Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (34 page)

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his
head.  "It's not easy. Horace--" he began carefully.

"He wrote Odes and Epodes," said Tom
Davis.  "What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?"

"Why," said Mr. Leonard reflectively, "it's
a form of poetry."

"Hell!" said "Pap" Rheinhart in a
rude whisper to Eugene.  "I knew that before I paid
tuition."

Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle
fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson.

"Now let me see," he began.

"Who was Catullus?" Eugene shouted
violently.  Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.

"He was a poet," Mr. Leonard answered
thoughtlessly, quickly, startled.  He regretted.

"What sort of poetry did he write?" asked
Eugene.

There was no answer.

"Was it like Horace?"

"No-o," said Mr. Leonard reflectively. 
"It wasn't exactly like Horace."

"What was it like?" said Tom Davis. 
"Like your granny's gut," "Pap" Rheinhart toughly
whispered.

"Why--he wrote on topics of general interest in
his day," said Mr. Leonard easily.

"Did he write about being in love?" said
Eugene in a quivering voice.

Tom Davis turned a surprised face on him. 
"Gre-a-at Day!" he exclaimed, after a moment.  Then he
began to laugh.

"He wrote about being in love," Eugene
cried with sudden certain passion.  "He wrote about being
in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr. Leonard if you don't
believe me."

They turned thirsty faces up to him.

"Why--no--yes--I don't know about all that,"
said Mr. Leonard, challengingly, confused.  "Where'd you
hear all this, boy?"

"I read it in a book," said Eugene,
wondering where.  Like a flung spear, the name.

--Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear
of ecstasy and passion.

Odi et amo: quore id faciam . . .

"Well, not altogether," said Mr. Leonard. 
"Some of them," he conceded.

. . . fortasse requiris.  Nescio, sed fieri
sentio et excrucior.

"Who was she?" said Tom Davis.

"Oh, it was the custom in those days," said
Mr. Leonard carelessly. "Like Dante and Beatrice.  It was a
way the poet had of paying a compliment."

The serpent whispered.  There was a distillation
of wild exultancy in his blood.  The rags of obedience,
servility, reverential awe dropped in a belt around him.

"She was a man's wife!" he said loudly. 
"That's who she was."

Awful stillness.

"Why--here--who told you that?" said Mr.
Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly
dangerous myth.  "Who told you, boy?"

"What was she, then?" said Tom Davis
pointedly.

"Why--not exactly," Mr. Leonard murmured,
rubbing his chin.

"She was a Bad Woman," said Eugene. 
Then, most desperately, he added:  "She was a Little
Chippie."

"Pap" Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

"What's that, what's that, what's that?"
cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak.  Fury boiled up
in him.  He sprang from his chair.  "What did you say,
boy?"

But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a
sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face. 
Too far beyond.  He sat down again, shaken.

--Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion,
whose greatest music flowered out of filth--
 

    
"Nulla potest mulier
tantum se dicere amatam
     
Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es."
 

"You should be more careful of your talk,
Eugene," said Mr. Leonard gently.

"See here!" he exclaimed suddenly, turning
with violence to his book.  "This is getting no work done. 
Come on, now!" he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual
hands.  "You rascals you!" he said, noting Tom Davis'
grin.  "I know what you're after?you want to take up the
whole period."

Tom Davis' hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with
his own whine.

"All right, Tom," said Mr. Leonard briskly,
"page 43, section 6, line 15.  Begin at that point."

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis' laughter
filled the room.
 
 

Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave
competent instruction.  He would perhaps have had difficulty in
constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not
become literally familiar by years of repetition.  In Greek,
certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he
would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he
had ever met it before).  There were two final years of precious
Greek: they read the Anabasis.

"What's the good of all this stuff?" said
Tom Davis argumentatively.

Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here.  He
understood the value of the classics.

"It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer
Things.  It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. 
It trains his mind."

"What good's it going to do him when he goes to
work?" said "Pap" Rheinhart.  "It's not
going to teach him how to grow more corn."

"Well--I'm not so sure of that," said Mr.
Leonard with a protesting laugh.  "I think it does."

"Pap" Rheinhart looked at him with a
comical cock of the head.  He had a wry neck, which gave his
humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.

He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly
humor, and chewed tobacco constantly.  His father was wealthy. 
He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in
the town.  They were unpretending people--German stock.

"Pshaw, Mr. Leonard," said "Pap"
Rheinhart.  "Are you going to talk Latin to your
farmhands?"

"Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus,"
said Tom Davis with sounding laughter.  Mr. Leonard laughed with
abstracted appreciation.  The joke was his own.

"It trains the mind to grapple with problems of
all sorts," he said.

"According to what you say," said Tom
Davis, "a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than
one who hasn't."

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his
head smartly, "you know, I believe he does."  He
joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering
giggle.

He was on trodden ground.  They engaged him in
long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around,
persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to
prove the connection of Greek and groceries.  The great wind of
Athens had touched him not at all.  Of the delicate and sensuous
intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive
power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their
character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their
forms, he said nothing.

He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of
the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt
the sculptural perfection of such a word as [Greek word], but his
opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp--Greek
was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic.  The
smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below,
touched the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil,
luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos.  He was simply
the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a
genuine belief.

[Greek phrase]
 

The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey's
sister Amy. She was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who
weighed 185 pounds.  She had very thick black hair, straight and
oily, and very black eyes, giving a heavy sensuousness to her face. 
Her thick forearms were fleeced with light down.  She was not
fat, but she corsetted tightly, her powerful arms and heavy shoulders
bulging through the cool white of her shirtwaists.  In warm
weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were stained below the
arm-pits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the winter, as she
warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the exciting odor of
chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal.  Eugene,
passing down the wind-swept back porch one day in winter, looked in
on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out. She
sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her
stockings.  Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders,
her big body steaming cleanly like a beast.

She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth:
sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in
the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her
brother's. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with
indifferent affection on all the boys.  No men came to see her:
like a pool she was thirsty for lips.  She sought no one. 
With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her
was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily,
smiling good-naturedly with contempt.  Behind her, at a desk,
Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically,
gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely.

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at
the end of the second year--cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with
blood, seventy-three years old.  They said he was
forty-nine?sickness made him look old.  He was a tall man, six
feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a
mandarin.  He painted pictures--impressionist blobs--sheep on a
gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick
buildings in the background.

Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks,
Captains Courageous--the rich salty names came reeking up with a
smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories
knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in
harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman's face, sign of
his marriage with ocean.  How look the seas at dawn in Spring? 
The cold gulls sleep upon the wind.  But rose the skies.

They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times
up and down the road.  It was Spring, there was a south wind
high in the big trees.  He wavered along on a stick, planted
before him with a blue phthisic hand.  His eyes were blue and
pale as if he had been drowned.

He had begotten two children by Sheba--girls. 
They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as
strange and lovely as Spring.  The boys groped curiously.

"He must be a better man than he looks yet,"
said Tom Davis.  "The little 'un's only two or three years
old."

"He's not as old as he looks," said
Eugene.  "He looks old because he's been sick.  He's
only forty-nine."

"How do you know?" said Tom Davis.

"Miss Amy says so," said Eugene innocently.

"Pap" Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene
and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other
cheek.

"Forty-nine!" he said, "you'd better
see a doctor, boy.  He's as old as God."

"That's what she said," Eugene insisted
doggedly.

"Why, of course she said it!" "Pap"
Rheinhart replied.  "You don't think they're going to let
it out, do you?  When they're running a school here."

"Son, you must be simple!" said Jack
Candler who had not thought of it up to now.

"Hell, you're their Pet.  They know you'll
believe whatever they tell you," said Julius Arthur.  "Pap"
Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure
was impossible.  They laughed at his faith.

"Well, if he's so old," said Eugene, "why
did old Lady Lattimer marry him?"

"Why, because she couldn't get any one else, of
course," said "Pap" Rheinhart, impatient at this
obtuseness.

"Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?"
said Tom Davis curiously.  Silently they wondered.  And
Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their
mother's heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last
steps to death, and heard Sheba's strong voice leveling a
conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of
her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable
riddle--out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.

His faith was above conviction.  Disillusion had
come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter
suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and
subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain. 
Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for
which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth. 
Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth
that men live for--the creative men--but for falsehood.  At
times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his
governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart,
whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels.  And this
unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object,
returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice,
leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with
wonder.