Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (17 page)

Eugene turned his wet eyes to the light that streamed
through the library windows, winked rapidly, gulped, and blew his
nose heavily. Ah, yes!  Ah, yes!
 
 

. . . The band of natives, seeing now that they had
no more to fear, and wild with rage at the losses they had suffered,
began to advance slowly toward the foot of the cliff, led by Taomi,
who, dancing with fury, and hideous with warpaint, urged them on,
exhorting them in a shrill voice.

Glendenning cursed softly under his breath as he
looked once more at the empty cartridge belts, then grimly, as he
gazed at the yelling horde below, slipped his two remaining
cartridges into his Colt.

"For us?" she said, quietly.  He
nodded.

"It is the end?" she whispered, but without
a trace of fear.

Again he nodded, and turned his head away for a
moment.  Presently he lifted his gray face to her.

"It is death, Veronica," he said, "and
now I may speak."

"Yes, Bruce," she answered softly.

It was the first time he had ever heard her use his
name, and his heart thrilled to it.

"I love you, Veronica," he said.  "I
have loved you ever since I found your almost lifeless body on the
beach, during all the nights I lay outside your tent, listening to
your quiet breathing within, love you most of all now in this hour of
death when the obligation to keep silence no longer rests upon me."

"Dearest, dearest," she whispered, and he
saw her face was wet with tears.  "Why didn't you speak? 
I have loved you from the first."

She leaned toward him, her lips half-parted and
tremulous, her breathing short and uncertain, and as his bare arms
circled her fiercely their lips met in one long moment of rapture,
one final moment of life and ecstasy, in which all the pent longing
of their lives found release and consummation now at this triumphant
moment of their death.

A distant reverberation shook the air. 
Glendenning looked up quickly, and rubbed his eyes with
astonishment.  There, in the island's little harbor were turning
slowly the lean sides of a destroyer, and even as he looked, there
was another burst of flame and smoke, and a whistling five-inch shell
burst forty yards from where the natives had stopped.  With a
yell of mingled fear and baffled rage, they turned and fled off
toward their canoes. Already, a boat, manned by the lusty arms of a
blue-jacketed crew, had put off from the destroyer's side, and was
coming in toward shore.

"Saved!  We are saved!" cried
Glendenning, and leaping to his feet he signalled the approaching
boat.  Suddenly he paused.

"Damn!" he muttered bitterly.  "Oh,
damn!"

"What is it, Bruce?" she asked.

He answered her in a cold harsh voice.

"A destroyer has just entered the harbor. 
We are saved, Miss Mullins.  Saved!"  And he laughed
bitterly.

"Bruce!  Dearest!  What is it? 
Aren't you glad?  Why do you act so strangely?  We shall
have all our life together."

"Together?" he said, with a harsh laugh. 
"Oh no, Miss Mullins.  I know my place.  Do you think
old J. T. Mullins would let his daughter marry Bruce Glendenning,
international vagabond, jack of all trades, and good at none of
them?  Oh no.  That's over now, and it's good-by.  I
suppose," he said, with a wry smile, "I'll hear of your
marriage to some Duke or Lord, or some of those foreigners some day. 
Well, good-by, Miss Mullins.  Good luck.  We'll both have
to go our own way, I suppose."  He turned away.

"You foolish boy!  You dear bad silly
boy!"  She threw her arms around his neck, clasped him to
her tightly, and scolded him tenderly.  "Do you think I'll
ever let you leave me now?"

"Veronica," he gasped.  "Do you
MEAN it?"

She tried to meet his adoring eyes, but couldn't: a
rich wave of rosy red mantled her cheek, he drew her rapturously to
him and, for the second time, but this time with the prophecy of
eternal and abundant life before them, their lips met in sweet
oblivion. . . .
 
 

Ah, me!  Ah, me!  Eugene's heart was filled
with joy and sadness--with sorrow because the book was done.  He
pulled his clotted handkerchief from his pocket and blew the contents
of his loaded heart into it in one mighty, triumphant and ecstatic
blast of glory and sentiment.  Ah, me!  Good old
Bruce-Eugene.
 
 

Lifted, by his fantasy, into a high interior world,
he scored off briefly and entirely all the grimy smudges of life: he
existed nobly in a heroic world with lovely and virtuous creatures. 
He saw himself in exalted circumstances with Bessie Barnes, her pure
eyes dim with tears, her sweet lips tremulous with desire: he felt
the strong handgrip of Honest Jack, her brother, his truehearted
fidelity, the deep eternal locking of their brave souls, as they
looked dumbly at each other with misty eyes, and thought of the pact
of danger, the shoulder-to-shoulder drive through death and terror
which had soldered them silently but implacably.

Eugene wanted the two things all men want: he wanted
to be loved, and he wanted to be famous.  His fame was
chameleon, but its fruit and triumph lay at home, among the people of
Altamont.  The mountain town had for him enormous authority:
with a child's egotism it was for him the centre of the earth, the
small but dynamic core of all life.  He saw himself winning
Napoleonic triumphs in battle, falling, with his fierce picked men,
like a thunderbolt upon an enemy's flank, trapping, hemming, and
annihilating.  He saw himself as the young captain of industry,
dominant, victorious, rich; as the great criminal-lawyer bending to
his eloquence a charmed court--but always he saw his return from the
voyage wearing the great coronal of the world upon his modest brows.

The world was a phantasmal land of faery beyond the
misted hem of the hills, a land of great reverberations, of
genii-guarded orchards, wine-dark seas, chasmed and fantastical
cities from which he would return into this substantial heart of
life, his native town, with golden loot.

He quivered deliciously to temptation--he kept his
titillated honor secure after subjecting it to the most trying
inducements: the groomed beauty of the rich man's wife, publicly
humiliated by her brutal husband, defended by Bruce-Eugene, and
melting toward him with all the pure ardor of her lonely and womanly
heart, pouring the sad measure of her life into his sympathetic ears
over the wineglasses of her candled, rich, but intimate table. 
And as, in the shaded light, she moved yearningly toward him,
sheathed plastically in her gown of rich velvet, he would detach
gently the round arms that clung about his neck, the firm curved body
that stuck gluily to his.  Or the blonde princess in the
fabulous Balkans, the empress of gabled Toyland, and the Doll
Hussars?he would renounce, in a great scene upon the frontiers, her
proffered renunciation, drinking eternal farewell on her red mouth,
but wedding her to himself and to the citizenship of freedom when
revolution had levelled her fortune to his own.
 
 

But, steeping himself in ancient myths, where the
will and the deed were not thought darkly on, he spent himself,
quilted in golden meadows, or in the green light of woods, in pagan
love.  Oh to be king, and see a fruity wide-hipped Jewess
bathing on her roof, and  to possess her; or a cragged and
castled baron, to execute le droit de seigneur upon the choicest of
the enfeoffed wives and wenches, in a vast chamber loud with the
howling winds and lighted by the mad dancing flames of great logs!
 
 

But even more often, the shell of his morality broken
to fragments by his desire, he would enact the bawdy fable of
school-boys, and picture himself in hot romance with a handsome
teacher.  In the fourth grade his teacher was a young,
inexperienced, but well-built woman, with carrot-colored hair, and
full of reckless laughter.

He saw himself, grown to the age of potency, a
strong, heroic, brilliant boy, the one spot of incandescence in a
backwoods school attended by snag-toothed children and hair-faced
louts.  And, as the mellow autumn ripened, her interest in him
would intensify, she would "keep him in" for imaginary
offenses, setting him, in a somewhat confused way, to do some task,
and gazing at him with steady yearning eyes when she thought he was
not looking.

He would pretend to be stumped by the exercise: she
would come eagerly and sit beside him, leaning over so that a few
fine strands of carrot-colored hair brushed his nostrils, and so that
he might feel the firm warmth of her white-waisted arms, and the
swell of her tight-skirted thighs.  She would explain things to
him at great length, guiding his fingers with her own warm, slightly
moist hand, when he pretended not to find the place; then she would
chide him gently, saying tenderly:

"Why are you such a bad boy?" or softly: 
"Do you think you're going to be better after this?"

And he, simulating boyish, inarticulate coyness,
would say:  "Gosh, Miss Edith, I didn't mean to do
nothin'."

Later, as the golden sun was waning redly, and there
was nothing in the room but the smell of chalk and the heavy buzz of
the old October flies, they would prepare to depart.  As he
twisted carelessly into his overcoat, she would chide him, call him
to her, arrange the lapels and his necktie, and smooth out his
tousled hair, saying:

"You're a good-looking boy.  I bet all the
girls are wild about you."

He would blush in a maidenly way and she, bitten with
curiosity, would press him:

"Come on, now.  Who's your girl?"

"I haven't got one, honest, Miss Edith."

"You don't want one of these silly little girls,
Eugene," she would say, coaxingly.  "You're too good
for them--you're a great deal older than your years.  You need
the understanding a mature woman can give you."

And they would walk away in the setting sun, skirting
the pine-fresh woods, passing along the path red with maple leaves,
past great ripening pumpkins in the fields, and under the golden
autumnal odor of persimmons.

She would live alone with her mother, an old deaf
woman, in a little cottage set back from the road against a shelter
of lonely singing pines, with a few grand oaks and maples in the
leaf-bedded yard.

Before they came to the house, crossing a field, it
would be necessary to go over a stile; he would go over first,
helping her down, looking ardently at the graceful curve of her long,
deliberately exposed, silk-clad leg.

As the days shortened, they would come by dark, or
under the heavy low-hanging autumnal moon.  She would pretend to
be frightened as they passed the woods, press in to him and take his
arm at imaginary sounds, until one night, crossing the stile, boldly
resolved upon an issue, she would pretend difficulty in descending,
and he would lift her down in his arms.  She would whisper:

"How strong you are, Eugene."  Still
holding her, his hand would shift under her knees.  And as he
lowered her upon the frozen clotted earth, she would kiss him
passionately, again and again, pressing him to her, caressing him,
and under the frosted persimmon tree fulfilling and yielding herself
up to his maiden and unfledged desire.

"That boy's read books by the hundreds,"
Gant boasted about the town.  "He's read everything in the
library by now."
 
"By
God, W. O., you'll have to make a lawyer out of him.  That's
what he's cut out for."  Major Liddell spat accurately, out
of his high cracked voice, across the pavement, and settled back in
his chair below the library windows, smoothing his stained white
pointed beard with a palsied hand.  He was a veteran.
 

10
 

But this freedom, this isolation in print, this
dreaming and unlimited time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken. 
Both Gant and Eliza were fluent apologists for economic independence:
all the boys had been sent out to earn money at a very early age.

"It teaches a boy to be independent and
self-reliant," said Gant, feeling he had heard this somewhere
before.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza.  "It won't
do them a bit of harm.  If they don't learn now, they won't do a
stroke of work later on.  Besides, they can earn their own
pocket money."  This, undoubtedly, was a consideration of
the greatest importance.

Thus, the boys had gone out to work, after school
hours, and in the vacations, since they were very young. 
Unhappily, neither Eliza nor Gant were at any pains to examine the
kind of work their children did, contenting themselves vaguely with
the comfortable assurance that all work which earned money was
honest, commendable, and formative of character.

By this time Ben, sullen, silent, alone, had
withdrawn more closely than ever into his heart: in the brawling
house he came and went, and was remembered, like a phantom. 
Each morning at three o'clock, when his fragile unfurnished body
should have been soaked in sleep, he got up under the morning stars,
departed silently from the sleeping house, and went down to the
roaring morning presses and the ink smell that he loved, to begin the
delivery of his route. Almost without consideration by Gant and Eliza
he slipped quietly away from school after the eighth grade, took on
extra duties at the paper's office and lived, in sufficient bitter
pride, upon his earnings.  He slept at home, ate perhaps one
meal a day there, loping home gauntly at night, with his father's
stride, thin long shoulders, bent prematurely by the weight of the
heavy paper bag,  pathetically, hungrily Gantian.