Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (63 page)

"Let's git started," she said. 
"Where's my money?"

He thrust two crumpled bills into her hand.

Then he lay down beside her.  He trembled,
unnerved and impotent. Passion was extinct in him.

The massed coals caved in the hearth.  The lost
bright wonder died.
 
 

When he went down stairs, he found Jim Trivett
waiting in the hall, holding Thelma by the hand.  Lily led them
out quietly, after peering through the lattice into the fog, and
listening for a moment.

"Be quiet," she whispered, "there's a
man across the street. They've been watching us lately."

"Come again, Slats," Thelma murmured,
pressing his hand.

They went out softly, treading gently until they
reached the road. The fog had thickened: the air was saturated with
fine stinging moisture.

At the corner, in the glare of the street-lamp, Jim
Trivett released his breath with loud relief, and stepped forward
boldly.

"Damn!" he said.  "I thought you
were never coming.  What were you trying to do with the woman,
Legs?"  Then, noting the boy's face, he added quickly, with
warm concern:  "What's the matter, 'Gene? Don't you feel
good?"

"Wait a minute!" said Eugene thickly. 
"Be all right!"

He went to the curb, and vomited into the gutter. 
Then he straightened, mopping his mouth with a handkerchief.

"How do you feel?" asked Jim Trivett. 
"Better?"

"Yes," said Eugene, "I'm all right
now."

"Why didn't you tell me you were sick?"
said Jim Trivett chidingly.

"It came on all of a sudden," said Eugene. 
He added presently:  "I think it was something I ate at
that damn Greek's to-night."

"I felt all right," said Jim Trivett. 
"A cup of coffee will fix you up," he added with cheerful
conviction.

They mounted the hill slowly.  The light from
winking cornerlamps fell with a livid stare across the fronts of the
squalid houses.

"Jim," said Eugene, after a moment's pause.

"Yes.  What is it?"

"Don't say anything about my getting sick,"
he said awkwardly.

Surprised, Jim Trivett stared at him.

"Why not?  There's nothing in that,"
he said.  "Pshaw, boy, any one's likely to get sick."

"Yes, I know.  But I'd rather you
wouldn't."

"Oh, all right.  I won't.  Why should
I?" said Jim Trivett.

Eugene was haunted by his own lost ghost: he knew it
to be irrecoverable.  For three days he avoided every one: the
brand of his sin, he felt, was on him.  He was published by
every gesture, by every word.  His manner grew more defiant, his
greeting to life more unfriendly.  He clung more closely to Jim
Trivett, drawing a sad pleasure from his coarse loyal praise. 
His unappeased desire began to burn anew: it conquered his bodily
disgust and made new pictures.  At the end of the week he went
again, alone, to Exeter, No more of him, he felt, could be lost. 
This time he sought out Thelma.
 
 

When he went home for Christmas, his loins were black
with vermin. The great body of the State lay like a barren giant
below the leaden reek of the skies.  The train roared on across
the vast lift of the Piedmont: at night, as he lay in his berth, in a
diseased coma, it crawled up into the great fortress of the hills. 
Dimly, he saw their wintry bulk, with its bleak foresting. 
Below a trestle, silent as a dream, a white rope of water coiled
between its frozen banks.  His sick heart lifted in the haunting
eternity of the hills.  He was hillborn.  But at dawn, as
he came from the cars with the band of returning students, his
depression revived. The huddle of cheap buildings at the station
seemed meaner and meaner than ever before.  The hills, above the
station flats, with their cheap propped houses, had the unnatural
closeness of a vision.  The silent Square seemed to have rushed
together during his absence, and as he left the car and descended the
street to Dixieland, it was as if he devoured toy-town distances with
a giant's stride.

The Christmas was gray and chill.  Helen was not
there to give it warmth.  Gant and Eliza felt the depression of
her absence.  Ben came and went like a ghost.  Luke was not
coming home.  And he himself was sick with shame and loss.

He did not know where to turn.  He paced his
chill room at night, muttering, until Eliza's troubled face appeared
above her wrapper. His father was gentler, older than he had ever
seen him; his pain had returned on him.  He was absent and
sorrowful.  He talked perfunctorily with his son about college. 
Speech choked in Eugene's throat.  He stammered a few answers
and fled from the house and the vacant fear in Gant's eyes.  He
walked prodigiously, day and night, in an effort to command his own
fear.  He believed himself to be rotting with a leprosy. 
And there was nothing to do but rot.  There was no cure. 
For such had been the instruction of the moralists of his youth.

He walked with aimless desperation, unable to quiet
for a moment his restless limbs.  He went up on the eastern
hills that rose behind Niggertown.  A winter's sun labored
through the mist.  Low on the meadows, and high on the hills,
the sunlight lay on the earth like milk.

He stood looking.  A shaft of hope cut through
the blackness of his spirit.  I will go to my brother, he
thought.

He found Ben still in bed at Woodson Street,
smoking.  He closed the door, then spun wildly about as if
caged.

"In God's name!" Ben cried angrily. 
"Have you gone crazy?  What's wrong with you?"

"I'm--I'm sick!" he gasped.

"What's the matter?  Where've you been?"
asked Ben sharply.  He sat up in bed.

"I've been with a woman," said Eugene.

"Sit down, 'Gene," said Ben quietly, after
a moment.  "Don't be a little idiot.  You're not going
to die, you know.  When did this happen?"

The boy blurted out his confession.

Ben got up and put on his clothes.

"Come on," said he, "we'll go to see
McGuire."

As they walked townward, he tried to talk, explaining
himself in babbling incoherent spurts.

"It was like this," he began, "if I
had known, but at that time I didn't--of course I know it was my own
fault for--"

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben
impatiently.  "Dry up!  I don't want to hear about
it.  I'm not your damned Guardian Angel."

The news was comforting.  So many people, after
our fall from grace, are.

They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the
Doctors' and Surgeons', with its sharp excitement of medical smells. 
McGuire's anteroom was empty.  Ben rapped at the inner door. 
McGuire opened it: he pulled away the wet cigarette that was
plastered on his heavy lip, to greet them.

"Hello, Ben.  Hello, son!" he barked,
seeing Eugene.  "When'd you get back?"

"He thinks he's dying of galloping consumption,
McGuire," said Ben, with a jerk of the head.  "You may
be able to do something to prolong his life."

"What's the matter, son?" said McGuire.

Eugene gulped dryly, craning his livid face.

"If you don't mind," he croaked.  "See
you alone."  He turned desperately upon his brother. 
"You stay here.  Don't want you with me."

"I don't want to go with you," said Ben
surlily.  "I've got troubles enough of my own."

Eugene followed McGuire's burly figure into the
office; McGuire closed the door, and sat down heavily at his littered
desk.

"Sit down, son," he commanded, "and
tell me about it."  He lit a cigarette and stuck it deftly
on his sag wet lip.  He glanced keenly at the boy, noting his
contorted face.

"Take your time, son," he said kindly, "and
control yourself. Whatever it is, it's probably not as bad as you
think."

"It was this way," Eugene began in a low
voice.  "I've made a mistake.  I know that.  I'm
willing to take my medicine.  I'm not making any excuses for
what has happened," his voice rose sharply; he got half-way out
of his chair, and began to pound fiercely upon the untidy desk. 
"I'm putting the blame on no one.  Do you understand that?"

McGuire turned a bloated bewildered face slowly upon
his patient. His wet cigarette sagged comically from his half-opened
mouth.

"Do I understand what?" he said.  "See
here, 'Gene: what the hell are you driving at?  I'm no Sherlock
Holmes, you know.  I'm your doctor.  Spit it out."

"What I've done," he said dramatically,
"thousands have done.  Oh, I know they may pretend not to. 
But they do!  You're a doctor?you know that.  People
high-up in society, too.  I'm one of the unlucky ones.  I
got caught.  Why am I any worse than they are?  Why--"
he continued rhetorically.

"I think I catch your drift," said McGuire
dryly.  "Let's have a look, son."

Eugene obeyed feverishly, still declaiming.

"Why should I bear the stigma for what others
get away with? Hypocrites--a crowd of damned, dirty, whining
hypocrites, that's what they are.  The Double-Standard! 
Hah!  Where's the justice, where's the honor of that?  Why
should I be blamed for what people in High Society--"

McGuire lifted his big head from its critical stare,
and barked comically.

"Who's blaming you?  You don't think you're
the first one who ever had this sort of trouble, do you? 
There's nothing wrong with you, anyway."

"Can--can you cure me?" Eugene asked.

"No.  You're incurable, son!" said
McGuire.  He scrawled a few hieroglyphics on a prescription
pad.  "Give this to the druggist," he said, "and
be a little more careful hereafter of the company you keep. 
People in High Society, eh?" he grinned.  "So that's
where you've been?"

The great weight of blood and tears had lifted
completely out of the boy's heart, leaving him dizzily buoyant, wild,
half-conscious only of his rushing words.

He opened the door and went into the outer room. 
Ben got up quickly and nervously.

"Well," he said, "how much longer has
he got to live?"  Seriously, in a low voice, he added: 
"There's nothing wrong with him, is there?"

"No," said McGuire, "I think he's a
little off his nut.  But, then, you all are."
 
 

When they came out on the street again, Ben said:

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"No," said Eugene.

"When did you eat last?"

"Some time yesterday," said Eugene. 
"I don't remember."

"You damned fool!" Ben muttered. 
"Come on--let's eat."

The idea became very attractive.  The world was
washed pleasantly in the milky winter sunshine.  The town, under
the stimulus of the holidays and the returning students, had wakened
momentarily from its winter torpor: warm brisk currents of life
seethed over the pavements.  He walked along at Ben's side with
a great bounding stride, unable to govern the expanding joy that rose
yeastily in him.  Finally, as he turned in on the busy avenue,
he could restrain himself no longer: he leaped high in the air, with
a yelp of ecstasy:

"Squee-ee!"

"You little idiot!" Ben cried sharply. 
"Are you crazy!"

He scowled fiercely, then turned to the roaring
passersby, with a thin smile.

"Hang on to him, Ben!" yelled Jim Pollock. 
He was a deadly little man, waxen and smiling under a black mustache,
the chief compositor, a Socialist.

"If you cut off his damned big feet," said
Ben, "he'd go up like a balloon."

They went into the big new lunch-room and sat at one
of the tables.

"What's yours?" said the waiter.

"A cup of coffee and a piece of mince pie,"
said Ben.

"I'll take the same," said Eugene.

"Eat!" said Ben fiercely.  "Eat!"

Eugene studied the card thoughtfully.

"Bring me some veal cutlets breaded with tomato
sauce," he said, "with a side-order of hash-brown potatoes,
a dish of creamed carrots and peas, and a plate of hot biscuits. 
Also a cup of coffee."
 
 

Eugene got back his heart again.  He got it back
fiercely and carelessly, with an eldritch wildness.  During the
remainder of his holiday, he plunged recklessly through the lively
crowds, looking boldly but without insolence at the women and young
girls.  They grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter
like splendid flowers.  He was eager and alone.  Fear is a
dragon that lives among crowds--and in armies.  It lives hardly
with men who are alone.  He felt released--beyond the last hedge
of desperation.

Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment
at all the possessed and possessing world about him.  Life hung
for his picking fingers like a strange and bitter fruit. 
THEY--the great clan huddled there behind the stockade for warmth and
safety?could hunt him down some day and put him to death: he thought
they would.

But he was not now afraid--he was content, if only
the struggle might be fruitful.  He looked among the crowds
printed with the mark of his danger, seeking that which he might
desire and take.