Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (75 page)

In this strange place
Eugene flourished amazingly.  He was outside the pale of popular
jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was
not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person.  He could
never be an all-round man.  Obviously, he would never be
governor.  Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he
said funny things.  He was not the man to lead a class or say a
prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise.  Well, thought they
benevolently, we need some such.  We are not all made for
weighty business.

He was happier than he
had ever been in his life, and more careless.  His physical
loneliness was more complete and more delightful.  His escape
from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending,
that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial
buoyance, drunken freedom.  He had come to the place alone,
without companions.  He had no connections.  He had, even
now, not one close friend.  And this isolation was in his
favor.  Every one knew him at sight: every one called him by
name, and spoke to him kindly.  He was not disliked. He was
happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with enthusiastic
gusto.  He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole
marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes.  He was
closer to a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more
alone.  He was filled with a divine indifference for all
appearance.  Joy ran like a great wine through his young
expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths with wild cries in his
throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to focus the blind
desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet all of his
formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.

He began to join. 
He joined everything.  He had never "belonged" to any
group before, but now all groups were beckoning him.  He had
without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the
college paper and the magazine.  The small beginning trickle of
distinctions widened into a gushet.  It began to sprinkle, then
it rained.  He was initiated into literary fraternities,
dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking
fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a
social fraternity.  He joined enthusiastically, submitted with
fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about
lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored
ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins,
badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.
 
 

But not without labor had
his titles come.  The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he
could not come from the shadow of Laura. She haunted him.  When
he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and
the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter. 
There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.

"Well!" said
Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, "let's all try
to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know!" 
She shook her head, unable to continue.  Her eyes were wet. 
"It may be the last time we're all together.  The old
trouble!  The old trouble!" she said hoarsely, turning to
him.

"What old trouble?"
he said angrily.  "Good God, why are you so mysterious?"

"My heart!" she
whispered, with a brave smile.  "I've said nothing to any
one.  But last week--I thought I was gone."  This was
delivered in a boding whisper.

"Oh, my God!"
he groaned.  "You'll be here when the rest of us are
rotten."

Helen burst into a
raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face, and prodding him
roughly with her big fingers.

"K-K-K-K-K-K-K! 
Did you ever know it to fail?  Did you?  If you come to her
with one of your kidneys gone, she's always got something worse the
matter with her.  No, sir!  I've never known it to fail!"

"You may laugh! 
You may laugh!" said Eliza with a smile of watery bitterness. 
"But I may not be here to laugh at much longer."

"Good heavens,
mama!" the girl cried irritably.  "There's nothing
wrong with you.  You're not the sick one!  Papa's the sick
one. He's the one that needs attention.  Can't you realize
that?he's dying.  He may not last the winter out.  I'm the
sick one!  You'll be here long after we're both gone."

"You never know,"
said Eliza mysteriously.  "You never know who'll be the
first one to go.  Only last week, there was Mr. Cosgrave, as
fine a looking man as--"

"They're off!"
Eugene screamed with a crazy laugh, stamping up and down the kitchen
in a frenzy.  "By God!  They're off!"

At this moment, one of
the aged harpies, of whom the house always sheltered two or three
during the grim winter, lurched from the hall back into the
door-space.  She was a large raw-boned hag, a confirmed
drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt
limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.

"Mrs. Gant,"
said she, writhing her loose gray lips horribly before she could
speak.  "Did I get a letter?  Have you seen him?"

"Seen who?  Go
on!" said Eliza fretfully.  "I don't know what you're
talking about, and I don't believe you do, either."

Smiling hideously at them
all, and pawing the air, the monster got under way again,
disappearing like an old wagon with loose wheels. Helen began to
laugh, hoarsely, as Eugene's face hung forward with mouth half-open
in an expression of sullen stupefaction.  Eliza laughed, too,
slily, rubbing her nosewing with a finger.

"I'll vow!" she
said.  "I believe she's crazy.  She takes dope of some
sort--that's certain.  It makes my flesh crawl when she comes
around."

"Then why do you
keep her in the house?" said Helen resentfully. "Good
heavens, mama!  You could get rid of her if you wanted to. Poor
old 'Gene!" she said, beginning to laugh again.  "You
always catch it, don't you?"

"The time draws near
the birth of Christ," said he, piously.

She laughed; then, with
abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large chin.
 
 

His father spent most of
the day staring vacantly into the parlor fire.  Miss Florry
Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her silence: she
rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the minute,
with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts.  Occasionally she
talked of death and disease.  Gant had aged and wasted
shockingly.  His heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks:
his face was waxen and transparent--it was like a great beak. 
He looked clean and fragile.  The cancer, Eugene thought,
flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful plant. His mind was
very clear, not doting, but sad and old.  He spoke little, with
almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost as soon as
one answered.

"How have you been,
son?" he asked.  "Are you getting along all right?"

"Yes.  I am a
reporter on the paper now; I may be managing editor next year. 
I have been elected to several organizations," he went on
eagerly, glad of the rare chance to speak to one of them about his
life.  But when he looked up again, his father's stare was fixed
sadly in the fire.  The boy stopped in confusion, pierced with a
bitter pain.

"That's good,"
said Gant, hearing him speak no more.  "Be a good boy,
son.  We're proud of you."
 
 

Ben came home two days
before Christmas: he prowled through the house like a familiar
ghost.  He had left the town early in the autumn, after his
return from Baltimore.  For three months he had wandered alone
through the South, selling to the merchants in small towns space for
advertisements upon laundry cards.  How well this curious
business succeeded he did not say: he was scrupulously neat, but
threadbare and haggard, and more fiercely secretive than ever. 
He had found employment at length upon a newspaper in a rich tobacco
town of the Piedmont.  He was going there after Christmas.

He had come to them, as
always, bearing gifts.

Luke came in from the
naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve. They heard his sonorous
tenor shouting greetings to people in the street; he entered the
house upon a blast of air.  Everyone began to grin.

"Well, here we are! 
The Admiral's back!  Papa, how's the boy! Well, for God's sake!"
he cried, embracing Gant, and slapping his back.  "I
thought I was coming to see a sick man!  You're looking like the
flowers that bloom in the Spring."

"Pretty well, my
boy.  How are you?" said Gant, with a pleased grin.

"Couldn't be better,
Colonel 'Gene, how are you, Old Scout?  Good!" he said,
without waiting for an answer.  "Well, well, if it isn't
Old Baldy," he cried, pumping Ben's hand.  "I didn't
know whether you'd be here or not.  Mama, old girl," he
said, as he embraced her, "how're they going?  Still
hitting on all six.  Fine!" he yelled, before any one could
reply to anything.

"Why, son,--what on
earth!" cried Eliza, stepping back to look at him.  "What
have you done to yourself?  You walk as if you are lame."

He laughed idiotically at
sight of her troubled face and prodded her.

"Whah--whah!  I
got torpedoed by a submarine," he said.  "Oh, it's
nothing," he added modestly.  "I gave a little skin to
help out a fellow in the electrical school."

"What!" Eliza
screamed.  "How much did you give?"

"Oh, only a little
six-inch strip," he said carelessly.  "The boy was
badly burned: a bunch of us got together and chipped in with a little
hide."

"Mercy!" said
Eliza.  "You'll be lame for life.  It's a wonder you
can walk."

"He always thinks of
others--that boy!" said Gant proudly.  "He'd give you
his heart's-blood."
 
 

The sailor had secured an
extra valise, and stocked it on the way home with a great variety of
beverages for his father.  There were several bottles of Scotch
and rye whiskies, two of gin, one of rum, and one each of port and
sherry wine.

Every one grew mildly
convivial before the evening meal.

"Let's give the poor
kid a drink," said Helen.  "It won't hurt him."

"What!  My
ba-a-by!  Why, son, you wouldn't drink, would you?" Eliza
said playfully.

"Wouldn't he!"
said Helen, prodding him.  "Ho! ho! ho!"

She poured him out a
stiff draught of Scotch whiskey.

"There!" she
said cheerfully.  "That's not going to hurt him."

"Son," said
Eliza gravely, balancing her wine-glass, "I don't want you ever
to acquire a taste for it."  She was still loyal to the
doctrine of the good Major.

"No," said
Gant.  "It'll ruin you quicker than anything in the world,
if you do."

"You're a goner,
boy, if that stuff ever gets you," said Luke. "Take a
fool's advice."

They lavished fair
warnings on him as he lifted his glass.  He choked as the fiery
stuff caught in his young throat, stopping his breath for a moment
and making him tearful.  He had drunk a few times before--minute
quantities that his sister had given him at Woodson Street. 
Once, with Jim Trivett, he had fancied himself tipsy.

When they had eaten, they
drank again.  He was allowed a small one. Then they all departed
for town to complete their belated shopping. He was left alone in the
house.

What he had drunk beat
pleasantly through his veins in warm pulses, bathing the tips of
ragged nerves, giving to him a feeling of power and tranquillity he
had never known.  Presently, he went to the pantry where the
liquor was stored.  He took a water tumbler and filled it
experimentally with equal portions of whiskey, gin, and rum. 
Then, seating himself at the kitchen table, he began to drink the
mixture slowly.

The terrible draught
smote him with the speed and power of a man's fist.  He was made
instantly drunken, and he knew instantly why men drank.  It was,
he knew, one of the great moments in his life?he lay, greedily
watching the mastery of the grape over his virgin flesh, like a girl
for the first time in the embrace of her lover. And suddenly, he knew
how completely he was his father's son?how completely, and with what
added power and exquisite refinement of sensation, was he Gantian. 
He exulted in the great length of his limbs and his body, through
which the mighty liquor could better work its wizardry.  In all
the earth there was no other like him, no other fitted to be so
sublimely and magnificently drunken.  It was greater than all
the music he had ever heard; it was as great as the highest poetry. 
Why had he never been told?  Why had no one ever written
adequately about it?  Why, when it was possible to buy a god in
a bottle, and drink him off, and become a god oneself, were men not
forever drunken?

He had a moment of great
wonder--the magnificent wonder with which we discover the simple and
unspeakable things that lie buried and known, but unconfessed, in
us.  So might a man feel if he wakened after death and found
himself in Heaven.

Then a divine paralysis
crept through his flesh.  His limbs were numb; his tongue
thickened until he could not bend it to the cunning sounds of words. 
He spoke aloud, repeating difficult phrases over and over, filled
with wild laughter and delight at his effort.  Behind his
drunken body his brain hung poised like a falcon, looking on him with
scorn, with tenderness, looking on all laughter with grief and pity. 
There lay in him something that could not be seen and could not be
touched, which was above and beyond him--an eye within an eye, a
brain above a brain, the Stranger that dwelt in him and regarded him
and was him, and that he did not know.  But, thought he, I am
alone now in this house; if I can come to know him, I will.