“Yes? … Ye-e-es? … Ye-e-e-es? … Ye-e-es? … Is that right? … Ye-e-es?”
Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:
“Y-ah-s? … Y-a-h-s? … Y-ah-s? … Y-ah-s?”
And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him, he would burst into a wild “Whah-whah-whah-whah” of laughter, beyond all reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.
Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh “whah-whahs”: “I’ll declare, boy! You act like a regular idiot,” and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity: “I’d be ash-a-amed! A-sha-a-med.”
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?” someone 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 boardinghouse 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
