Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (65 page)

Eliza visited Helen in
Sydney in the Spring.  The girl was quieter, sadder, more
thoughtful than she had ever been.  She was subdued by the new
life: chastened by her obscurity.  She missed Gant more than she
would confess.  She missed the mountain town.

"What do you have to
pay for this place?" said Eliza, looking around critically.

"Fifty dollars a
month," said Helen.

"Furnished?"

"No, we had to buy
furniture."

"I tell you what,
that's pretty high," said Eliza, "just for down stairs. 
I believe rents are lower at home."

"Yes, I know it's
high," said Helen.  "But good heavens, mama!  Do
you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town?  We're
only two blocks from the Governor's Mansion, you know.  Mrs.
Mathews is no common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! 
No sir!" she exclaimed, laughing.  "She's a real
swell--goes to all the big functions and gets in the papers all the
time.  You know Hugh and I have got to try to keep up
appearances.  He's a young man just starting out here."

"Yes.  I know,"
Eliza agreed thoughtfully.  "How's he been doing?"

"O'Toole says he's
the best agent he's got," said Helen.  "Hugh's all
right.  We could get along together anywhere, as long as there's
no damned family about.  It makes me furious at times to see him
slaving to feather O'Toole's pockets.  He works like a dog. You
know, O'Toole gets a commission on every sale he makes.  And
Mrs. O'T. and those two girls ride around in a big car and never turn
their hands over.  They're Catholics, you know, but they get to
go everywhere."

"I tell you what,"
said Eliza with a timid half-serious smile, "it might not be a
bad idea if Hugh became his own boss.  There's no use doing it
all for the other fellow.  Say, child!" she exclaimed, "why
wouldn't it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont agency? 
I don't believe that fellow they've got is much account. He could get
it without trying."

There was a pause.

"We've been thinking
of that," the girl admitted slowly.  "Hugh has written
in to the main office.  Anyway," she said a moment later,
"he'd be his own boss.  That's something."

"Well," said
Eliza slowly, "I don't know but what it'd be a good idea. 
If he works hard there's no reason why he shouldn't build a good
business up.  Your papa's been complaining here lately about his
trouble.  He'd be glad to have you back."  She shook
her head slowly for a moment.  "Child! they didn't do him a
bit of good, up there.  It's all come back."

They drove over to Pulpit
Hill at Easter for a two days' visit. Eliza took him to Exeter and
bought him a suit of clothes.

"I don't like those
skimpy trousers," she told the salesman.  "I want
something that makes him look more of a man."

When he was newly
dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and said:

"Spruce up, boy! 
Throw your shoulders back!  That's one thing about your
father--he carries himself straight as an arrow.  If you go all
humped over like that, you'll have lung trouble before you're
twenty-five."

"I want you to meet
my mother," he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph Ballantyne, a smooth
pink young man who had been elected president of the Freshman class.

"You're a good
smart-looking fellow," said Eliza smiling, "I'll make a
trade with you.  If you drum up some boarders for me among your
friends here in this part of the State, I'll throw in your board
free.  Here are some of my cards," she added, opening her
purse.  "You might hand a few of them out, if you get a
chance, and say a good word for Dixieland in the Land of the Sky."

"Yes, ma'am,"
said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, "I certainly
will."

Eugene turned a hot
distressed face toward Helen.  She laughed huskily, ironically,
then turning to the boy, said:

"You're welcome at
any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not. We'll always find a place
for you."

When they were alone, in
answer to his stammering and confused protests, she said with an
annoyed grin:

"Yes, I know. 
It's pretty bad.  But you're away from it most of the time. 
You're the lucky one.  You see what I've had to listen to, the
last week, don't you?  You see, don't you?"
 
 

When he went home at the
end of the year, late in May, he found that Helen and Hugh Barton had
preceded him.  They were living with Gant, at Woodson Street. 
Hugh Barton had secured the Altamont agency.

The town and the nation
boiled with patriotic frenzy--violent, in a chaotic sprawl, to little
purpose.  The spawn of Attila must be crushed ("exterminated,"
said the Reverend Mr. Smallwood) by the sons of freedom.  There
were loans, bond issues, speech-making, a talk of drafts, and a thin
trickle of Yankees into France. Pershing arrived in Paris, and said,
"Lafayette, we are here!", but the French were still
looking.  Ben went up before the enlistment board and was
rejected.  "Lungs--weak!" they said quite definitely.
"No--not tubercular.  A tendency.  Underweight." 
He cursed.  His face was a little more like a blade--thinner,
grayer.  The cleft of his scowl was deeper.  He seemed more
alone.

Eugene came up into the
hills again and found them in their rich young summer glory. 
Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests. More arrived.

Eugene was sixteen years
old.  He was a College Man.  He walked among the gay crowd
of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty greetings
with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.

"They tell me you're
batting a thousand down there, son," yelled Mr. Wood, the plump
young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at all.  "That's
right, boy!  Go get 'em."  The man passed forward
cheerfully, up the prosperous glade of his store.  Fans droned.

After all, Eugene
thought, he had not done so badly.  He had felt his first
wounds.  He had not been broken.  He had seen love's bitter
mystery.  He had lived alone.
 
 

30
 

There was at Dixieland a
girl named Laura James.  She was twenty-one years old.  She
looked younger.  She was there when he came back.

Laura was a slender
girl, of medium height, but looking taller than she was.  She
was very firmly moulded: she seemed fresh and washed and clean. 
She had thick hair, very straight and blonde, combed in a flat
bracelet around her small head.  Her face was white, with small
freckles.  Her eyes were soft, candid, cat-green.  He nose
was a little too large for her face: it was tilted.  She was not
pretty.  She dressed very simply and elegantly in short plaid
skirts and waists of knitted silk.

She was the only young
person at Dixieland.  Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur. 
He thought her plain and dull.  But he began to sit with her on
the porch at night.  Somehow, he began to love her.

He did not know that he
loved her.  He talked to her arrogantly and boastfully as they
sat in the wooden porch-swing.  But he breathed the clean
perfume of her marvellous young body.  He was trapped in the
tender cruelty of her clear green eyes, caught in the subtle net of
her smile.

Laura James lived in the
eastern part of the State, far east even of Pulpit Hill, in a little
town built on a salt river of the great coastal plain.  Her
father was a wealthy merchant--a wholesale provisioner.  The
girl was an only child: she spent extravagantly.

Eugene sat on the porch
rail one evening and talked to her. Before, he had only nodded, or
spoken stiffly a word or two.  They began haltingly, aware
painfully of gaps in their conversation.

"You're from Little
Richmond, aren't you?" he said.

"Yes," said
Laura James, "do you know any one from there?"

"Yes," said he,
"I know John Bynum and a boy named Ficklen. They're from Little
Richmond, aren't they?"

"Oh, Dave Ficklen! 
Do you know him?  Yes.  They both go to Pulpit Hill. 
Do you go there?"

"Yes," he said,
"that's where I knew them."

"Do you know the two
Barlow boys?  They're Sigma Nus," said Laura James.

He had seen them. 
They were great swells, football men.

"Yes, I know them,"
he said, "Roy Barlow and Jack Barlow."

"Do you know
'Snooks' Warren?  He's a Kappa Sig."

"Yes.  They
call them Keg Squeezers," said Eugene.

"What fraternity are
you?" said Laura James.

"I'm not any,"
he said painfully.  "I was just a Freshman this year."

"Some of the best
friends I have never joined fraternities," said Laura James.
 
 

They met more and more
frequently, without arrangement, until by silent consent they met
every night upon the porch.  Sometimes they walked along the
cool dark streets.  Sometimes he squired her clumsily through
the town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of
youth, past the loafing cluster at Wood's. Often he took her to
Woodson Street, where Helen secured for him the cool privacy of the
veranda.  She was very fond of Laura James.

"She's a nice girl. 
A lovely girl.  I like her.  She's not going to take any
beauty prizes, is she?"  She laughed with a trace of
good-natured ridicule.

He was displeased.

"She looks all
right," he said.  "She's not as ugly as you make out."

But she WAS ugly--with a
clean lovely ugliness.  Her face was freckled lightly, over her
nose and mouth: her features were eager, unconscious, turned upward
in irregular pertness.  But she was exquisitely made and
exquisitely kept: she had the firm young line of Spring, budding,
slender, virginal.  She was like something swift, with wings,
which hovers in a wood--among the feathery trees suspected, but
uncaught, unseen.

He tried to live before
her in armor.  He showed off before her. Perhaps, he thought, if
he were splendid enough, she would not see the ugly disorder and
meanness of the world he dwelt in.

Across the street, on the
wide lawn of the Brunswick--the big brick gabled house that Eliza
once had coveted--Mr. Pratt, who crawled in that mean world in which
only a boarding-house husband can exist, was watering wide green
spaces of lawn with a hose.  The flashing water motes gleamed in
the red glare of sunset.  The red light fell across the shaven
pinched face.  It glittered on the buckles of his arm-bands. 
Across the walk, on the other lobe of grass, several men and women
were playing croquet.  There was laughter on the vine-hid
porch.  Next door, at the Belton, the boarders were assembled on
the long porch in bright hashhouse chatter.  The comedian of the
Dixie Ramblers arrived with two chorus girls.  He was a little
man, with the face of a weasel and no upper teeth.  He wore a
straw hat with a striped band, and a blue shirt and collar. The
boarders gathered in around him.  In a moment there was shrill
laughter.

Julius Arthur sped
swiftly down the hill, driving his father home. He grinned squintily
and flung his arm up in careless greeting. The prosperous lawyer
twisted a plump Van Dyked face on a wry neck curiously. 
Unsmiling, he passed.

A negress in the
Brunswick struck on the several bells of a Japanese gong.  There
was a scramble of feet on the porch; the croquet players dropped
their mallets and walked rapidly toward the house.  Pratt wound
his hose over a wooden reel.

A slow bell-clapper in
the Belton sent the guests in a scrambling drive for the doors. 
In a moment there was a clatter of heavy plates and a loud foody
noise.  The guests on the porch at Dixieland rocked more
rapidly, with low mutters of discontent.

Eugene talked to Laura in
thickening dusk, sheeting his pain in pride and indifference. 
Eliza's face, a white blur in the dark,
came
up behind the screen.

"Come on out, Mrs.
Gant, and get a breath of fresh air," said Laura James.

"Why no-o, child. 
I can't now.  Who's that with you?" she cried, obviously
flustered.  She opened the door.  "Huh?  Heh? 
Have you seen 'Gene?  Is it 'Gene?"

"Yes," he
said.  "What's the matter?"

"Come here a minute,
boy," she said.

He went into the hall.

"What is it?"
he asked.

"Why, son, what in
the world!  I don't know.  You'll have to do something,"
she whispered, twisting her hands together.

"What is it, mama? 
What are you talking about?" he cried irritably.

"Why--Jannadeau's
just called up.  Your papa's on a rampage again and he's coming
this way.  Child!  There's no telling what he'll do. 
I've all these people in the house.  He'll ruin us." 
She wept.  "Go and try to stop him.  Head him off if
you can.  Take him to Woodson Street."

He got his hat quickly
and ran through the door.

"Where are you
going?" asked Laura James.  "Are you going off without
supper?"

"I've got to go to
town," he said.  "I won't be long.  Will you wait
for me?"