Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (64 page)

He went back to the university sealed up against the
taunts of the young men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about
him with thronging jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he
met them, with constraint.

There came and sat beside him Tom French, his
handsome face vested in the hard insolence of money.  He was
followed by his court jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high
hard cackle.

"Hello, Gant," said Tom French harshly. 
"Been to Exeter lately?" Scowling, he winked at grinning
Roy.

"Yes," said Eugene, "I've been there
lately, and I'm on my way there now.  What's it to you, French?"

Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man's son
drew back.

"We hear you're stepping out among them, 'Gene,"
said Roy Duncan, cackling.

"Who's we?" said Eugene.  "Who's
them?"

"They say," said Tom French, "that
you're as pure as the flowing sewer."

"If I need cleaning," said Eugene, "I
can always use the Gold Dust Twins, can't I?  French and Duncan,
the Gold Dust Twins--who never do any work."

The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial
brutes who had gathered about them on the seats back and front,
laughed loudly.

"That's right!  That's right!  Talk to
them, 'Gene!" said Zeno Cochran, softly.  He was a tall lad
of twenty, slender and powerful, with the grace of a running horse. 
He had punted against the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl. 
He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless
gentleness of the athlete.

Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom
French said:

"Nobody has anything on me.  I've been too
slick for them.  Nobody knows anything about me."
 
"You mean," said Eugene, "that every
one knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about
you."

The crowd laughed.

"Wow!" said Jimmy Revell.

"What about that, Tom?" he asked
challengingly.  He was very small and plump, the son of a
carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by
various schemes.  He was a "kidder," an egger-on,
finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud
good-humor.

Eugene turned quietly on Tom French.  "Stop
it!" he said.  "Don't go on because the others are
listening.  I don't think it's funny. I don't like it.  I
don't like you.  I want you to leave me alone now.  Do you
hear?"

"Come on," said Roy Duncan, rising, "leave
him alone, Tom.  He can't take a joke.  He takes things too
seriously."

They left him.  Unperturbed, relieved, he turned
his face toward the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip
of winter.
 
 

Winter ended.  The sleety frozen earth began to
soften under thaw and the rain.  The town and campus paths were
dreary trenches of mud and slime.  The cold rain fell: the grass
shot up in green wet patches.  He hurtled down the campus lanes,
bounding like a kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a
budding twig with his teeth.  He cried loudly in his throat--a
whinnying squeal--the centaur-cry of man or beast, trying to unburden
its overladen heart in one blast of pain and joy and passion. 
At other times he slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable burden
of weariness and dejection.

He lost count of the hours--he had no sense of
time--no regular periods for sleep, work, or recreation, although he
attended his classes faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by
compulsion of dining-hall or boarding-house schedules.  The food
was abundant, coarse, greasily and badly cooked.  It was very
cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the
boarding-houses, fifteen.  He ate at the commons for a month:
his interest in food was too profound and too intelligent to stand it
longer.  The commons was housed in a large bleak building of
white brick.  It was called officially Stiggins Hall, but in the
more descriptive epithet of the students--The Sty.

He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. 
They lived thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. 
It was a town of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy
pavements, and a capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. 
At the head of the main street, across from the capitol, a brown
weathered building of lichened stone, was a cheap hotel--the largest
and most notorious brothel in town.  There were also three
denominational colleges for young women.

The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on
the street above the Governor's Mansion.  They lived in three or
four rooms on the ground floor.

It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man,
from Baltimore, on his slow drift to the South.  It was in
Sydney that he had first started business for himself and conceived,
from the loss of his first investments, his hatred of property. 
It was in Sydney that he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the
tubercular spinstress who had died within two years of their
marriage.

Their father's great ghost haunted them: it brooded
over the town, above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes
all trace of us away.

Together, they hunted down into the mean streets,
until they stood at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the
negro district.

"This must be it," she said.  "His
shop stood here.  It's gone now."

She was silent a moment.  "Poor old Papa." 
She turned her wet eyes away.

There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak
world.  No vines grew round the houses.  That part of him
which had lived here was buried--buried with a dead woman below the
long gray tide of the years.  They stood quietly, frightened, in
that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with
expectant unbelief, as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.
 
 

In April the nation declared war on Germany. 
Before the month was out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were
eligible--those who were twenty-one--were going into service. 
At the gymnasium he watched the doctors examine them, envying the
careless innocence with which they stripped themselves naked. 
They threw off their clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing
and certain, before the doctors.  They were clean-limbed, sound
and white of tooth, graceful and fast in their movements.  The
fraternity men joined first--those merry and extravagant snobs of
whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest
reach of urbane and aristocratic life.  He had seen them, happy
and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses--those temples
where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. 
He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the
uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the
post-office, or gambling for "black cows," at the
drug-store.  And, with a stab of failure, with regret, with pain
at his social deficiency, he had watched their hot campaigns for the
favor of some desirable freshman--some one vastly more elegant than
himself, some one with blood and with money.  They were only the
sons of the little rich men, the lords of the village and county, but
as he saw them go so surely, with such laughing unconstraint, in
well-cut clothes, well-groomed, well-brushed, among the crowd of
humbler students, who stiffened awkwardly with peasant hostility and
constraint,--they were the flower of chivalry, the sons of the
mansion-house.  They were Sydney, Raleigh, Nash.  And now,
like gentlemen, they were going to war.

The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and
of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. 
Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green
budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph
Hendrix.

"Look!" said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry
tone.  "Look at that, will you!"  He nodded
toward a group of students ahead.  "That little Horse's
Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus."

Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter
common face beside him.  Every Saturday night, after the meeting
of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and
bought two cheap cigars.  He had bent narrow shoulders, a white
knobby face, and a low forehead.  He spoke in a monotonous
painful drawl.  His father was foreman in a cotton mill.

"They're all Horse's Necks," he said. 
"They can go to hell before I'll boot to get in."

"Yes," said Eugene.

But he wanted to get in.  He wanted to be urbane
and careless.  He wanted to wear well-cut clothes.  He
wanted to be a gentleman.  He wanted to go to war.

On the central campus, several students who had been
approved by the examining board, descended from the old dormitories,
bearing packed valises.  They turned down under the trees,
walking toward the village street.  From time to time they threw
up an arm in farewell.

"So long, boys!  See you in Berlin." 
The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.
 
 

He read a great deal--but at random, for pleasure. 
He read Defoe, Smollet, Stern, and Fielding--the fine salt of the
English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath
an ocean of tea and molasses.  He read the tales of Boccaccio,
and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron.  At
Buck Benson's suggestion, he read Murray's Euripides (at the time he
was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis--noblest and loveliest of
all the myths of Love and Death).  He saw the grandeur of the
Prometheus fable--but the fable moved him more than the play of é 
In fact, é he found sublime--and dull: he could not understand his
great reputation.  Rather--he could.  He was Literature?a
writer of masterpieces.  He was almost as great a bore as
Cicero--that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of
Old Age and Friendship.  Sophocles was an imperial poet--he
spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the é Rex is not only one
of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest
stories. This story--perfect, inevitable, and fabulous--wreaked upon
him the nightmare coincidence of Destiny.  It held him birdlike
before its great snake-eye of wisdom and horror.  And Euripides
(whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the
greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.

He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose
or verse, from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief
prince of the moon and magic.  But he liked the fabulous
wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose.

The best fabulists have often been the greatest
satirists: satire (as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a
high and subtle art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale
geese-slaughterings of the present degenerate age.  Great satire
needs the sustenance of great fable.  Swift's power of invention
is incomparable: there's no better fabulist in the world.

He read Poe's stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of
Lord Dunsany. He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book
of Tobit. He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. 
Magic was magic. He wanted old ghosts--not Indian ghosts, but ghosts
in armor, the spirit of old kings, and pillioned ladies with high
coned hats. Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth
he dwelt on.  Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should
read Euripides there in the wilderness.

Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling
land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America--more
land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly.  He
was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black
was eating fried food.  He was reading of ancient sorceries and
old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? 
The ghost of Hamlet's Father, in Connecticut.
 

    
". . . . . . I am thy
father's spirit,
     
Doomed
for a certain term to walk the night
     
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine."
 

He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the
nation.  Only the earth endured--the gigantic American earth,
bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets.  Only
the earth endured--this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to
haunt it.  Stogged in the desert, half-broken and overthrown,
among the columns of lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image
of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of Akhnaton.  Nothing
had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely
breast he read Euripides.  Within its hills he had been held a
prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
 
O God!  O God!  We have been an exile in
another land and a stranger in our own.  The mountains were our
masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to
five.  Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. 
Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned
to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never
lose and never forget.  We walked along a road in Cumberland,
and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away
from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. 
And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close
and near.  And the old hunger returned--the terrible and obscure
hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at
home and strangers wherever we go.