Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (31 page)

"Mama, in heaven's name--" Helen began
furiously.  At this moment Gant strode in out of the dusk,
carrying a mottled package of pork chops, and muttering rhetorically
to himself.  There was another long peal of laughter above. 
He halted abruptly, startled, and lifted his head.  Luke,
listening attentively at the foot of the stairs, exploded in a loud
boisterous guffaw, and the girl, her annoyance changing at once to
angry amusement, walked toward her father's inquiring face, and
prodded him several times in the ribs.

"Hey?" he said startled.  "What
is it?"

"Miss Eliza's got a crazy man upstairs,"
she sniggered, enjoying his amazement.

"Jesus God!" Gant yelled frantically,
wetting his big thumb swiftly on his tongue, and glancing up toward
his Maker with an attitude of exaggerated supplication in his small
gray eyes and the thrust of his huge bladelike nose.  Then,
letting his arms slap heavily at his sides, in a gesture of defeat,
he began to walk rapidly back and forth, clucking his deprecation
loudly.  Eliza stood solidly, looking from one to another, her
lips working rapidly, her white face hurt and bitter.

There was another long howl of mirth above. 
Gant paused, caught Helen's eye, and began to grin suddenly in an
unwilling sheepish manner.

"God have mercy on us," he chuckled. 
"She'll have the place filled with all of Barnum's freaks the
next thing you know."

At this moment, Simon, self-contained, distinguished
and grave in his manner, descended the steps with Mr. Gilroy and Mr.
Flannagan, his companions.  The two guards were red in the face,
and breathed stertorously as if from some recent exertion. 
Simon, however, preserved his habitual appearance of immaculate and
well-washed urbanity.

"Good evening," he remarked suavely. 
"I hope I have not kept you waiting long."  He caught
sight of Eugene.

"Come here, my boy," he said very kindly.

"It's all right," remarked Mr. Gilroy,
encouragingly.  "He wouldn't hurt a fly."

Eugene moved into the presence.

"And what is your name, young man?" said
Simon with his beautiful devil's smile.

"Eugene."

"That's a very fine name," said Simon. 
"Always try to live up to it."  He thrust his hand
carelessly and magnificently into his coat pocket, drawing out under
the boy's astonished eyes, a handful of shining five- and ten-cent
pieces.

"Always be good to the birds, my boy," said
Simon, and he poured the money into Eugene's cupped hands.

Every one looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.

"Oh, that's all right!" said Mr. Gilroy
cheerfully.  "He'll never miss it.  There's lots more
where that came from."

"He's a mul-tye-millionaire," Mr. Flannagan
explained proudly.  "We give him four or five dollars in
small change every morning just to throw away."

Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.

"Look out for the Stingaree," he cried. 
"Remember the Maine."

"I tell you what," said Eliza laughing. 
"He's not so crazy as you think."

'That's right," said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant's
grin.  "The Stingaree's a fish.  They have them in
Florida."

"Don't forget the birds, my friends," said
Simon, going out with his companions.  "Be good to the
birds."

They became very fond of him.  Somehow he fitted
into the pattern of their life.  None of them was uncomfortable
in the presence of madness.  In the flowering darkness of
Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic laughter burst suddenly out:
Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept, unable to forget the smile of
dark flowering evil, the loose pocket chinking heavily with coins.

Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings.  Heard
lapping water of the inland seas.
 
 

--And the air will be filled with warm-throated
plum-dropping bird-notes.  He was almost twelve.  He was
done with childhood.  As that Spring ripened he felt entirely,
for the first time, the full delight of loneliness.  Sheeted in
his thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the orchard window of the
back room at Gant's, drinking the sweet air down, exulting in his
isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the whistle going
west.

The prison walls of self had closed entirely round
him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his
imagination?he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the
world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him
from intrusion.  He no longer went through the torment of the
recess flight and pursuit.  He was now in one of the upper
grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys.  His hair
had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against
Eliza's obstinacy.  He no longer suffered because of the curls. 
But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch
or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no
meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving
him a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.

Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big
wide-browed head  covered thickly by curling hair which had
changed, since his infancy, from a light maple to dark brown-black,
was a face so small, and so delicately sculptured, that it seemed not
to belong to its body.  The strangeness, the remote quality of
this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its
passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or
sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool.  The
mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply
scooped and pouting.  His rapt dreaming intensity set the face
usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled,
oftener than he laughed, inwardly, at some extravagant invention, or
some recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first
time.  He did not open his lips to smile--there was a swift
twisted flicker across his mouth.  His thick heavily arched
eyebrows grew straight across the base of his nose.

That Spring he was more alone than ever. 
Eliza's departure for Dixieland three or four years before, and the
disruption of established life at Gant's, had begun the loosening of
his firstfriendships with the neighborhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max
Isaacs, and the others, and had now almost completely severed them.
Occasionally he saw these boys again, occasionally he resumed again,
at sporadic intervals, his association with them, but he now had no
steady companionship, he had only a series of associations with
children whose parents stayed for a time at Dixieland, with Tim
O'Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick, with children here and there
who briefly held his interest.

But he became passionately bored with them, plunged
into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because
of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their
amusements.  Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so
much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of
others--his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts
came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the
smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping
howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their
conversation on disease, death, and misery.  He was filled with
terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to
thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him.

Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical
background of his life, was now dappled by powerful prejudices of
liking and distaste formed, God knows how, or by what intangible
affinities of thought, feeling and connotation.  Thus, one
street would seem to him to be a "good street"--to exist in
the rich light of cheerful, abundant, and high-hearted living;
another, inexplicably, a "bad street," touching him somehow
with fear, hopelessness, depression.

Perhaps the cold red light of some remembered
winter's afternoon, waning pallidly over a playing-field, with all
its mockery of Spring, while lights flared up smokily in houses, the
rabble-rout of children dirtily went in to supper, and men came back
to the dull but warm imprisonment of home, oil lamps (which he
hated), and bedtime, clotted in him a hatred of the place which
remained even when the sensations that caused it were forgotten.

Or, returning from some country walk in late autumn,
he would come back from Cove or Valley with dewy nose, clotted boots,
the smell of a mashed persimmon on his knee, and the odor of wet
earth and grass on the palms of his hands, and with a stubborn
dislike and suspicion of the scene he had visited, and fear of the
people who lived there.

He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence. 
He hated dull lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights.  At
night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with
beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights.  After that, the
dark.
 
 

He played games badly, although he took a violent
interest in sports.  Max Isaacs continued to interest him as an
athlete long after he had ceased to interest him as a person. 
The game Max Isaacs excelled in was baseball.  Usually he played
one of the outfield positions, ranging easily about in his field,
when a ball was hit to him, with the speed of a panther, making
impossible catches with effortless grace.  He was a terrific
hitter, standing at the plate casually but alertly, and meeting the
ball squarely with a level swinging smack of his heavy shoulders. 
Eugene tried vainly to imitate the precision and power of this
movement, which drove the ball in a smoking arc out of the lot, but
he was never able: he chopped down clumsily and blindly, knocking a
futile bounder to some nimble baseman.  In the field he was
equally  useless: he never learned to play in a team, to become
a limb of that single animal which united telepathically in a
concerted movement.  He became nervous, highly excited, and
erratic in team-play, but he spent hours alone with another boy, or,
after the mid-day meal, with Ben, passing a ball back and forth.

He developed blinding speed, bending all the young
suppleness of his long thin body behind the ball, exulting as it
smoked into the pocket of the mitt with a loud smack, or streaked up
with a sharp dropping curve.  Ben, taken by surprise by a fast
drop, would curse him savagely, and in a rage hurl the ball back into
his thin gloved hand.  In the Spring and Summer he went as often
as he could afford it, or was invited, to the baseball games in the
district league, a fanatic partisan of the town club and its best
players, making a fantasy constantly of himself in a heroic
game-saving ré

But he was in no way able to submit himself to the
discipline, the hard labor, the acceptance of defeat and failure that
make a good athlete; he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be
the general, the heroic spear-head of victory.  And after that
he wanted to be loved.  Victory and love.  In all of his
swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like this--unbeaten and
beloved.  But moments of clear vision returned to him when all
the defeat and misery of his life was revealed.  He saw his
gangling and absurd figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too
like a dark strange flower to arouse any feeling among his companions
and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery; he
remembered, with a drained sick heart, the countless humiliations,
physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and
family, before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory
died within the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the proud
clangor of the gongs quivered away in silence.  His eagles had
flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman playing
César  He craned his head aside and covered his face with his
hand.
 
 

16
 

The Spring grew ripe.  There was at mid-day a
soft drowsiness in the sun.  Warm sporting gusts of wind howled
faintly at the eaves; the young grass bent; the daisies twinkled.

He pressed his high knees uncomfortably against the
bottom of his desk, grew nostalgic on his dreams.  Bessie Barnes
scrawled vigorously two rows away, displaying her long full silken
leg. Open for me the gates of delight.  Behind her sat a girl
named Ruth, dark, with milk-white skin, eyes as gentle as her name,
and thick black hair, parted in middle.  He thought of a wild
life with Bessie and of a later resurrection, a pure holy life, with
Ruth.

One day, after the noon recess, they were marshalled
by the teachers--all of the children in the three upper grades?and
marched upstairs to the big assembly hall.  They were excited,
and gossiped in low voices as they went.  They had never been
called upstairs at this hour.  Quite often the bells rang in the
halls: they sprang quickly into line and were marched out in double
files. That was fire drill.  They liked that.  Once they
emptied the building in four minutes.

This was something new.  They marched into the
big room and sat down in blocks of seats assigned to each class: they
sat with a seat between each of them.  In a moment the door of
the principal's office on the left--where little boys were
beaten--was opened, and the principal came out.  He walked
around the corner of the big room and stepped softly up on the
platform.  He began to talk.