Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
It was dark. Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.
"Sit down here a moment, 'Gene. I want to talk to you." Her voice was serious, low-pitched. He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.
"I've been watching you these last few days," said Irene Mallard. "I know what's been going on."
"What do you mean?" he said thickly, with thudding pulses.
"You know what I mean," said Irene Mallard sternly. "Now you're too fine a boy, 'Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman. Any one can see what she is. Mother and I have both talked about it. A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you. You've got to stop it."
"How did you know about it?" he muttered. He was frightened and ashamed. She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until he grew quieter. But he drew no closer to her: he halted, afraid, before her loveliness. As with Laura James, she seemed too high for his passion. He was afraid of her flesh; he was not afraid of "Miss Brown's." But now he was tired of the woman and didn't know how he could pay her. She had all his medals.
All through the waning summer he walked with Irene Mallard. They walked at night through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired leaves. They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later "Pap" Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came to their little table, sitting and drinking with them. He had spent the years since Leonard's at a military school, trying to straighten the wry twist of his neck. But he remained the same as ever--quizzical, dry, and humorous. Eugene looked at that good shy face, remembering the lost years, the lost faces. And there was sorrow in his heart for what would come no more. August ended.
September came, full of departing wings. The world was full of departures. It had heard the drums. The young men were going to the war. Ben had been rejected again in the draft. Now he was preparing to drift off in search of employment in other towns. Luke had given up his employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had enlisted in the Navy. He had come home on a short leave before his departure for the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island. The street roared as he came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride, in flapping blues, his face all on the grin, thick curls of his unruly hair coiling below the band of his hat. He was the cartoon of a gob.
"Luke!" shouted Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from the street to Wood's pharmacy, "by God, son, you've done your bit. I'm going to set you up. What are you going to have?"
"Make it a dope," said Luke. "Colonel, yours truly!" He lifted the frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed
before the grinning counter. "F-f-f-forty years ago," he began, in a hoarse voice, "I might have refused, but now I can't, G-G-G-God help me! I c-c-c-c-can't!"
Gant's sickness had returned on him with increased virulence. His face was haggard and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs. It was decided that he must go again to Baltimore. Helen would go with him.
"Mr. Gant," said Eliza persuasively, "why don't you just give up everything and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days? You don't feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you, I'd retire. We could get $20,000 for your shop without any trouble--If I had that much money to work with, I'd show them a thing or two." She nodded pertly with a smart wink. "I could turn it over two or three times within two years' time. You've got to trade quick to keep the ball a-rolling. That's the way it's done."
"Merciful God," he groaned. "That's my last refuge on earth. Woman, have you no mercy? I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won't be long now. You can do what you please with it after I'm gone, but give me a little peace now. In the name of Jesus, I ask it!" He sniffled affectedly.
"Pshaw!" said Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him. "There's nothing wrong with you. Half of it's only imagination."
He groaned, turning his head away.
Summer died upon the hills. There was a hue, barely guessed, upon the foliage, of red rust. The streets at night were filled with sad lispings: all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard the strange noise of autumn. And all the people who had given the town its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight. They had gone back into the vast South again. The solemn tension of the war gathered about the nation. A twilight of grim effort hovered around him, above him. He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory. Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war--engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.
But something of true wonder had come upon the land--the flares and rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well. Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own. For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.
Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great deal: Gant's excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.
"You damned old man!" cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. "I could wear you out! You're not sick; I've wasted my life nursing you, and you're not as sick as I am! You'll be here long after I'm gone, you selfish old man! It makes me furious!"
"Why, baby!" he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, "God bless you, I couldn't do without you."
"Don't 'baby' me!" she cried.
But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.
"I was a boy here," he muttered.
"Don't worry," she said, "we're going to make you well again. Why! You'll be a boy again!"
Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely in among the broken lives--with arms proposed in an attitude of enormous mercy--many times bigger than Gant's largest angel--is an image of gentle Jesus.
Eugene went to see the Leonards several times. Margaret looked thin and ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly. Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience, the great health of her spirit. All of his sin, all of his pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and ragged cloak. He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless light.
But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the university, he talked of little else. His heart was packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she would not understand. She was too wise for anything but faith. Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began to laugh.
"Mr. Leonard!" she called. "Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy! You don't know what love is. Get along with you. There'll be time enough to think of that ten years from now." She laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.
"Old 'Gene with a girl! Pity the poor girl! Ah, Lord, Boy! That's a long way off for you. Thank your stars!"
He bent his
He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and saddened by departures. A few people hurried past, as if driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind. He was held in the lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched her. But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate. She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.
The house was almost empty. At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with
satisfaction.
"Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son. Try to take care of them." She put Gant's check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a safety-pin.
"Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy. You never know who you'll run up with on a train."
He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.
"It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother," she said querulously. Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile. "I tell you what! It looks mighty funny, doesn't it? You can't stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along. It's all right! It's all right. I'm not complaining. It seems as if all I was fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off." She burst volubly into tears. "It seems that that's the only use you have for me. I've hardly laid eyes on you all summer."
"No," he said bitterly, "you've been too busy looking after the boarders. Don't think, mama, that you can work on my feelings here at the last minute," he cried, already deeply worked-on. "It's easy to cry. But I was here all the time if you had had time for me. Oh, for God's sake! Let's make an end to this! Aren't things bad enough without it? Why must you act this way whenever I go off? Do you want to make me as miserable as you can?"
"Well, I tell you," said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once, "if I make a couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me waiting for you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring. I've got the lot picked out. I was thinking about it the other day," she went on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.
"Ah-h!" he made a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar. "In God's name! Please!" There was a silence.
"Well," said Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, "I want you to be a good boy and study hard, son. Take care of your money--I want you to have plenty of good food and warm clothes--but you mustn't be extravagant, boy. This sickness of your papa's has cost a lot of money. Everything is going out and nothing's coming in. Nobody knows where the next dollar's coming from. So you've got to watch out."
Again silence fell. She had said her say; she had come as close as she could, but suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the bitter and lonely secrecy of his life.
"I hate to see you go, son," she said quietly, with a deep and indefinable sadness.
He cast his arms up suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.
"What does it matter! Oh God, what does it matter!" Eliza's eyes filled with tears of real pain. She grasped his hand and held it.
"Try to be happy, son," she wept, "try to be a little more happy. Poor child! Poor child! Nobody ever knew you. Before you were born," she shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that was drowned and husky with her tears. Then, huskily, clearing her throat, she repeated, "Before you were born--"
32
When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder?the number of students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones had gone to war. The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. They were careless of colleges, careers, successes--the war had thrilled them with its triumphing Now. Of what use To-morrow! Of what use all labor for To-morrow! The big guns had blown all spun schemes to fragments: they hailed the end of all planned work with a fierce, a secret joy. The business of education went on half-heartedly, with an abstracted look: in the classroom, their eyes were vague upon the book, but their ears cocked attentively for alarums and excursions without.
Eugene began the year earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been the best student in the Altamont High School. His name was Bob Sterling. Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son of a widow. He was of middling height, always very neatly and soberly dressed; there was nothing conspicuous about him. For this reason, he could laugh good-naturedly, a little smugly, at whatever was conspicuous. He had a good mind--bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by originality or inventiveness. He had a time for everything: he apportioned a certain time for the preparation of each lesson, and went over it three times, mumbling rapidly to himself. He sent his laundry out every Monday. When in merry company he laughed heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always kept track of the time. Presently, he would look at his watch, saying: "Well, this is all very nice, but it's getting no work done," and he would go.
Every one said he had a bright future. He remonstrated with Eugene, with good-natured seriousness, about his habits. He ought not to throw his clothes around. He ought not to let his shirts and drawers accumulate in a dirty pile. He ought to have a regular time for doing each lesson; he ought to live by regular hours.
They lived in a private dwelling on the edge of the campus, in a large bright room decorated with a great number of college pennants, all of which belonged to Bob Sterling.
Bob Sterling had heart-disease. He stood on the landing, gasping, when he had climbed the stairs. Eugene opened the door for him. Bob Sterling's pleasant face was dead white, spotted by pale freckles. His lips chattered and turned blue.
"What is it, Bob? How do you feel?" said Eugene.
"Come here," said Bob Sterling with a grin. "Put your head down here." He took Eugene's head and placed it against his heart. The great pump beat slowly and irregularly, with a hissing respiration.
"Good God!" cried Eugene.
"Do you hear it?" said Bob Sterling, beginning to laugh. Then he went into the room, chafing his dry hands briskly.
But he fell sick and could not attend classes. He was taken to the College Infirmary, where he lay for several weeks, apparently not very ill, but with lips constantly blue, a slow pulse, and a sub-normal temperature. Nothing could be done about it.
His mother came and took him home. Eugene wrote him regularly twice a week, getting in return short but cheerful messages. Then one day he died.
Two weeks later the widow returned to gather together the boy's belongings. Silently she collected the clothing that no one would ever wear. She was a stout woman in her forties. Eugene took all the pennants from the wall and folded them. She packed them in a valise and turned to go.
"Here's another," said Eugene.
She burst suddenly into tears and seized his hand.
"He was so brave," she said, "so brave. Those last days--I had not meant to--Your letters made him so happy."
She's alone now, Eugene thought.
I cannot stay here, he thought, where he has been. We were here together. Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.
But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two room-mates--one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the "L" stood for Lawrence, but every one called him "Elk") and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a "study."
The younger students--particularly the Freshmen--gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.
The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.