Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (49 page)

She saved carefully all his letters--written on his
heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his
crippled right hand.

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the
coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices
too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland
at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and
citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold
lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching
nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.
 
 

24
 

With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully
massaged his torso from loin to chin.

"Now, let me see," he whined with studious
deliberation, "what he gives on this."  He fumbled for
the notes.

Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the
window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.

Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand
stroking his grave pallid face.

"Entgegen," said Eugene, in a small choked
voice, "follows its object."

John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head,
still searching the notes.

"I'm not so sure of that," he said.

Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. 
Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk.  John
Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.

From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught
him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily
ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked
it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation
in order to enjoy his bewilderment.   Sometimes,
deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings,
sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting
exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.

"Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in
which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and
finally,"--Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, "giving
him a good punch in the eye."

"No-o," said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin,
"not exactly. 'Catching him squarely in the eye' gets the idiom
better, I think."

Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling
noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion.  It
came at once.

"Let me see," said John Dorsey, turning the
pages, "what he gives on this."

Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled
wad and thrust it on Eugene's desk.  Eugene read:
 

    
"Gebe mir ein Stuck
Papier,
     
Before
I bust you on the ear."
 

He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and
wrote in answer:
 

    
"Du bist wie eine
bum-me."
 

They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German
tear-gulps: Immensee, Hé als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. 
Then, Wilhelm Tell.  The fine lyrical measure of the opening
song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with
its faery music.  The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was
unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene,
and the escape by boat.  As for the rest, it was, they wearily
recognized, Great Literature.  Mr. Schiller, they saw, was
religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and
Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty.  His embattled Swiss
bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.

"The mountains," observed John Dorsey,
touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, "have
been the traditional seat of Liberty."

Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. 
He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.

During this season of Eliza's absence he roomed with
Guy Doak.

Guy Doak was five years his senior.  He was a
native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee
nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness.  His mother, a
boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to
retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter
in Florida.

Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height,
black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow
suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish's belly, with somewhat
unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than
his upper.  He was foppishly neat in his dress.  People
called him a good-looking boy.

He made few friends.  To the boys at Leonard's
this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel
Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for
girls.  He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him.

Guy Doak had none of their floridity.  He was
lacking in their hearty violence.  He did not laugh loudly. 
He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic.  His
companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee
realist.  They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common
goal of superstition.  Guy Doak had already hardened into the
American city-dweller's mould of infantile cynicism.  He was
occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the
city fellow with the yokels.  He was wise.  Above all, he
was wise.  It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always
on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne.  So far from
being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave
him much bitter amusement.

Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice
fellow--sharp, obstinate, unsubtle, and pleased with his wit. 
They lived on the first floor at Leonard's: at night, by a roaring
wood fire, they listened carefully to the great thunder of the trees,
and to the stealthy creaking foot-steps of the master as he came
softly down the stairs, and paused by their door.  They ate at
table with Margaret, John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John
Dorsey, junior, nine, and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard's
Tennessee nephews?Tyson Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen,
foulmouthed and sly, and Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen,
with a bumpy face, brown merry eyes, and a quick temper.  At
table they kept up a secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden
movement, fleshing a fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said
the blessing, and choking with smothered laughter.  At night,
they tapped messages on floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering
conventions in the windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds
as John Dorsey stormed down on them.

Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school
alive.  He had less than twenty students the first year, and
less than thirty the second.  From an income of not more than
$3,000 he had to pay Miss Amy, who had left a high school position to
help him, a small salary.  The old house on its fine wooded hill
was full of outmoded plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it
at a small rental. But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a
considerable yearly restoration.  The Leonards were fighting
very stubbornly and courageously for their existence.

The food was scant and poor: at breakfast, a dish of
blue, watery oatmeal, eggs and toast; at lunch, a thin soup, hot sour
cornbread, and a vegetable boiled with a piece of fat pork; at
dinner, hot biscuits, a small meat loaf, and creamed or boiled
potatoes.  No one was permitted coffee or tea, but there was an
abundance of fresh creamy milk.  John Dorsey always kept and
milked his own cow. Occasionally there was a deep, crusted pie, hot,
yolky muffins, or spicy gingerbread of Margaret's make.  She was
a splendid cook.

Often, at night, Guy Doak slid quietly out through
the window on to the side porch, and escaped down the road under the
concealing roar of the trees.  He would return from town within
two hours, crawling in exultantly with a bag full of hot frankfurter
sandwiches coated thickly with mustard, chopped onion, and a hot
Mexican sauce.  With a crafty grin he unfoiled two five-cent
cigars, which they smoked magnificently, with a sharp tang of daring,
blowing the smoke up the chimney in order to thwart a possible
irruption by the master. And Guy brought back, from the wind and the 
night, the good salt breath of gossip in street and store, news of
the town, and the brave swagger of the drugstore gallants.

As they smoked and stuffed fat palatable bites of
sandwich into their mouths, they would regard each other with pleased
sniggers, carrying on thus an insane symphony of laughter:

"Chuckle, chuckle!--laugh of gloatation."

"Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee! . . laugh of
titterosity."

"Snuh-huh, snuh-huh, snuh-huh! . . laugh of
gluttonotiousness."

The vigorous warmth of burning wood filled their room
pleasantly: over their sheltered heads the dark gigantic wind howled
through the earth.  O sheltered love, nooked warmly in against
this winter night.  O warm fair women, whether within a forest
hut, or by the town ledged high above the moaning seas, shot upon the
wind, I come.

Guy Doak toyed gently at his belly with his right
hand, and stroked his round chin slowly with his left.

"Now let me see," he whined, "what he
gives on this."

Their laughter rang around the walls.  Too late,
they heard the aroused stealthy foot-falls of the master, creaking
down the hall. Later--silence, the dark, the wind.
 
 

Miss Amy closed her small beautifully kept grade
book, thrust her great arms upward, and yawned.  Eugene looked
hopefully at her and out along the playing court, reddened by the
late sun.  He was wild, uncontrollable, erratic.  His mad
tongue leaped out in class. He could never keep peace a full day. 
He amazed them.  They loved him, and they punished him piously,
affectionately.  He was never released at the dismissal hour. 
He was always "kept in."

John Dorsey noted each whisper of disorder, or each
failure in preparation, by careful markings in a book.  Each
afternoon he read the names of delinquents, amid a low mutter of
sullen protest, and stated their penalties.  Once Eugene got
through an entire day without a mark.  He stood triumphantly
before Leonard while the master searched the record.

John Dorsey began to laugh foolishly; he gripped his
hand affectionately around the boy's arm.

"Well, sir!" he said.  "There
must be a mistake.  I'm going to keep you in on general
principles."

He bent to a long dribbling suction of laughter. 
Eugene's wild eyes were shot with tears of anger and surprise. 
He never forgot.

Miss Amy yawned, and smiled on him with slow powerful
affectionate contempt.

"Go on!" she said, in her broad, lazy
accent.  "I don't want to fool with you any more. 
You're not worth powder enough to blow you up."

Margaret came in, her face furrowed deeply between
smoke-dark eyes, full of tender sternness and hidden laughter.

"What's wrong with the rascal?" she asked. 
"Can't he learn algebra?"

"He can learn!" drawled Miss Amy.  "He
can learn anything.  He's lazy--that's what it is.  Just
plain lazy."

She smacked his buttock smartly with a ruler.

"I'd like to warm you a bit with this," she
laughed, slowly and richly.  "You'd learn then."

"Here!" said Margaret, shaking her head in
protest.  "You leave that boy alone.  Don't look
behind the faun's ears.  Never mind about algebra, here. 
That's for poor folks.  There's no need for algebra where two
and two make five."

Miss Amy turned her handsome gypsy eyes on Eugene.

"Go on.  I've seen enough of you." 
She made a strong weary gesture of dismissal.

Hatless, with a mad whoop, he plunged through the
door and leaped the porch rail.

"Here, boy!" Margaret called. 
"Where's your hat?"

Grinning, he galloped back, picked up a limp rag of
dirty green felt, and pulled it over his chaotic hair.  Curly
tufts stuck through the gaping crease-holes.

"Come here!" said Margaret gravely. 
Her nervous fingers pulled his frayed necktie around to the front,
tugged down his vest, and buttoned his coat over tightly, while he
peered at her with his strange devil's grin.  Suddenly she
trembled with laughter.

"Good heavens, Amy," she said.  "Look
at that hat."

Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy
cat-warmth.

"You want to fix yourself up, 'Gene," she
said, "so the girls will begin to notice you."

He heard the strange song of Margaret's laughter.

"Can you see him out courting?" she said. 
"The poor girl would think she had a demon lover, sure."
 

    
"As e'er beneath a
waning moon was haunted
     
By
woman wailing for her demon lover."
 

His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret
beauty.

"Get along, you scamp!" she ordered.

He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore
down the road with bounding strides.

All the dusk blurred in her eyes.