Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (72 page)

Little electric currents
of excitement played up his spine.

"I believe I will,"
she whispered.  "Have you got a cigarette?"

He gave her his package;
she stood up to receive the flame he nursed in his cupped hands. 
She leaned her heavy body against him as, with puckered face and
closed eyes, she held her cigarette to the fire.  She grasped
his shaking hands to steady the light, holding them for a moment
after.

"What," said
"Miss Brown," with a cunning smile, "what if your
mother should see us?  You'd catch it!"

"She'll not see us,"
he said.  "Besides," he added generously, "why
shouldn't women smoke the same as men?  There's no harm in it."

"Yes," said
"Miss Brown," "I believe in being broad-minded about
these things, too."

But he grinned in the
dark, because the woman had revealed herself with a cigarette. 
It was a sign--the sign of the province, the sign unmistakable of
debauchery.

Then, when he laid his
hands upon her, she came very passively into his embrace as he sat
before her on the rail.

"Eugene! 
Eugene!" she said in mocking reproof.

"Where is your
room?" he said.

She told him.

Later, Eliza came
suddenly and silently out upon them, on one of her swift raids from
the kitchen.

"Who's there? 
Who's there?" she said, peering into the gloom suspiciously. 
"Huh?  Hah?  Where's Eugene?  Has any one seen
Eugene?"  She knew very well he was there.

"Yes, here I am,"
he said.  "What do you want?"

"Oh!  Who's
that with you?  Hah?"

"'Miss Brown' is
with me."

"Won't you come out
and sit down, Mrs. Gant?" said "Miss Brown." "You
must be tired and hot."

"Oh!" said
Eliza awkwardly, "is that you, 'Miss Brown'?  I couldn't
see who it was."  She switched on the dim porch light. 
"It's mighty dark out here.  Some one coming up those steps
might fall and break a leg.  I tell you what," she
continued conversationally, "this air feels good.  I wish I
could let everything go and just enjoy myself."

She continued in amiable
monologue for another half hour, her eyes probing about swiftly all
the time at the two dark figures before her.  Then hesitantly,
by awkward talkative stages, she went into the house again.

"Son," she said
before she went, troubled, "it's getting late. You'd better go
to bed.  That's where we all ought to be."

"Miss Brown"
assented gracefully and moved toward the door.

"I'm going now. 
I feel tired.  Good-night, all."

He sat quietly on the
rail, smoking, listening to the noises in the house.  It went to
sleep.  He went back and found Eliza preparing to retire to her
little cell.

"Son!" she
said, in a low voice, after shaking her puckered face reproachfully
for a moment, "I tell you what--I don't like it.  It
doesn't look right--your sitting out alone with that woman. 
She's old enough to be your mother."

"She's YOUR boarder,
isn't she?" he said roughly, "not mine.  I didn't
bring her here."

"There's one thing
sure," said Eliza, wounded.  "You don't catch me
associating with them.  I hold up my head as high as any one." 
She smiled at him bitterly.

"Well, good-night,
mama," he said, ashamed and hurt.  "Let's forget about
them for a while.  What does it matter?"

"Be a good boy,"
said Eliza timidly.  "I want you to be a good boy, son."

There was a sense of
guilt in her manner, a note of regret and contrition.

"Don't worry!"
he said, turning away suddenly, wrenched bitterly, as he always was,
by a sense of the child-like innocence and steadfastness that lay at
the bottom of her life.  "It's not your fault if I'm not. 
I shan't blame you.  Goodnight."

The kitchen-light went
out; he heard his mother's door click gently.  Through the dark
house a shaft of air blew coolly.  Slowly, with thudding heart,
he began to mount the stairs.
 
 

But on that dark stair,
his foot-falls numbed in the heavy carpet, he came squarely upon a
woman's body that, by its fragrance, like magnolia, he knew was that
of Mrs. Selborne.  They held each other sharply by the arms,
discovered, with caught breath.  She bent toward him: a few
strands of her blonde hair brushed his face, leaving it aflame.

"Hush-h!" she
whispered.

So they paused there,
holding each other, breast to breast, the only time that they had
ever touched.  Then, with their dark wisdom of each other
confirmed, they parted, each a sharer in the other's life, to meet
thereafter before the world with calm untelling eyes.

He groped softly back
along the dark corridor until he came to the door of "Miss
Brown's" room.  It was slightly ajar.  He went in.
 
 

She took all his medals,
all that he had won at Leonard's school--the one for debating, the
one for declaiming, the one in bronze for William Shakespeare. 
W. S.  1616-1916--Done for a Ducat!

He had no money to give
her: she did not want much--a coin or two at a time.  It was,
she said, not the money: it was the principle of the thing.  He
saw the justice of her argument.

"For," said
she, "if I wanted money, I wouldn't fool with you. Somebody
tries to get me to go out every day.  One of the richest men in
this town (old man Tyson) has been after me ever since I came. 
He's offered me ten dollars if I'll go out in his car with him. 
I don't need your money.  But you've got to give me something. 
I don't care how little it is.  I wouldn't feel decent unless
you did.  I'm not one of your little Society Chippies that you
see every day uptown.  I've too much self-respect for that."

So, in lieu of money, he
gave her his medals as pledges.

"If you don't redeem
them," said "Miss Brown," "I'll give them to my
own son when I go home."

"Have you a son?"

"Yes.  He's
eighteen years old.  He's almost as tall as you are and twice as
broad.  All the girls are mad about him."

He turned his head away
sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him
an incestuous pollution.

"That's enough,
now," said "Miss Brown" with authority.  "Go
to your room and get some sleep."

But, unlike the first one
in the tobacco town, she never called him "son."
 

    
"Poor
Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,
     
Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o--"
 

Miss Irene Mallard
changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and
reversed the well-worn record.  Then as with stately emphasis,
the opening measure of "Katinka" paced out, she waited for
him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held
up like wings to his embrace.  She was teaching him to dance. 
Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her
poised in the arms of a young man dancing.  Now, clumsily, he
moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. 
One, two, three, four!  Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his
awkward pressure, as bodiless as a fume of smoke.  Her left hand
rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a bird: her cool fingers were
threaded into his hot sawing palm.

She had thick hair of an
oaken color, evenly parted in the middle; her skin was pearl-pale,
and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full, and sensuous--her
face was like that of one of the pre-Raphaelite women.  She
carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with the
slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely
eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise
and tenderness.  She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness
and seduction, the world and heaven.  He held her with reverent
care, as one who would not come too near, who would not break a
sacred image.  Her exquisite and subtle perfume stole through
him like a strange whisper, pagan and divine.  He was afraid to
touch her--and his hot palm sweated to her fingers.

Sometimes she coughed
gently, smiling, holding a small crumpled handkerchief, edged with
blue, before her mouth.

She had come to the hills
not because of her own health, but because of her mother's, a woman
of sixty-five, rustily dressed, with the petulant hang-dog face of
age and sickness.  The old woman suffered from asthma and
heart-disease.  They had come from Florida.  Irene Mallard
was a very capable business woman; she was the chief bookkeeper of
one of the Altamont banks.  Every evening Randolph Gudger, the
bank president, telephoned her.

Irene Mallard pressed her
palm across the mouthpiece of the telephone, smiling at Eugene
ironically, and rolling her eyes entreatingly aloft.

Sometimes Randolph Gudger
drove by and asked her to go with him. The boy went sulkily away
until the rich man should leave: the banker looked bitterly after
him.

"He wants me to
marry him, 'Gene," said Irene Mallard.  "What am I
going to do?"

"He's old enough to
be your grandfather," said Eugene.  "He has no hair on
the top of his head; his teeth are false, and I don't know what-all!"
he said resentfully.

"He's a rich man,
'Gene," said Irene, smiling.  "Don't forget that."

"Go on, then! 
Go on!" he cried furiously.  "Yes--go ahead. 
Marry him.  It's the right thing for you.  Sell yourself. 
He's an old man!" he said melodramatically.  Randolph
Gudger was almost forty-five.
 
 

But they danced there
slowly in a gray light of dusk that was like pain and beauty; like
the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost merman, swam,
remembering exile.  And as they danced she, whom he dared not
touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear,
pressing with slender fingers his hot hand.  And she, whom he
would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of
his arm, token of the world's remedy--the refuge from the one lost
face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named
Laura--a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and
delight.  The great pageantry of pain and pride and death hung
through the dusk its awful vision, touching his sorrow with a lonely
joy.  He had lost; but all pilgrimage across the world was loss:
a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking away, the  thousand
phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high impassionate grief of
stars.
 
 

It was dark.  Irene
Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.

"Sit down here a
moment, 'Gene.  I want to talk to you."  Her voice was
serious, low-pitched.  He sat beside her in the swing,
obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.

"I've been watching
you these last few days," said Irene Mallard. "I know
what's been going on."

"What do you mean?"
he said thickly, with thudding pulses.

"You know what I
mean," said Irene Mallard sternly.  "Now you're too
fine a boy, 'Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman.  Any one can
see what she is.  Mother and I have both talked about it. 
A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you.  You've got to
stop it."

"How did you know
about it?" he muttered.  He was frightened and ashamed. 
She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until
he grew quieter.  But he drew no closer to her: he halted,
afraid, before her loveliness.  As with Laura James, she seemed
too high for his passion.  He was afraid of her flesh; he was
not afraid of "Miss Brown's."  But now he was tired of
the woman and didn't know how he could pay her.  She had all his
medals.
 
 

All through the waning
summer he walked with Irene Mallard.  They walked at night
through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired leaves. 
They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later "Pap"
Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came
to their little table, sitting and drinking with them.  He had
spent the years since Leonard's at a military school, trying to
straighten the wry twist of his neck.  But he remained the same
as ever--quizzical, dry, and humorous.  Eugene looked at that
good shy face, remembering the lost years, the lost faces.  And
there was sorrow in his heart for what would come no more. August
ended.

September came, full of
departing wings.  The world was full of departures.  It had
heard the drums.  The young men were going to the war.  Ben
had been rejected again in the draft.  Now he was preparing to
drift off in search of employment in other towns. Luke had given up
his employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had
enlisted in the Navy.  He had come home on a short leave before
his departure for the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island. 
The street roared as he came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride,
in flapping blues, his face all on the grin, thick curls of his
unruly hair coiling below the band of his hat.  He was the
cartoon of a gob.

"Luke!" shouted
Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from the street to
Wood's pharmacy, "by God, son, you've done your bit.  I'm
going to set you up.  What are you going to have?"