Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (60 page)

Four years later, when he was graduated, he had
passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his
lips, and he was still a child.

When it was at last plain that Gant's will was on
this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:

"Well, then, go your ways, boy.  Go your
ways.  God bless you."

She looked a moment at his long thin figure and
turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:

"Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who
came to us four years ago?  Can you believe it?"

John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary
gentle relaxation.

"What do you know about it?" he said.

When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and
gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in
it.

"You are taking a part of our heart with you,
boy.  Do you know that?"

She took his trembling hand gently between her own
lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.

"Eugene," she continued, "we could not
love you more if you were our own child.  We wanted to keep you
with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending
you out with our hopes pinned to you.  Oh, boy, you are fine. 
There is no atom in you that is not fine.  A glory and a chrism
of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours."

The proud words of love and glory sank like music to
his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him
with the bitter shame of his concealed desires.  Love bade him
enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.

He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the
strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.

"I can't!" he choked.  "You
mustn't think--"  He could not go on; his life groped
blindly to confessional.

Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his
cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.
 
 

That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. 
They occupied the same room at Woodson Street.  Luke had
returned to the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen's
marriage.

Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of
the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. 
She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an
especial tenderness.  At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene
would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of
his brother's voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette
in darkness.

The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had
ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. 
All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with
Gant he spoke hardly at all.  They had never talked together. 
Their eyes never met--a great shame, the shame of father and son,
that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that
mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their
hearts, had silenced them.

But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever
before.  As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and
smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin
Gant's life burst out in violent denunciation.  He began to
speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did
when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became
more passionate.

"I suppose they've told you how poor they are?"
he began, tossing his cigarette away.

"Well," said Eugene, "I've got to go
easy.  I mustn't waste my money."

"Ah-h!" said Ben, making an ugly face. 
He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.

"Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way
through college by waiting on tables and so on.  Perhaps I can
do something like that."

Ben turned over on his side until he faced his
brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.

"Now listen, 'Gene," he said sternly,
"don't be a damned little fool, do you hear?  You take
every damn cent you can get out of them," he added savagely.

"Well, I appreciate what they're doing. 
I'm getting a lot more than the rest of you had.  They're doing
a lot for me," said the boy.

"For YOU, you little idiot!" said Ben,
scowling at him in disgust. "They're doing it all for
themselves.  Don't let them get away with that.  They think
you'll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day. 
They're rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is.  No,
you take everything you can get.  The rest of us never had
anything, but I want to see you get all that's coming to you. My
God!" he cried furiously.

"Their money's doing no one any good rotting in
the damned bank, is it?  No, 'Gene, get all you can.  When
you get down there, if you find you need more to hold your own with
the other boys, make the old man give it to you.  You've never
had a chance to hold your head up in your own home town, so make the
most of your chances when you get away."

He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence
for a moment.

"To hell with it all!" he said.  "What
in God's name are we living for!"
 
 

Eugene's first year at the university was filled for
him with loneliness, pain, and failure.  Within three weeks of
his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic
jokes, his ignorance of all campus tradition had been exploited, his
gullibility was a byword.  He was the greenest of all green
Freshmen, past and present: he had listened attentively to a sermon
in chapel by a sophomore with false whiskers; he had prepared
studiously for an examination on the contents of the college
catalogue; and he had been guilty of the inexcusable blunder of
making a speech of acceptance on his election, with fifty others, to
the literary society.

And these buffooneries--a little cruel, but only with
the cruelty of vacant laughter, and a part of the schedule of rough
humor in an American college--salty, extravagant, and
national--opened deep wounds in him, which his companions hardly
suspected.  He was conspicuous at once not only because of his
blunders, but also because of his young wild child's face, and his
great raw length of body, with the bounding scissor legs.  The
undergraduates passed him in grinning clusters: he saluted them
obediently, but with a sick heart.  And the smug smiling faces
of his own classmen, the wiser Freshmen, complacently guiltless of
his own mistakes, touched him at moments with insane fury.

"Smile and smile and s-mile--damn you!" he
cursed through his grating teeth.  For the first time in his
life he began to dislike whatever fits too snugly in a measure. 
He began to dislike and envy the inconspicuous mould of general
nature--the multitudinous arms, legs, hands, feet, and figures that
are comfortably shaped for ready-made garments.  And the
prettily regular, wherever he found it, he hated--the vacantly
handsome young men, with shining hair, evenly parted in the middle,
with sure strong middling limbs meant to go gracefully on
dancefloors.  He longed to see them commit some awkward
blunder--to trip and sprawl, to be flatulent, to lose a strategic
button in mixed company, to be unconscious of a hanging shirt-tail
while with a pretty girl.  But they made no mistakes.

As he walked across the campus, he heard his name
called mockingly from a dozen of the impartial windows, he heard the
hidden laughter, and he ground his teeth.  And at night, he
stiffened with shame in his dark bed, ripping the sheet between his
fingers as, with the unbalanced vision, the swollen egotism of the
introvert, the picture of a crowded student-room, filled with the
grinning historians of his exploits, burned in his brain.  He
strangled his fierce cry with a taloned hand.  He wanted to blot
out the shameful moment, unweave the loom.  It seemed to him
that his ruin was final, that he had stamped the beginning of his
university life with folly that would never be forgotten, and that
the best he could do would be to seek out obscurity for the next four
years. He saw himself in his clown's trappings and thought of his
former vision of success and honor with a lacerating self-contempt.
 
There was no one to whom he could turn:
he had no friends.  His conception of university life was a
romantic blur, evoked from his reading and tempered with memories of
Stover at Yale, Young Fred Fearnot, and jolly youths with
affectionate linked arms, bawling out a cheer-song.  No one had
given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life
of an American university.  He had not been warned of the
general taboos.  Thus, he had come greenly on his new life,
unprepared, as he came ever thereafter on all new life, save for his
opium visions of himself a stranger in Arcadias.

He was alone.  He was desperately lonely.

But the university was a charming, an unforgettable
place.  It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in
the central midland of the big State.  Students came and
departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve
miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling
land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried
in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply
above the country.  One burst suddenly, at the hill-top, on the
end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and
winding a mile in to the town centre and the university.  The
central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf,
groved with magnificent ancient trees.  A quadrangle of
post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper
end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic
Neo- Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design:
beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness.  There was
still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place--one felt its
remoteness, its isolated charm.  It seemed to Eugene like a
provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like
a beast.

Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the
forest, had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was
later to forfeit.  It had the fine authority of
provincialism?the provincialism of an older South.  Nothing
mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich
kingdom--there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.

Few of the university's sons had been distinguished
in the nation's life--there had been an obscure President of the
United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such
distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. 
Nothing beyond mattered very much.

In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to
loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent
years.  There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic
scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the
prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a
fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly
any incipient rash of bookishness.  Instead, they loafed and
invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted
the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics,
fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs.  And they
talked--always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls,
assembled in their rooms, they talked--in limp sprawls--incessant,
charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large  easy
fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics,
athletics, fraternities and the girls--My God! how they talked!

"Observe," lisped Mr. Torrington, the old
Rhodes Scholar (Pulpit Hill and Merton, '14), "observe how
skilfully he holds suspense until the very end.  Observe with
what consummate art he builds up to his climax, keeping his meaning
hidden until the very last word."  Further, in fact.

At last, thought Eugene, I am getting an education. 
This must be good writing, because it seems so very dull.  When
it hurts, the dentist says, it does you good.  Democracy must be
real, because it is so very earnest.  It must be a certainty,
because it is so elegantly embalmed in this marble mausoleum of
language.  Essays For College Men--Woodrow Wilson, Lord Bryce
and Dean Briggs.

But there was no word here of the loud raucous voice
of America, political conventions and the Big Brass Band, Tweed,
Tammany, the Big Stick, lynching bees and black barbecue parties, the
Boston Irish, and the damnable machinations of the Pope as exposed by
the Babylon Hollow Trumpet (Dem.), the rape of the Belgian virgins,
rum, oil, Wall Street and Mexico.

All that, Mr. Torrington would have said, was
temporary and accidental.  It was unsound.

Mr. Torrington smiled moistly at Eugene and urged him
tenderly into a chair drawn intimately to his desk.

"Mr.--?  Mr.--?--" he said, fumbling
at his index cards.

"Gant," said Eugene.

"Ah, yes--Mr. Gant," he smiled his
contrition.  "Now--about your outside reading?" he
began.

But what, thought Eugene, about my inside reading?

Did he like to read?  Ah--that was good. 
He was so glad to hear it.  The true university in these days,
said Carlyle (he did hope Eugene liked rugged old Thomas), was a
collection of books.