Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (74 page)

Two weeks later the widow
returned to gather together the boy's belongings.  Silently she
collected the clothing that no one would ever wear.  She was a
stout woman in her forties.  Eugene took all the pennants from
the wall and folded them.  She packed them in a valise and
turned to go.

"Here's another,"
said Eugene.

She burst suddenly into
tears and seized his hand.

"He was so brave,"
she said, "so brave.  Those last days--I had not meant
to--Your letters made him so happy."

She's alone now, Eugene
thought.
 
 

I cannot stay here, he
thought, where he has been.  We were here together.  Always
I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue
lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons.  Then, at night, the
other cot would be empty.  I think I shall room alone hereafter.

But he roomed the
remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two
room-mates--one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L.
K. Duncan (the "L" stood for Lawrence, but every one called
him "Elk") and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister,
Harold Gay.  Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk
Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two.  But it is
doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before
gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a "study."

Elk Duncan was the son of
an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county
affairs.  Elk Duncan was tall--an inch or two over six feet--and
incredibly thin, or rather narrow.  He was already a little
bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes:
from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin. 
His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his
body had the symmetry of a lead pencil.  He always dressed very
foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars,
fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs.  He was a
student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time,
industriously, in avoiding study.

The younger
students--particularly the Freshmen--gathered around him after meals
with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and
hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became.  His
posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival
sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.

The other room-mate,
Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child.  He wore
spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his
face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been
puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence
that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them.  Instead,
he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that
echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd
and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of
the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium
which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer,
and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved
clergyman.

"Harold! 
Harold!" said Elk Duncan reprovingly.  "Damn, son!
You're getting hard!  If you go on like this, you'll begin to
chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies.
Think of the rest of us, please.  'Gene here's only a young boy,
as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I've always moved in the
best circles, and associated with only the highest class of
bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers.  What would your father
say if he could hear you?  Don't you know he'd be shocked? 
He'd cut off your cigarette money, son."

"I don't give a damn
what he'd do, Elk, nor you either!" said Harold toughly,
grinning.  "So, what the hell!" he roared as loudly as
he could.  There was an answering howl from the windows of the
whole dormitory--cries of "Go to hell!" "Cut it out!"
and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
 
 

The scattered family drew
together again at Christmas.  A sense of impending dissolution,
of loss and death, brought them back.  The surgeon at Baltimore
had given no hope.  He had, rather, confirmed Gant's
death-warrant.

"Then how long can
he live?" asked Helen.

He shrugged his
shoulders.  "My dear girl!" he said.  "I
have no idea.  The man's a miracle.  Do you know that he's
Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look.  How
long can he last? I'll swear to nothing--I no longer have any idea. 
When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I
never expected to see him again.  I doubted if he would last the
winter through.  But he's back again.  He may be back many
times."

"Can you help him at
all?  Do you think the radium does any good?"

"I can give him
relief for a time.  I can even check the growth of the disease
for a time.  Beyond that, I can do nothing.  But his
vitality is enormous.  He is a creaking gate which hangs by one
hinge--but which hangs, nevertheless."
 
 

Thus, she had brought him
home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles
sword.  Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard
feet.  The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it
had its outburst daily at Eliza's or in her own home. Hugh Barton had
purchased a house to which he had taken her.

"You'll get no
peace," he said, "as long as you're near them.  That's
what's wrong with you now."

She had frequent periods
of sickness.  She went constantly to the doctors for treatment
and advice.  Sometimes she went to the hospital for several
days.  Her illness manifested itself in various ways--sometimes
in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion,
sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by
turns, and which was governed partly by Gant's illness and a morbid
despair over her failure to bear a child.  She drank stealthily
at all times--she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never
enough for drunkenness.  She drank vile liquids--seeking only
the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a
dozen abominations called "tonics" and "extracts." 
Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of
potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient
labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood. 
This self-deception was characteristic of her.  Her life
expressed itself through a series of deceptions--of symbols: her
dislikes, affections, grievances, brandishing every cause but the
real one.

But, unless actually
bedridden, she was never absent from her father for many hours. 
The shadow of his death lay over their lives.  They shuddered
below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma,
deprived them of dignity and courage.  They were dominated by
the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly
philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the
corruption of natural law.  It was as hard for them to think of
Gant's death as of God's death: it was a great deal harder, because
he was more real to them than God, he was more immortal than God, he
was God.

This hideous twilight
into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and
choked him with fury.  He would grow enraged after reading a
letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall
until his knuckles were bloody.  They have taken his courage
away! he thought.  They have made a whining coward out of him! 
No, and if I die, no damned family about. Blowing their messy breaths
in your face!  Snuffling down their messy noses at you! 
Gathering around you till you can't breathe. Telling you how well
you're looking with hearty smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back. 
O messy, messy, messy death!  Shall we never be alone? 
Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves
alone?  Ah! but I shall!  I shall!  Alone, alone, and
far away, with falling rain.  Then, bursting suddenly into the
study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a
page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic
snake, the law.

"Are we to die like
rats?" he said.  "Are we to smother in a hole?"

"Damn!" said
Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind
it.

"Yes, that's right,
that's right!  Calm yourself.  You are Napoleon Bonaparte
and I'm your old friend, Oliver Cromwell.  Harold!" he
called.  "Help!  He killed the keeper and got out."

"'Gene!" yelled
Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk's
great names.  "What do you know about history? Who signed
Magna Charta, eh?"

"It wasn't signed,"
said Eugene.  "The King didn't know how to write, so they
mimeographed it."

"Correct!"
roared Harold Gay.  "Who was é the Unready?"

"He was the son of
Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed," said Eugene.

"On his Uncle
Jasper's side," said Elk Duncan, "he was related to Paul
the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous."

"He was
excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused
to be cowed," said Eugene.

"Instead, he called
together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope," said Elk Duncan. 
"This caused a great schism in the Church."

"But as usual, God
was on the side of the greatest number of canons," said Eugene. 
"Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its
fortune in the Gold Rush of '49."

"You boys are too
good for me!" yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly. 
"Come on!  Who's going to the Pic?"

The Pic was the only
purchasable entertainment that the village afforded steadily. 
It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a howling tribe
of students who rushed down aisles, paved with peanut-shells, through
a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting themselves studiously for
the remainder of the evening to the unhappy heads and necks of
Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of applause,
indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets that
wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen.  A
weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost
constantly at a batteredpiano.  If she was idle for five
minutes, the whole pack howled ironically, demanding:  "Music,
Myrtle!  Music!"

It was necessary to speak
to every one.  If one spoke to every one, one was "democratic";
if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes.  The
appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was
coarse and blunt.  They were suspicious of all eminence. They
had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual.  A man was
brilliant?  Was there a bright sparkle to him?  Bad, bad! 
He was not safe; he was not sound.  The place was a democratic
microcosmos--seething with political interests: national, regional,
collegiate.

The campus had its
candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the
State.  A youngster developed in college the  political
craft he was later to exert in Party affairs.  The son of a
politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off
his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the
governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman.  The
boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first
traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely
to benefit him later.  By his junior year, if he was successful,
he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he
moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely
weighed with cordiality:

"Ah, there,
gentlemen."  "Gentlemen, how are you?"  "A
nice day, gentlemen."

The vast champaign of the
world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away
from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant
reverberation of an idea.  They could get no greater glory for
themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory--the way
to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever--was through the
law, a string tie, and a hat.  Hence politics, law schools,
debating societies, and speechmaking.  The applause of listening
senates to command.

The yokels, of course,
were in the saddle--they composed nine-tenths of the student body:
the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that
their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun
virtues.  Usually, these dignities?the presidencies of student
bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.'s, and the managerships of athletic
teams--were given to some honest serf who  had established his
greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or
to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in
all directions.  Such an industrious hack was called an
"all-round man."  He was safe, sound, and reliable. 
He would never get notions.  He was the fine flower of
university training.  He was a football scrub, and a respectable
scholar in all subjects.  He was a universal Two Man.  He
always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone
with a superlative Oneness.  If he did not go into the law or
the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.