Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (14 page)

"I have learned to write," he thought.

Then, one day, Max Isaacs looked suddenly, from his
exercise, on Eugene's sheet, and saw the jagged line.

"That ain't writin'," said he.

And clubbing his pencil in his waited grimy hand, he
scrawled a copy of the exercise across the page.

The line of life, that beautiful developing structure
of language that he saw flowing from his comrade's pencil, cut the
knot in him that all instruction failed to do, and instantly he
seized the pencil, and wrote the words in letters fairer and finer
than his friend's.  And he turned, with a cry in his throat, to
the next page, and copied it without hesitation, and the next, the
next. They looked at each other a moment with that clear wonder by
which children accept miracles, and they never spoke of it again.

"That's writin' now," said Max.  But
they kept the mystery caged between them.

Eugene thought of this event later; always he could
feel the opening gates in him, the plunge of the tide, the escape;
out it happened like this one day at once.  Still midget-near
the live pelt of the earth, he saw many things that he kept in
fearful secret, knowing that revelation would be punished with
ridicule. One Saturday in Spring, he stopped with Max Isaacs above a
deep pit in Central Avenue where city workmen were patching a broken
watermain.  The clay walls of their pit were much higher than
their heads; behind their huddled backs there was a wide fissure, a
window in the earth which opened on some dark subterranean passage.
And as the boys looked, they gripped each other suddenly, for past
the fissure slid the flat head of an enormous serpent; passed, and
was followed by a scaled body as thick as a man's; the monster slid
endlessly on into the deep earth and vanished behind the working and
unwitting men.  Shaken with fear they went away, they talked
about it then and later in hushed voices, but they never revealed it.

He fell now easily into the School-Ritual; he choked
his breakfast with his brothers every morning, gulped scalding
coffee, and rushed off at the ominous warning of the final bell,
clutching a hot paper-bag of food, already spattered hungrily with
grease blots. He pounded along after his brothers, his heart
hammering in his throat with excitement and, as he raced into the
hollow at the foot of the Central Avenue hill, grew weak with
nervousness, as he heard the bell ringing itself to sleep, jerking
the slatting rope about in its dying echoes.

Ben, grinning evilly and scowling, would thrust his
hand against the small of his back and rush him screaming, but unable
to resist the plunging force behind, up the hill.

In a gasping voice he would sing the morning song,
coming in pantingly on the last round of a song the quartered class
took up at intervals:
 

    
"--Merrily, merrily,
merrily, merrily,
     
Life
is but a dream."
 

Or, in the frosty Autumn mornings:
 

    
"Waken, lords and
ladies gay,
     
On
the mountain dawns the day."
 

Or the Contest of the West Wind and the South Wind. 
Or the Miller's Song:
 

    
"I envy no man, no, not
I,
     
And no one
envies me."
 

He read quickly and easily; he spelled accurately. 
He did well with figures.  But he hated the drawing lesson,
although the boxes of crayons and paints delighted him. 
Sometimes the class would go into the woods, returning with specimens
of flowers and leaves?the bitten flaming red of the maple, the brown
pine comb, the brown oak leaf.  These they would paint; or in
Spring a spray of cherry-blossom, a tulip.  He sat reverently
before the authority of the plump woman who first taught him: he was
terrified lest he do anything common or mean in her eyes.

The class squirmed: the little boys invented tortures
or scrawled obscenities to the little girls.  And the wilder and
more indolent seized every chance of leaving the room, thus: 
"Teacher, may I be excused?"  And they would go out
into the lavatory, sniggering and dawdling about restlessly.

He could never say it, because it would reveal to her
the shame of nature.

Once, deathly sick, but locked in silence and dumb
nausea, he had vomited finally upon his cupped hands.

He feared and hated the recess periods, trembled
before the brawling confusion of the mob and the playground, but his
pride forbade that he skulk within, or secrete himself away from
them. Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around
her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls; the agony and
humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or
unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and
stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.  She had the garnered
curls of Ben, Grover, and Luke stored in tiny boxes: she wept
sometimes when she saw Eugene's, they were the symbol of his babyhood
to her, and her sad heart, so keen in marking departures, refused to
surrender them.  Even when his thick locks had become the
luxuriant colony of Harry Tarkinton's lice, she would not cut them:
she held his squirming body between her knees twice a day and
ploughed his scalp with a fine-toothed comb.

As he made to her his trembling passionate
entreaties, she would smile with an affectation of patronizing humor,
make a bantering humming noise in her throat, and say:  "Why,
say--you can't grow up yet.  You're my baby." 
Suddenly baffled before the yielding inflexibility of her nature,
which could be driven to action only after incessant and maddening
prods, Eugene, screaming-mad with helpless fury, would understand the
cause of Gant's frenzy.

At school, he was a desperate and hunted little
animal.  The herd, infallible in its banded instinct, knew at
once that a stranger had been thrust into it, and it was merciless at
the hunt.  As the lunch-time recess came, Eugene, clutching his
big grease-stained bag, would rush for the playground pursued by the
yelping pack. The leaders, two or three big louts of advanced age and
deficient mentality, pressed closely about him, calling out
suppliantly, "You know me, 'Gene.  You know me"; and
still racing for the far end, he would open his bag and hurl to them
one of his big sandwiches, which stayed them for a moment, as they
fell upon its possessor and clawed it to fragments, but they were
upon him in a moment more with the same yelping insistence, hunting
him down into a corner of the fence, and pressing in with
outstretched paws and wild entreaty.  He would give them what he
had, sometimes with a momentary gust of fury, tearing away from a
greedy hand half of a sandwich and devouring it.  When they saw
he had no more to give, they went away.

The great fantasy of Christmas still kept him
devout.  Gant was his unwearied comrade; night after night in
the late autumn and early winter, he would scrawl petitions to Santa
Claus, listing interminably the gifts he wanted most, and
transmitting each, with perfect trust, to the roaring chimney. 
As the flame took the paper from his hand and blew its charred ghost
away with a howl, Gant would rush with him to the window, point to
the stormy northern sky, and say:  "There it goes!  Do
you see it?"

He saw it.  He saw his prayer, winged with the
stanch convoying winds, borne northward to the rimed quaint gabels of
Toyland, into frozen merry Elfland; heard the tiny silver
anvil-tones, the deep-lunged laughter of the little men, the stabled
cries of aerial reindeer.  Gant saw and heard them, too.

He was liberally dowered with bright-painted
gimcracks upon Christmas Day; and in his heart he hated those who
advocated "useful" gifts.  Gant bought him wagons,
sleds, drums, horns?best of all, a small fireman's ladder wagon: it
was the wonder, and finally the curse, of the neighborhood. 
During his unoccupied hours, he lived for months in the cellar with
Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs: they strung the ladders on wires
above the wagon, so that, at a touch, they would fall in accurate
stacks.  They would pretend to doze in their quarters, as
firemen do, would leap to action suddenly, as one of them imitated
the warning bell:  "Clang-a-lang-a-lang."  Then,
quite beyond reason, Harry and Max yoked in a plunging team, Eugene
in the driver's seat, they would leap out through the narrow door,
gallop perilously to a neighbor's house, throw up ladders, open
windows, effect entries, extinguish imaginary flames, and return
oblivious to the shrieking indictment of the housewife.

For months they lived completely in this fantasy,
modelling their actions on those of the town's firemen, and on
Jannadeau, who was the assistant chief, child-proud over it: they had
seen him, at the sound of the alarm, rush like a madman from his
window in Gant's shop, leaving the spattered fragments of a watch
upon his desk, and arriving at his duty just as the great wagon
hurtled at full speed into the Square.  The firemen loved to
stage the most daring exhibitions before the gaping citizenry;
helmeted magnificently, they hung from the wagons in gymnastic
postures, one man holding another over rushing space, while number
two caught in mid-air the diving heavy body of the Swiss, who
deliberately risked his neck as he leaped for the rail.  Thus,
for one rapturous moment they stood poised triangularly over rocking
speed: the spine of the town was chilled ecstatically.

And when the bells broke through the drowning winds
at night, his demon rushed into his heart, bursting all cords that
held him to the earth, promising him isolation and dominance over sea
and land, inhabitation of the dark: he looked down on the whirling
disk of dark forest and field, sloped over singing pines upon a
huddled town, and carried its grated guarded fires against its own
roofs, swerving and pouncing with his haltered storm upon their
doomed and flaming walls, howling with thin laughter above their
stricken heads and, fiend-voiced, calling down the bullet wind.

Or, holding in fief the storm and the dark and all
the black powers of wizardry, to gaze, ghoul-visaged, through a
storm-lashed windowpane, briefly planting unutterable horror in
grouped and sheltered life; or, no more than a man, but holding, in
your more than mortal heart, demoniac ecstasy, to crouch against a
lonely storm-swept house, to gaze obliquely through the streaming
glass upon a woman, or your enemy, and while still exulting in your
victorious dark all-seeing isolation, to feel a touch upon your
shoulder, and to look, haunter-haunted, pursuer-pursued, into the
green corrupted hell-face of malignant death.
 
 

Yes, and a world of bedded women, fair glimmers in
the panting darkness, while winds shook the house, and he arrived
across the world between the fragrant columns of delight.  The
great mystery of their bodies groped darkly in him, but he had found
there, at the school, instructors to desire--the hair-faced louts of
Doubleday.  They struck fear and wonder into the hearts of the
smaller, gentler boys, for Doubleday was that infested region of the
town-grown mountaineers, who lurked viciously through the night, and
came at Hallowe'en to break the skulls of other gangs in rock
warfare.

There was a boy named Otto Krause, a cheese-nosed,
hair-faced, inch-browed German boy, lean and swift in the legs,
hoarse-voiced and full of idiot laughter, who showed him the gardens
of delight. There was a girl named Bessie Barnes, a black-haired,
tall, bold-figured girl of thirteen years who acted as model. 
Otto Krause was fourteen, Eugene was eight: they were in the third
grade.  The German boy sat next to him, drew obscenities on his
books, and passed his furtive scrawled indecencies across the aisle
to Bessie.

And the nymph would answer with a lewd face, and a
contemptuous blow against her shapely lifted buttock, a gesture which
Otto considered as good as a promise, and which tickled him into
hoarse sniggers.
 
 

Bessie walked in his brain.

In their furtive moments at school, he and Otto
amused each other by drawing obscenities in their geographies,
bestowing on the representations of tropical natives sagging breasts
and huge organs.  And they composed on tiny scraps of paper
dirty little rhymes about teachers and principal.  Their teacher
was a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce glaring eyes: Eugene
thought always of the soldier and the tinder and the dogs he had to
pass, with eyes like saucers, windmills, the moon.  Her name was
Miss Groody, and Otto, with the idiot vulgarity of little boys, wrote
of her:

    
"Old Miss Groody
     
Has Good Toody."
 

And Eugene, directing his fire against the principal,
a plump, soft, foppish young man whose name was Armstrong, and who
wore always a carnation in his coat, which, after whipping an
offending boy, he was accustomed to hold delicately between his
fingers, sniffing it with sensitive nostrils and lidded eyes,
produced in the first rich joy of  creation scores of rhymes,
all to the discredit of Armstrong, his parentage, and his relations
with Miss Groody.
 
He was obsessed;
he spent the entire day now in the composition of poetry--all bawdy
variations of a theme.  And he could not bring himself to
destroy them.  His desk was stuffed with tiny crumpled balls of
writing: one day, during the geography lesson, the woman caught him. 
His bones turned to rubber as she bore down on him glaring, and took
from the concealing pages of his book the paper on which he had been
writing.  At recess she cleared his desk, read the sequence,
and, with boding quietness, bade him to see the principal after
school.