Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (69 page)

Helen came out on the
high front porch with them as they departed. As usual, she had added
a double heaping measure to what they needed.  There was another
shoe-box stuffed with sandwiches, boiled eggs, and fudge.

She stood on the high
step-edge, with a cloth wound over her head, her gaunt arms, pitted
with old scars, akimbo.  A warm sunny odor of nasturtiums, loamy
earth, and honeysuckle washed round them its hot spermy waves.
 
"O-ho!  A-ha!" she winked
comically.  "I know something!  I'm not as blind as
you think, you know--"  She nodded with significant
jocularity, her big smiling face drenched in the curious radiance and
purity that occasionally dwelt so beautifully there.  He thought
always when he saw her thus, of a sky washed after rain, of wide
crystalline distances, cool and clean.

With a rough snigger she
prodded him in the ribs:

"Ain't love grand! 
Ha-ha-ha-ha!  Look at his face, Laura."  She drew the
girl close to her in a generous hug, laughing, Oh, with laughing
pity, and as they mounted the hill, she stood there, in the sunlight,
her mouth slightly open, smiling, touched with radiance, beauty, and
wonder.

They mounted slowly
toward the eastern edge of town, by the long upward sweep of Academy
Street, which bordered the negro settlement sprawled below it. 
At the end of Academy Street, the hill loomed abruptly; a sinuous
road, well paved, curved up along the hillside to the right. 
They turned into this road, mounting now along the eastern edge of
Niggertown.  The settlement fell sharply away below them,
rushing down along a series of long clay streets.  There were a
few frame houses by the roadside: the dwellings of negroes and poor
white people, but these became sparser as they mounted.  They
walked at a leisurely pace up the cool road speckled with little
dancing patches of light that filtered through the arching trees and
shaded on the left by the dense massed foliage of the hill. Out of
this green loveliness loomed the huge raw turret of a cement
reservoir: it was streaked and blotted coolly with water-marks.
Eugene felt thirsty.  Further along, the escape from a smaller
reservoir roared from a pipe in a foaming hawser, as thick as a man's
body.

They climbed sharply up,
along a rocky trail, avoiding the last long corkscrew of the road,
and stood in the gap, at the road's summit.  They were only a
few hundred feet above the town: it lay before them with the sharp
nearness of a Sienese picture, at once close and far.  On the
highest ground, he saw the solid masonry of the Square, blocked
cleanly out in light and shadow, and a crawling toy that was a car,
and men no bigger than sparrows.  And about the Square was the
treeless brick jungle of business--cheap, ragged, and ugly, and
beyond all this, in indefinite patches, the houses where all the
people lived, with little bright raw ulcers of suburbia further off,
and the healing and concealing grace of fair massed trees.  And
below him, weltering up from the hollow along the flanks and
shoulders of the hill, was Niggertown.  There seemed to be a
kind of centre at the Square, where all the cars crawled in and
waited, yet there was no purpose anywhere.

But the hills were
lordly, with a plan.  Westward, they widened into the sun,
soaring up from buttressing shoulders.  The town was thrown up
on the plateau like an encampment: there was nothing below him that
could resist time.  There was no idea.  Below him, in a
cup, he felt that all life was held: he saw it as might one of the
old schoolmen writing in monkish Latin a Theatre of Human Life; or
like Peter Breughel, in one of his swarming pictures.  It seemed
to him suddenly that he had not come up on the hill from the town,
but that he had come out of the wilderness like a beast, and was
staring now with steady beast-eye at this little huddle of wood and
mortar which the wilderness must one day repossess, devour, cover
over.

The seventh from the top
was Troy--but Helen had lived there; and so the German dug it up.

They turned from the
railing, with recovered wind, and walked through the gap, under
Philip Roseberry's great arched bridge.  To the left, on the
summit, the rich Jew had his cattle, his stables, his horses, his
cows, and his daughters.  As they went under the shadow of the
bridge Eugene lifted his head and shouted.  His voice bounded
against the arch like a stone.  They passed under and stood on
the other side of the gap, looking from the road's edge down into the
cove.  But they could not yet see the cove, save for green
glimmers.  The hillside was thickly wooded, the road wound down
its side in a white perpetual corkscrew.  But they could look
across at the fair wild hills on the other side of the cove, cleared
halfway up their flanks with ample field and fenced meadow, and
forested above with a billowing sea of greenery.

The day was like gold and
sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and
multifarious, like sunlight on roughened  water, all over the
land.  A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back
the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of
flower and grass and fruit.  The wind moaned, not with the mad
fiend-voice of winter in harsh boughs, but like a fruitful woman,
deep-breasted, great, full of love and wisdom; like Demeter unseen
and hunting through the world.  A dog bayed faintly in the cove,
his howl spent and broken by the wind. A cowbell tinkled gustily. 
In the thick wood below them the rich notes of birds fell from their
throats, straight down, like nuggets.  A woodpecker drummed on
the dry unbarked hole of a blasted chestnut-tree.  The blue gulf
of the sky was spread with light massy clouds: they cruised like
swift galleons, tacking across the hills before the wind, and
darkening the trees below with their floating shadows.

The boy grew blind with
love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this
wonder.  It overcame and weakened him.  He grasped the
girl's cool fingers.  They stood leg to leg, riven into each
other's flesh.  Then they left the road, cutting down across its
loops along steep wooded paths.  The wood was a vast green
church; the bird-cries fell like plums.  A great butterfly, with
wings of blue velvet streaked with gold and scarlet markings,
fluttered heavily before them in freckled sunlight, tottering to rest
finally upon a spray of dogwood.  There were light skimming
noises in the dense undergrowth to either side, the swift
bullet-shadows of birds.  A garter snake, greener than wet moss,
as long as a shoelace and no thicker than a woman's little finger,
shot across the path, its tiny eyes bright with terror, its small
forked tongue playing from its mouth like an electric spark. 
Laura cried out, drawing back in sharp terror; at her cry he snatched
up a stone in a wild lust to kill the tiny creature that shot at
them, through its coils, the old snake-fear, touching them with
beauty, with horror, with something supernatural.  But the snake
glided away into the undergrowth and, with a feeling of strong shame,
he threw the stone away.  "They won't hurt you," he
said.

At length, they came out
above the cove, at a forking of the road. They turned left, to the
north, toward the upper and smaller end. To the south, the cove
widened out in a rich little Eden of farm and pasture.  Small
houses dotted the land, there were green meadows and a glint of
water.  Fields of young green wheat bent rhythmically under the
wind; the young corn stood waist-high, with light clashing blades. 
The chimneys of Rheinhart's house showed above its obscuring grove of
maples; the fat dairy cows grazed slowly across the wide pastures. 
And further below, half tree-and-shrub-hidden, lay the rich acres of
Judge Webster Tayloe.  The road was thickly coated with white
dust; it dipped down and ran through a little brook.  They
crossed over on white rocks, strewn across its bed.  Several
ducks, scarcely disturbed by their crossing, waddled up out of the
clear water and regarded them gravely, like little children in white
choir aprons.  A young country fellow clattered by them in a
buggy filled with empty milk-cans.  He grinned with a cordial
red face, saluting them with a slow gesture, and leaving behind an
odor of milk and sweat and butter.  A woman, in a field above
them, stared curiously with shaded eyes.  In another field, a
man was mowing with a scythe, moving into the grass like a god upon
his enemies, with a reaping hook of light.

They left the road near
the head of the cove, advancing over the fields on rising ground to
the wooded cup of the hills.  There was a powerful masculine
stench of broad dock-leaves, a hot weedy odor. They moved over a
pathless field, knee-high in a dry stubbly waste, gathering on their
clothes clusters of brown cockle-burrs.  All the field was sown
with hot odorous daisies.  Then they entered the wood again,
mounting until they came to an island of tender grass, by a little
brook that fell down from the green hill along a rocky ferny bed in
bright cascades.

"Let's stop here,"
said Eugene.  The grass was thick withdandelions: their poignant
and wordless odor studded the earth with yellow magic.  They
were like gnomes and elves, and tiny witchcraft in flower and acorn.

Laura and Eugene lay upon
their backs, looking up through the high green shimmer of leaves at
the Caribbean sky, with all its fleet of cloudy ships.  The
water of the brook made a noise like silence. The town behind the
hill lay in another unthinkable world.  They forgot its pain and
conflict.

"What time is it?"
Eugene asked.  For, they had come to a place where no time was. 
Laura held up her exquisite wrist, and looked at her watch.

"Why!" she
exclaimed, surprised.  "It's only half-past twelve!"

But he scarcely heard
her.

"What do I care what
time it is!" he said huskily, and he seized the lovely hand,
bound with its silken watch-cord, and kissed it.Her long cool fingers
closed around his own; she drew his face down to her mouth.

They lay there, locked
together, upon that magic carpet, in that paradise.  Her gray
eyes were deeper and clearer than a pool of clear water; he kissed
the little freckles on her rare skin; he gazed reverently at the snub
tilt of her nose; he watched the mirrored dance of the sparkling
water over her face.  All of that magic world--flower and field
and sky and hill, and all the sweet woodland cries, sound and sight
and odor--grew into him, one voice in his heart, one tongue in his
brain, harmonious, radiant, and whole--a single passionate lyrical
noise.

"My dear! 
Darling!  Do you remember last night?" he asked fondly, as
if recalling some event of her childhood.

"Yes," she
gathered her arms tightly about his neck, "why do you think I
could forget it?"

"Do you remember
what I said--what I asked you to do?" he insisted eagerly.

"Oh, what are we
going to do?  What are we going to do?" she moaned, turning
her head to the side and flinging an arm across her eyes.

"What is it? 
What's the matter?  Dear?"

"Eugene--my dear,
you're only a child.  I'm so old--a grown woman."

"You're only
twenty-one," he said.  "There's only five years'
difference.  That's nothing."

"Oh!" she
said.  "You don't know what you're saying.  It's all
the difference in the world."

"When I'm twenty,
you'll be twenty-five.  When I'm twenty-six, you'll be
thirty-one.  When I'm forty-eight, you'll be fifty-three. What's
that?" he said contemptuously.  "Nothing."

"Everything,"
she said, "everything.  If I were sixteen, and you
twenty-one it would be nothing.  But you're a boy and I'm a
woman. When you're a young man I'll be an old maid; when you grow old
I shall be dying.  How do you know where you'll be, what you'll
be doing five years from now?" she continued in a moment. 
"You're only a boy--you've just started college.  You have
no plans yet. You don't know what you're going to do."

"Yes, I do!" he
yelled furiously.  "I'm going to be a lawyer. That's what
they're sending me for.  I'm going to be a lawyer, and I'm going
into politics.  Perhaps," he added with gloomy pleasure,
"you'll be sorry then, after I make a name for myself." 
With bitter joy he foresaw his lonely celebrity.  The Governor's
Mansion.  Forty rooms.  Alone.  Alone.

"You're going to be
a lawyer," said Laura, "and you're going everywhere in the
world, and I'm to wait for you, and never get married.  You poor
kid!"  She laughed softly.  "You don't know what
you're going to do."

He turned a face of
misery on her; brightness dropped from the sun.

"You don't care?"
he choked.  "You don't care?"  He bent his head
to hide his wet eyes.

"Oh, my dear,"
she said, "I do care.  But people don't live like that. 
It's like a story.  Don't you know that I'm a grown woman? At my
age, dear, most girls have begun to think of getting married.
What--what if I had begun to think of it, too?"

"Married!" 
The word came from him in a huge gasp of horror as if she had
mentioned the abominable, proposed the unspeakable.  Then,
having heard the monstrous suggestion, he immediately accepted it as
a fact.  He was like that.

"So!  That's
it!" he said furiously.  "You're going to get married,
eh?  You have fellows, have you?  You go out with them, do
you? You've known it all the time, and you've tried to fool me."