Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (33 page)

"Well, sir!" said Mr. Leonard vaguely,
rubbing his chin.  "You young rascal, you!" he said,
giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to laugh with narcissistic
pleasure.

Eliza pursed her lips slowly.

"Well," she said, "I'll send him to
you for a year."  That was the way she did business. 
Tides run deep in Sargasso.

So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse,
destiny bore down on his life again.
 
 

Mr. Leonard had leased an old pre-war house, set on a
hill wooded by magnificent trees.  It faced west and south,
looking toward Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the
negro flats that stretched to the depot.  One day early in
September he took Eugene there.  They walked across town,
talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down Hatton Avenue,
south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending road that
ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill.  The huge trees
made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds.  In the broad
hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw
Margaret Leonard.  She held a broom in her hands, and was
aproned.  But his first impression was of her shocking
fragility.

Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years
old.  She had borne two children, a son who was now six years
old, and a daughter who was two.  As she stood there, with her
long slender fingers splayed about the broomstick, he noted, with a
momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her right index finger was
flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond healing by a hammer. 
But it was years before he knew that tuberculars sometimes have such
fingers.

Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet
six inches perhaps.  As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore
off he saw that she could not weigh more than eighty or ninety
pounds.  He had heard of the children.  Now he remembered
them, and Leonard's white muscular bulk, with a sense of horror. 
His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual relation, and something
in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid.

She had on a dress of crisp gray gingham, not loose
or lapping round her wasted figure, but hiding every line in her
body, like a draped stick.

As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he
heard her voice and, still feeling within him the strange convulsive
shame, he lifted his eyes to her face.  It was the most tranquil
and the most passionate face he had ever seen.  The skin was
sallow with a dead ashen tinge; beneath, the delicate bone-carving of
face and skull traced itself clearly: the cadaverous tightness of
those who are about to die had been checked.  She had won her
way back just far enough to balance carefully in the scales of
disease and recovery. It was necessary for her to measure everything
she did.

Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and
decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of
her chin. Beneath the sallow minute pitted skin in her cheeks, and
about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to
moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying
the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within.
This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but
always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous
energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of
depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was
always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of
struggle--he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the
reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the
straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and
unjoint her members, once she let go.  Literally, physically, he
felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she
would immediately go to pieces.  She was like some great
general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers
clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his
life--sends on the battle.

Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant,
tinged lightly with gray: it was combed evenly in the middle and
bound tightly in a knot behind.  Everything about her was very
clean, like a scrubbed kitchen board: she took his hand, he felt the
firm nervous vitality of her fingers, and he noticed how clean and
scrubbed her thin somewhat labor-worn hands were.  If he noticed
her emaciation at all now, it was only with a sense of her
purification: he felt himself in union not with disease, but with the
greatest health he had ever known.  She made a high music in
him.  His heart lifted.

"This," said Mr. Leonard, stroking him
gently across the kidneys, "is Mister Eugene Gant."

"Well, sir," she said, in a low voice, in
which a vibrant wire was thrumming, "I'm glad to know you." 
The voice had in it that quality of quiet wonder that he had
sometimes heard in the voices of people who had seen or were told of
some strange event, or coincidence, that seemed to reach beyond life,
beyond nature?a note of acceptance; and suddenly he knew that all
life seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she looked directly
into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts of men,
and that he seemed beautiful to her.

Her face darkened with the strange passionate
vitality that left no print, that lived there bodiless like life; her
brown eyes darkened into black as if a bird had flown through them
and left the shadow of its wings.  She saw his small remote face
burning strangely at the end of his long unfleshed body, she saw the
straight thin shanks, the big feet turned awkwardly inward, the dusty
patches on his stockings at the knees, and his thin wristy arms that
stuck out painfully below his cheap ill-fitting jacket; she saw the
thin hunched line of his shoulders, the tangled mass of hair--and she
did not laugh.

He turned his face up to her as a prisoner who
recovers light, as a man long pent in darkness who bathes himself in
the great pool of dawn, as a blind man who feels upon his eyes the
white core and essence of immutable brightness.  His body drank
in her great light as a famished castaway the rain: he closed his
eyes and let the great light bathe him, and when he opened them
again, he saw that her own were luminous and wet.

Then she began to laugh.  "Why, Mr.
Leonard," she said, "what in the world!  He's almost
as tall as you.  Here, boy.  Stand up here  while I
measure."  Deft-fingered, she put them back to back. 
Mr. Leonard was two or three inches taller than Eugene.  He
began to whine with laughter.

"Why, the rascal," he said.  "That
little shaver."

"How old are you, boy?" she asked.

"I'll be twelve next month," he said.

"Well, what do you know about that!" she
said wonderingly.  "I tell you what, though," she
continued.  "We've got to get some meat on those bones. 
You can't go around like that.  I don't like the way you look." 
She shook her head.

He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. 
It embarrassed and frightened him to be told that he was "delicate";
it touched sharply on his pride.

She took him into a big room on the left that had
been fitted out as a living-room and library.  She watched his
face light with eagerness as he saw the fifteen hundred or two
thousand books shelved away in various places.  He sat down
clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited until she
returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of
clabber, which he had never tasted before.

When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his,
and sat down. She had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard
errands; he could be heard from time to time shouting in an
authoritative country voice to his live stock.

"Well, tell me boy," she said, "what
have you been reading?"

Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of
printery, naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win
her approval.  As he had read everything, good and bad, that the
town library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing.
Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book--he rebuilt the
story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her
wholly.  She was excited and eager--she saw at once how
abundantly she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge,
experience, wisdom.  And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience:
the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled
desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled.  The way
through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find,
would now be charted for him.  Before he went away she had given
him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited
engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best.

He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the
man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of
banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in
valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of
Erasmus.  Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best
story he had ever read.
 
 

The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture
of their lives.  All the delayed success that Leonard had
dreamed of as a younger man he hoped to realize now.  For him
the school was independence, mastership, power, and, he hoped,
prosperity.  For her, teaching was its own exceeding great
reward--her lyric music, her life, the world in which plastically she
built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that gave her
spirit life while he broke her body.

In the cruel volcano of the boy's mind, the little
brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and
were consumed.  One by one the merciless years reaped down his
gods and captains.  What had lived up to hope?  What had
withstood the scourge of growth and memory?  Why had the gold
become so dim?  All of his life, it seemed, his blazing
loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on
melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a
statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted
heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with
light, who nested his hooded houseless soul.  She remained.

O death in life that turns our men to stone!  O
change that levels down our gods!  If only one lives yet, above
the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall
not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in
morning, on the mountain?  Who walks with us on the hills?
 
 

17
 

Eugene spent the next four years of his life in
Leonard's school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the
dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had
already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment
of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at
Leonard's bloomed like golden apples.

From Leonard he got little--a dry campaign over an
arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent
skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and
bewildered him  needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy
dislike of syntax,and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which
the language was  built.  Then, a year's study of the lean,
clear precision of César magnificent structure of the style--the
concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily
partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic
translation:

"Having done all things that were necessary, and
the season now being propitious for carrying on war, César began to
arrange his legions in battle array."

All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of
the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in
the  forests, and the proud clangor of triumph--all that might
have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of
the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his
work, was lacking.

Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard
rut of method and memory.  March 12, last year--three days
late.  Cogitata. Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive. 
Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows. 
Eighty lines for to-morrow.

They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog,
Cicero.  De Senectute.  De Amicitia.  They skirted
Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor--he was not at
all sure of Virgilian navigation.  He hated exploration. 
He distrusted voyages.  Next year, he said.  And the great
names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of
Amores, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides.  Nox est
perpetua.

"Huh?" drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly
beginning to laugh.  He was fingermarked with chalk from chin to
crotch.  Stephen ("Pap") Rheinhart leaned forward
gently and fleshed his penpoint in Eugene Gant's left rump. 
Eugene grunted painfully.

"Why, no," said Mr. Leonard, stroking his
chin.  "A different sort of Latin."

"What sort?" Tom Davis insisted. 
"Harder than Cicero?"

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, dubiously,
"different.  A little beyond you at present."

"--est perpetua.  Una dormienda.  Luna
dies et nox."

"Is Latin poetry hard to read?" Eugene
said.