Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (70 page)

Nakedly, with breast bare
to horror, he scourged himself, knowing in the moment that the
nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in
the probable--the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds
treason in the dark.

"You have
fellows--you let them feel you.  They feel your legs, they play
with your breasts, they--"  His voice became inaudible
through strangulation.

"No.  No, my
dear.  I haven't said so," she rose swiftly to a sitting
position, taking his hands.  "But there's nothing unusual
about getting married, you know.  Most people do.  Oh, my
dear! Don't look like that!  Nothing has happened. 
Nothing! Nothing!"

He seized her fiercely,
unable to speak.  Then he buried his face in her neck.

"Laura!  My
dear!  My sweet!  Don't leave me alone!  I've been
alone!  I've always been alone!"

"It's what you want,
dear.  It's what you'll always want.  You couldn't stand
anything else.  You'd get so tired of me.  You'll forget
this ever happened.  You'll forget me.  You'll
forget--forget."

"Forget!  I'll
never forget!  I won't live long enough."

"And I'll never love
any one else!  I'll never leave you!  I'll wait for you
forever!  Oh, my child, my child!"

They clung together in
that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the
world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say--whatever
disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic, or that we can
ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and
the gold?  Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the
rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of
painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away.  Their
world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never
die.  This would endure.

He kissed her on her
splendid eyes; he grew into her young Mé body, his heart numbed
deliciously against the pressure of her narrow breasts.  She was
as lithe and yielding to his sustaining hand as a willow rod--she was
bird-swift, more elusive in repose than the dancing water-motes upon
her face.  He held her tightly lest she grow into the tree
again, or be gone amid the wood like smoke.

Come up into the hills, O
my young love.  Return!  O lost, and by the wind grieved,
ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley,
where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of
June.  There was a place where all the sun went glistening in
your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. 
Where is the day that melted into one rich noise?  Where the
music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of
your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten
like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? 
And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair?  Quick
are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this
loveliness.  You who were made for music, will hear music no
more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come
back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into
life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted
wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the
hills, O my young love: return.  O lost, and by the wind
grieved, ghost, come back again.
 
 

31
 

One day, when June was
coming to its end, Laura James said to him:

"I shall have to go
home next week."  Then, seeing his stricken face, she
added, "but only for a few days--not more than a week."

"But why?  The
summer's only started.  You will burn up down there."

"Yes.  It's
silly, I know.  But my people expect me for the Fourth of July. 
You know, we have an enormous family--hundred of aunts, cousins, and
in-laws.  We have a family re-union every year?a great barbecue
and picnic.  I hate it.  But they'd never forgive me if I
didn't come."

Frightened, he looked at
her for a moment.

"Laura!  You're
coming back, aren't you?" he said quietly.

"Yes, of course,"
she said.  "Be quiet."

He was trembling
violently; he was afraid to question her more closely.

"Be quiet," she
whispered, "quiet!"  She put her arms around him.

He went with her to the
station on a hot mid-afternoon.  There was a smell of melted tar
in the streets.  She held his hand beside her in the rattling
trolley, squeezing his fingers to give him comfort, and whispering
from time to time:

"In a week! 
Only a week, dear."
 
"I
don't see the need," he muttered.  "It's over 400
miles.  Just for a few days."

He passed the old
one-legged gateman on the station platform very easily, carrying her
baggage.  Then he sat beside her in the close green heat of the
pullman until the train should go.  A little electric fan droned
uselessly above the aisle; a prim young lady whom he knew, arranged
herself amid the bright new leather of her bags.  She returned
his greeting elegantly, with a shade of refined hauteur, then looked
out the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed
at her raptly from the platform.  Several prosperous merchants
went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the
fan's drone.

"Not going to leave
us, are you, Mr. Morris?"

"Hello, Jim. 
No, I'm running up to Richmond for a few days."  But even
the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of
that hot chariot to the East.

"'Board!"

He got up trembling.

"In a few days,
dear."  She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved
palms.

"You will write as
soon as you get there?  Please!"

"Yes. 
To-morrow--at once."

He bent down suddenly and
whispered, "Laura--you will come back. You will come back!"

She turned her face away
and wept bitterly.  He sat beside her once more; she clasped him
tightly as if he had been a child.

"My dear, my dear! 
Don't forget me ever!"

"Never.  Come
back.  Come back."

The salt print of her
kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the
guttering candle-end of time.  The train was in motion.  He
leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.

"Come back again!"

But he knew.  Her
cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.
 
 

Within three days he had
his letter.  On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious
little American flags, this:
 

"My dear:  I
got home at half-past one, just too tired to move.  I couldn't
sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the
way down.  I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. 
Little Richmond is too ghastly for words--everything burned up and
every one gone away to the mountains or the sea.  How can I ever
stand it even for a week!"  (Good! he thought.  If the
weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.)  "It
would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air.  Could
you find your way back to our place in the valley again?" 
(Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.)  "Will you promise
to look after your hand until it gets well?  I worried so after
you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. 
Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again
but, don't worry, I'll have my own way in the end.  I always
do.  I don't know any one at home any more--all of the boys have
enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk.  Most of
the girls I know are getting married, or married already.  That
leaves only the kids."  (He winced.  As old as I am,
maybe older.)  "Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your
mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. 
And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you.  Try
to guess what they are.

LAURA."
 

He read her prosy letter
with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had
been lyrical song.  She would come back! She would come back! 
Soon.

There was another page. 
Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. 
There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own
speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter,
this note:
 

"July 4.

"Richard came
yesterday.  He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I've been
engaged to him almost a year.  We're going off quietly to
Norfolk to-morrow and get married.  My dear!  My dear! 
I couldn't tell you!  I tried to, but couldn't.  I didn't
want to lie. Everything else was true.  I meant all I said. 
If you hadn't been so young, but what's the use of saying that? 
Try to forgive me, but please don't forget me.  Good-by and God
bless you.  Oh, my darling, it was heaven!  I shall never
forget you."
 
 

When he had finished the
letter, he re-read it, slowly and carefully.  Then he folded it,
put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for
forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. 
It was sunset.  The sun's vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the
western earth, in a great field of murky pollen.  It sank beyond
the western ranges.  The clear sweet air was washed with gold
and pearl.  The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they
were like Canaan and rich grapes.  The motors of cove people
toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came.  The
bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the
town like dew: it washed out all the day's distress, the harsh
confusions.  Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.

And above him the proud
stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he
could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew's
great house.  One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men
returning home.  (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) 
One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth
lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth
and on Troy.  It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of
loneliness, that washes our stains away.  He was washed in the
great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption.  His
bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face
upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a
grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of
death--alone, alone.
 
 

"Ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. "Your girl went
and got married, didn't she?  She fooled you.  You got
left."

"Wh-a-a-a-t!"
said Eliza banteringly, "has my boy been--as the fellow says"
(she sniggered behind her hand) "has my boy been a-courtin'?" 
She puckered her lips in playful reproach.

"Oh, for God's
sake," he muttered angrily.  "What fellow says!"

His scowl broke into an
angry grin as he caught his sister's eye. They laughed.

"Well, 'Gene,"
said the girl seriously, "forget about it.  You're only a
kid yet.  Laura is a grown woman."

"Why, son,"
said Eliza with a touch of malice, "that girl was fooling you
all the time.  She was just leading you on."

"Oh, stop it,
please."

"Cheer up!"
said Helen heartily.  "Your time's coming.  You'll
forget her in a week.  There are plenty more, you know. 
This is puppy love.  Show her that you're a good sport. 
You ought to write her a letter of congratulation."

"Why, yes,"
said Eliza, "I'd make a big joke of it all.  I wouldn't let
on to her that it affected me.  I'd write her just as big as you
please and laugh about the whole thing.  I'd show them! 
That's what I'd--"

"Oh, for God's
sake!" he groaned, starting up.  "Leave me alone,
won't you?"

He left the house.
 
 

But he wrote the letter. 
And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was
writhen by shame.  For it was a proud and boastful letter,
salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable
scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy,
without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his
weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning.  She
would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end,
his fiercely beating heart stormed through:

". . . and I hope
he's worth having you--he can't deserve you, Laura; no one can. 
But if he knows what he has, that's something. How lucky he is! 
You're right about me--I'm too young.  I'd cut off my hand now
for eight or ten years more.  God bless and keep you, my dear,
dear Laura.

"Something in me
wants to burst.  It keeps trying to, but it won't, it never
has.  O God!  If it only would!  I shall never forget
you. I'm lost now and I'll never find the way again.  In God's
name write me a line when you get this.  Tell me what your name
is now--you never have.  Tell me where you're going to live. 
Don't let me go entirely, I beg of you, don't leave me alone."
 
He sent the letter to the address she had
given him--to her father's house.  Week melted into week: his
life mounted day by day in a terrible tension to the delivery of the
mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no
word came, July ended.  The summer waned.  She did not
write.