Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called "the ancient Jester"--had turned his frown upon their fortunes.
It began to rain--rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.
There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.
The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.
"He will go where I send him or not at all," Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.
Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.
Eugene did not want to go to the State University.
For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, "top things off" with a year or two at Oxford.
"Then," said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, "then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he's really 'cultsherd.' After that, of course," he continued with a spacious carelessness, "he may travel for a year or so."
But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.
"You're too young, boy," said Margaret Leonard. "Can't you persuade your father to wait another year? You're only a child in years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world." Her eyes darkened as she talked.
Gant would not be persuaded.
"He's old enough," he said. "When I was his age I had been earning my living for years. I'm getting old. I won't be here much longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die."
He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name's survival in laurels--in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and far-seeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.
"He's ready to go," said Gant, "and he's going to the State University, and nowhere else. He'll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life." He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach. "There are very few boys who have had your chance," said he, "and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you'll live to see the day when you'll thank me for sending you there. Now, I've given you my last word: you'll go where I send you or you'll go nowhere at all."
PART THREE
28
Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him exhausted. He tired very quickly.
He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.
Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.
When it was at last plain that Gant's will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:
"Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you."
She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:
"Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago? Can you believe it?"
John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.
"What do you know about it?" he said.
When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.
"You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?"
She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.
"Eugene," she continued, "we could not love you more if you were our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours."
The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.
He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.
"I can't!" he choked. "You mustn't think--" He could not go on; his life groped blindly to confessional.
Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.
That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen's marriage.
Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother's voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in darkness.
The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met--a great shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them
But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant's life burst out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.
"I suppose they've told you how poor they are?" he began, tossing his cigarette away.
"Well," said Eugene, "I've got to go easy. I mustn't waste my money."
"Ah-h!" said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.
"Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that."
Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.
"Now listen, 'Gene," he said sternly, "don't be a damned little fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them," he added savagely.
"Well, I appreciate what they're doing. I'm getting a lot more than the rest of you had. They're doing a lot for me," said the boy.
"For YOU, you little idiot!" said Ben, scowling at him in disgust. "They're doing it all for themselves. Don't let them get away with that. They think you'll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day. They're rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is. No, you take everything you can get. The rest of us never had anything, but I want to see you get all that's coming to you. My God!" he cried furiously.
"Their money's doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is it? No, 'Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you find you need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the old man give it to you. You've never had a chance to hold your head up in your own home town, so make the most of your chances when you get away."
He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.
"To hell with it all!" he said. "What in God's name are we living for!"
Eugene's first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain, and failure. Within three weeks of his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic jokes, his ignorance of all campus tradition had been exploited, his gullibility was a byword. He was the greenest of all green Freshmen, past and present: he had listened attentively to a sermon in chapel by a sophomore with false whiskers; he had prepared studiously for an examination on the contents of the college catalogue; and he had been guilty of the inexcusable blunder of making a speech of acceptance on his election, with fifty others, to the literary society.
And these buffooneries--a little cruel, but only with the cruelty of vacant laughter, and a part of the schedule of rough humor in an American college--salty, extravagant, and national--opened deep wounds in him, which his companions hardly suspected. He was conspicuous at once not only because of his blunders, but also because of his young wild child's face, and his great raw length of body, with the bounding scissor legs. The undergraduates passed him in grinning clusters: he saluted them obediently, but with a sick heart. And the smug smiling faces of his own classmen, the wiser Freshmen, complacently guiltless of his own mistakes, touched him at moments with insane fury.
"Smile and smile and s-mile--damn you!" he cursed through his grating teeth. For the first time in his life he began to dislike whatever fits too snugly in a measure. He began to dislike and envy the inconspicuous mould of general nature--the multitudinous arms, legs, hands, feet, and figures that are comfortably shaped for ready-made garments. And the prettily regular, wherever he found it, he hated--the vacantly handsome young men, with shining hair, evenly parted in the middle, with sure strong middling limbs meant to go gracefully on dancefloors. He longed to see them commit some awkward blunder--to trip and sprawl, to be flatulent, to lose a strategic button in mixed company, to be unconscious of a hanging shirt-tail while with a pretty girl. But they made no mistakes.
As he walked across the campus, he heard his name called mockingly from a dozen of the impartial windows, he heard the hidden laughter, and he ground his teeth. And at night, he stiffened with shame in his dark bed, ripping the sheet between his fingers as, with the unbalanced vision, the swollen egotism of the introvert, the picture of a crowded student-room, filled with the grinning historians of his exploits, burned in his brain. He strangled his fierce cry with a taloned hand. He wanted to blot out the shameful moment, unweave the loom. It seemed to him that his ruin was final, that he had stamped the beginning of his university life with folly that would never be forgotten, and that the best he could do would be to seek out obscurity for the next four years. He saw himself in his clown's trappings and thought of his former vision of success and honor with a lacerating self-contempt.
There was no one to whom he could turn: he had no friends. His conception of university life was a romantic blur, evoked from his reading and tempered with memories of Stover at Yale, Young Fred Fearnot, and jolly youths with affectionate linked arms, bawling out a cheer-song. No one had given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life of an American university. He had not been warned of the general taboos. Thus, he had come greenly on his new life, unprepared, as he came ever thereafter on all new life, save for his opium visions of himself a stranger in Arcadias.
He was alone. He was desperately lonely.
But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State. Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply above the country. One burst suddenly, at the hill-top, on the end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and winding a mile in to the town centre and the university. The central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent ancient trees. A quadrangle of post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic Neo- Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design: beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness. There was still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place--one felt its remoteness, its isolated charm. It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast.
Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest, had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was later to forfeit. It had the fine authority of provincialism?the provincialism of an older South. Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom--there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.
Few of the university's sons had been distinguished in the nation's life--there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.
In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years. There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness. Instead, they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs. And they talked--always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked--in limp sprawls--incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, athletics, fraternities and the girls--My God! how they talked!
"Observe,"
At last, thought Eugene, I am getting an education. This must be good writing, because it seems so very dull. When it hurts, the dentist says, it does you good. Democracy must be real, because it is so very earnest. It must be a certainty, because it is so elegantly embalmed in this marble mausoleum of language. Essays For College Men--Woodrow Wilson, Lord Bryce and Dean Briggs.
But there was no word here of the loud raucous voice of America, political conventions and the Big Brass Band, Tweed, Tammany, the Big Stick, lynching bees and black barbecue parties, the Boston Irish, and the damnable machinations of the Pope as exposed by the Babylon Hollow Trumpet (Dem.), the rape of the Belgian virgins, rum, oil, Wall Street and Mexico.
All that, Mr. Torrington would have said, was temporary and accidental. It was unsound.
Mr. Torrington smiled moistly at Eugene and urged him tenderly into a chair drawn intimately to his desk.
"Mr.--? Mr.--?--" he said, fumbling at his index cards.
"Gant," said Eugene.
"Ah, yes--Mr. Gant," he smiled his contrition. "Now--about your outside reading?" he began.
But what, thought Eugene, about my inside reading?
Did he like to read? Ah--that was good. He was so glad to hear it. The true university in these days, said Carlyle (he did hope Eugene liked rugged old Thomas), was a collection of books.
"Yes, sir," said Eugene.
That, it seemed to him, was the Oxford Plan. Oh, yes--he had been there, three years, in fact. His mild eye kindled. To loaf along the High on a warm Spring day, stopping to examine in the bookseller's windows the treasures that might be had for so little. Then to Buol's or to a friend's room for tea, or for a walk in the meadows or Magdalen gardens, or to look down into the quad, at the gay pageant of youth below. Ah--Ah! A great place? Well?he'd hardly say that. It all depended what one meant by a great place. Half the looseness in thought--unfortunately, he fancied, more prevalent among American than among English youth--came from an indefinite exuberance of ill-defined speech.