Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (66 page)

"Yes," she
said.

He leaped down on the
walk just as his father lurched in from the street by the high
obscuring hedge that shut the house from the spacious yard of the
attorney Hall.  Gant reeled destructively, across a border of
lilies, on to the lawn, and strode for the veranda.  He
stumbled, cursing, on the bottom step and plunged forward in a sprawl
upon the porch.  The boy jumped for him, and half dragged, half
lifted his great drunken body erect.  The boarders shrank into a
huddle with a quick scattering of chairs: he greeted them with a
laugh of howling contempt.

"Are you there? 
I say, are you there?  The lowest of the low--boarding-house
swine!  Merciful God!  What a travesty!  A travesty on
Nature!  That it should come to this!"

He burst into a long peal
of maniacal laughter.

"Papa!  Come
on!" said Eugene in a low voice.  He took his father
cautiously by the sleeve.  Gant flung him half across the porch
with a gesture of his hand.  As he stepped in again swiftly, his
father struck at him with a flailing arm.  He evaded the great
mowing fist without trouble, and caught the falling body, swung from
its own pivot, in his arms.  Then quickly, before Gant could
recover, holding him from behind, he rushed him toward the door. The
boarders scattered away like sparrows.  But Laura James was at
the screen before him: she flung it open.

"Get away!  Get
away!" he cried, full of shame and anger.  "You stay
out of this."  For a moment he despised her for seeing his
hurt.

"Oh, let me help
you, my dear," Laura James whispered.  Her eyes were wet,
but she was not afraid.

Father and son plunged
chaotically down the wide dark hall, Eliza, weeping and making
gestures, just before them.

"Take him in here,
boy.  Take him in here," she whispered, motioning to a
large bed-room on the upper side of the house. Eugene propelled his
father through a blind passage of bath room, and pushed him over on
the creaking width of an iron bed.

"You damned
scoundrel!" Gant yelled, again trying to reap him down with the
long arm, "let me up or I'll kill you!"

"For God's sake,
papa," he implored angrily, "try to quiet down. Every one
in town can hear you."

"To hell with them!"
Gant roared.  "Mountain Grills--all of them, fattening upon
my heart's-blood.  They have done me to death, as sure as
there's a God in heaven."

Eliza appeared in the
door, her face contorted by weeping.

"Son, can't you do
something to stop him?" she said.  "He'll ruin us
all.  He'll drive every one away."

Gant struggled to stand
erect when he saw her.  Her white face stirred him to insanity.

"There it is! 
There!  There!  Do you see!  The fiend-face I know so
well, gloating upon my misery.  Look at it!  Look!  Do
you see its smile of evil cunning?  Greeley, Will, The Hog, The
Old Major! The Tax Collector will get it all, and I shall die in the
gutter!"

"If it hadn't been
for me," Eliza began, stung to retaliation, "you'd have
died there long ago."

"Mama, for God's
sake!" the boy cried.  "Don't stand there talking to
him!  Can't you see what it does to him!  Do something, in
heaven's name!  Get Helen!  Where is she?"

"I'll make an end to
it all!" Gant yelled, staggering erect.  "I'll do for
us both now."

Eliza vanished.

"Yes, sir, papa. 
It's going to be all right," Eugene began soothingly, pushing
him back on the bed again.  He dropped quickly to his knees, and
began to draw off one of Gant's soft tongueless shoes, muttering
reassurances all the time:  "Yes, sir.  We'll get you
some good hot soup and put you to bed in a jiffy.  Everything's
going to be all right," the shoe came off in his hand and, aided
by the furious thrust of his father's foot, he went sprawling back.

Gant got to his feet
again and, taking a farewell kick at his fallen son, lunged toward
the door.  Eugene scrambled up quickly, and leaped after him. 
The two men fell heavily into the roughly grained plaster of the
wall.  Gant cursed, flailing about clumsily at his tormentor. 
Helen came in.
 
"Baby!"
Gant wept, "they're trying to kill me.  O Jesus, do
something to save me, or I perish."

"You get back in
that bed," she commanded sharply, "or I'll knock your head
off."

Very obediently he
suffered himself to be led back to bed and undressed.  In a few
minutes she was sitting beside him with a bowl of smoking soup. 
He grinned sheepishly as she spooned it into his opened mouth. 
She laughed--almost happily--thinking of the lost and irrevocable
years.  Suddenly, before he slept, he lifted himself strongly
from the pillows that propped him, and with staring eyes, called out
in savage terror:

"Is it a cancer? 
I say, is it a cancer?"

"Hush!" she
cried.  "No.  Of course not!  Don't be foolish."

He fell back exhausted,
with eyes closed.  But they knew that it was.  He had never
been told.  The terrible name of his malady was never uttered
save by him.  And in his heart he knew--what they all knew and
never spoke of before him--that it was, it was a cancer. All day,
with fear-stark eyes, Gant had sat, like a broken statue, among his
marbles, drinking.  It was a cancer.
 
 

The boy's right hand bled
very badly across the wrist, where his father's weight had ground it
into the wall.

"Go wash it off,"
said Helen.  "I'll tie it up for you."

He went into the dark
bathroom and held his hand under a jet of lukewarm water.  A
very quiet despair was in his heart, a weary peace that brooded too
upon the house of death and tumult, that flowed, like a soft
exploring wind, through its dark halls, bathing all things quietly
with peace and weariness.  The boarders had fled like silly
sheep to the two houses across the street: they had eaten there, they
were clustered there upon the porches, whispering.  And their
going brought him peace and freedom, as if his limbs had been freed
from a shackling weight.  Eliza, amid the slow smoke of the
kitchen, wept more quietly over the waste of supper; he saw the black
mournful calm of the negress's face.  He walked slowly up the
dark hall, with a handkerchief tied looselyround his wound.  He
felt suddenly the peace that comes with despair.  The sword that
pierces very deep had fared through the folds of his poor armor of
pride.  The steel had sheared his side, had bitten to his
heart.  But under his armor he had found himself. No more than
himself could be known.  No more than himself could be given. 
What he was--he was: evasion and pretense could not add to his sum. 
With all his heart he was glad.

By the door, in the
darkness, he found Laura James.

"I thought you had
gone with the others," he said.

"No," said
Laura James, "how is your father?"

"He's all right
now.  He's gone to sleep," he answered.  "Have
you had anything to eat?"

"No," she said,
"I didn't want it."

"I'll bring you
something from the kitchen," he said.  "There's plenty
there."  In a moment he added:  "I'm sorry,
Laura."

"What are you sorry
for?" she asked.

He leaned against the
wall limply, drained of his strength at her touch.

"Eugene.  My
dear," she said.  She pulled his drooping face down to her
lips and kissed him.  "My sweet, my darling, don't look
like that."

All his resistance melted
from him.  He seized her small hands, crushing them in his hot
fingers, and devouring them with kisses.

"My dear Laura! 
My dear Laura!" he said in a choking voice.  "My
sweet, my beautiful Laura!  My lovely Laura.  I love you. 
I love you."  The words rushed from his heart, incoherent,
unashamed, foaming through the broken levees of pride and silence. 
They clung together in the dark, with their wet faces pressed mouth
to mouth. Her perfume went drunkenly to his brain; her touch upon him
shot through his limbs a glow of magic; he felt the pressure of her
narrow breasts, eager and lithe, against him with a sense of fear--as
if he had dishonored her--with a sickening remembrance of his
defilement.

He held between his hands
her elegant small head, so gloriously wound with its thick bracelet
of fine blonde hair, and spoke the words he had never spoken--the
words of confession, filled with love and humility.

"Don't go! 
Don't go!  Please don't go!" he begged.  "Don't
leave, dear.  Please!"

"Hush!" she
whispered.  "I won't go!  I love you, my dear."

She saw his hand, wrapped
in its bloody bandage; she nursed it gently with soft little cries of
tenderness.  She fetched a bottle of iodine from her room and
painted the stinging cut with a brush. She wrapped it with clean
strips of fine white cloth, torn from an old waist, scented with a
faint and subtle perfume.

Then they sat upon the
wooden swing.  The house seemed to sleep in darkness. 
Helen and Eliza came presently from its very quiet depth.

"How's your hand,
'Gene?" Helen asked.

"It's all right,"
he said.

"Let me see! 
O-ho, you've got a nurse now, haven't you?" she said, with a
good laugh.

"What's that? 
What's that?  Hurt his hand?  How'd you do that? Why,
here--say--I've got the very thing for it, son," said Eliza,
trying to bustle off in all directions.

"Oh, it's all right
now, mama.  It's been fixed," he said wearily, reflecting
that she had the very thing always too late.  He looked at Helen
grinning:

"God bless our Happy
Home!" he said.

"Poor old Laura!"
she laughed, and hugged the girl roughly with one hand.  "It's
too bad you have to be dragged into it."

"That's all right,"
said Laura.  "I feel like one of the family now anyhow."

"He needn't think he
can carry on like this," said Eliza resentfully.  "I'm
not going to put up with it any longer."

"Oh forget about
it!" said Helen wearily.  "Good heavens, mama. Papa's
a sick man.  Can't you realize that?"

"Pshaw!" said
Eliza scornfully.  "I don't believe there's a thing in the
world wrong with him but that vile licker.  All his trouble
comes from that."

"Oh--how
ridiculous!  How ridiculous!  You can't tell me!"
Helen exclaimed angrily.

"Let's talk about
the weather," said Eugene.

Then they all sat
quietly, letting the darkness soak into them. Finally Helen and Eliza
went back into the house: Eliza went unwillingly, at the girl's
insistence, casting back the doubtful glimmer of her face upon the
boy and girl.

The wasting helve of the
moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the hills.  There was a
smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the
million-noted little night things, rising and falling in a constant
ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious
certitude.  The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like
silence on the earth, it dripped through the leafy web of the young
maples, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.

Eugene and Laura sat with
joined hands in the slowly creaking swing.  Her touch shot
through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around her
shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live firm
cup of her breast.  He jerked his hand away, as if he had been
stung, muttering an apology.  Whenever she touched him, his
flesh got numb and weak.  She was a virgin, crisp like
celery--his heart shrank away from the pollution of his touch upon
her.  It seemed to him that he was much the older, although he
was sixteen, and she twenty-one.  He felt the age of his
loneliness and his dark perception.  He felt the gray wisdom of
sin--a waste desert, but seen and known.  When he held her hand,
he felt as if he had already seduced her.  She lifted her lovely
face to him, pert and ugly as a boy's; it was inhabited by a true and
steadfast decency, and his eyes were wet.  All the young beauty
in the world dwelt for him in that face that had kept wonder, that
had kept innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the
terror and foulness of the world.  He came to her, like a
creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment
of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in
the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the
moonflower of her face.  For if a man should dream of heaven
and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had
really been there--what then, what then?

"Eugene," she
said presently, "how old are you?"

His vision thickened with
his pulse.  In a moment he answered with terrible difficulty.

"I'm--just sixteen."

"Oh, you child!"
she cried.  "I thought you were more than that!"

"I'm--old for my
age," he muttered.  "How old are you?"

"I'm twenty-one,"
she said.  "Isn't it a pity?"

"There's not much
difference," he said.  "I can't see that it matters."

"Oh, my dear,"
she said.  "It does!  It matters so much!"