Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (78 page)

There was forever in that
town a smell of raw tobacco, biting the nostrils with its acrid
pungency: it smote the stranger coming from the train, but all the
people in the town denied it, saying:  "No; there is no
smell at all."  And within a day the stranger too could
smell it no more.

On Easter morning he
arose in the blue light and went with the other pilgrims to the
Moravian cemetery.

"You ought to see
it," Ben said.  "It's a famous custom: people come
from everywhere."  But the older brother did not go. 
Behind massed bands of horns, the trumpeting blare of trombones, the
big crowds moved into the strange burial ground where all the stones
lay flat upon the graves--symbol, it was said, of all-levelling
Death.  But as the horns blared, the old ghoul-fantasy of death
returned, the grave slabs made him think of table-cloths: he felt as
if he were taking part in some obscene feast.

Spring was coming on
again across the earth like a light sparkle of water-spray: all of
the men who had died were making their strange and lovely return in
blossom and flower.  Ben walked along the streets of the tobacco
town looking like asphodel.  It was strange to find a ghost
there in that place: his ancient soul prowled wearily by the cheap
familiar brick and all the young facades.

There was a Square on
high ground; in the centre a courthouse. Cars were parked in close
lines.  Young men loitered in the drug-store.

How real it is, Eugene
thought.  It is like something we have always known about and do
not need to see.  The town would not have seemed strange to
Thomas Aquinas,--but he to the town.

Ben prowled along,
greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning his skull against
their round skulls of practicality, across their counters--a phantom
soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.

"This is my kid
brother, Mr. Fulton."

"Hello, son! 
Dogged if you don't grow tall 'uns up there, Ben. Well, if you're
like Old Ben, young fellow, we won't kick.  We think a lot of
him here."

That's like thinking well
of Balder, in Connecticut, Eugene thought.
 
 

"I have only been
here three months," said Ben, resting in bed on his elbow and
smoking a cigarette.  "But I know all the leading business
men already.  I'm well thought of here."  He glanced
at his brother quickly and grinned, with a shy charm of rare
confession.  But his fierce eyes were desperate and lonely. 
Hill-haunted?  For--home?  He smoked.

"You see, they think
well of you, once you get away from your people.  You'll never
have a chance at home, 'Gene.  They'll ruin everything for you. 
For heaven's sake, get away when you can.--What's the matter with
you?  Why are you looking at me like that?" he said
sharply, alarmed at the set stare of the boy's face.  In a
moment he said:  "They'll spoil your life.  Can't you
forget about her?"

"No," said
Eugene.  In a moment he added:  "She's kept coming
back all Spring."

He twisted his throat
with a wild cry.

The Spring advanced with
a mounting hum of war.  The older students fell out quietly and
drifted away to enlistments.  The younger strained tensely,
waiting.  The war brought them no sorrow: it was a pageant which
might, they felt, pluck them instantly into glory. The country flowed
with milk and honey.  There were strange rumors of a land of
Eldorado to the north, amid the war industry of the Virginia coast. 
Some of the students had been there, the year before: they brought
back stories of princely wages.  One could earn twelve dollars a
day, with no experience.  One could assume the duties of a
carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw, and a square. No questions were
asked.

War is not death to young
men; war is life.  The earth had never worn raiment of such
color as it did that year.  The war seemed to unearth pockets of
ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast
unfolding and exposure of wealth and power.  And somehow--this
imperial wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended
into a lyrical music.  In Eugene's mind, wealth and love and
glory melted into a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had
come upon the world again.  All things were possible.

He went home stretched
like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into
Virginia.  There was protest, but not loud enough to impede
him.  Eliza's mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer
trade.  Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed
at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.

"Can't do without
her?  You can't fool me!  No, sir.  I know why you
want to go," she said jocularly.  "She's a married
woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know.  You've no
right to go after her."

Then abruptly, she said:

"Well, let him go if
he wants to.  It looks silly to me, but he's got to decide for
himself."

He got twenty-five
dollars from his father--enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk
and leave him a few dollars.

"Mark my words,"
said Gant.  "You'll be back in a week's time. It's a
wild-goose chase you're going on."

He went.
 
 

All through the night he
drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth
and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with
dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing
moonlight.

Early in the morning he
came to Richmond.  He had to change trains; there was a wait. 
He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine
old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light.  He
ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men
going to their work.  This casual and brief contact with their
lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the
night, thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking
sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices
in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels,
seemed magical and unreal.  The   city had no
existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had
lived before he came, how it would live after he left.  He
looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the vast
moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth. 
They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the
little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their
limbs and faces of their own little cosmos.  And the great
hunger for voyages rose up in him--to come always, as now at dawn,
into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them
unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the
earth.

The counterman yawned and
turned the crackling pages of a morning paper.  That was
strange.

Cars clanked by,
beginning to work through the town.  Merchants lowered their
awnings; he left them as their day began.

An hour later he was
riding for the sea.  Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura. 
She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her. 
He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at
the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and
bright salt.
 
The train drew under
the boat-shed at Newport News.  The terrific locomotive, as
beautiful as any ship, breathed with unlaborious fatigue at the
rail-head.  There, by lapping water, she came to rest, like a
completed destiny.

The little boat lay
waiting at the dock.  Within a few minutes he had left the hot
murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue water of
the Roads.  A great light wind swept over the water, making a
singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music
and a glory in his heart.  He drove along the  little decks
at a bounding stride, lunging past the staring people,with wild
noises in his throat.  The lean destroyers, the bright mad
camouflage of the freighters and the transports, the lazy red whirl
of a propeller, half-submerged, and the light winey sparkle of the
waves fused to a single radiance and filled him with glory. He cried
back into the throat of the enormous wind, and his eyes were wet.

Upon the decks of the
boats, clean little figures in white moved about; under the bulging
counter of a huge Frenchman young naked men were swimming.  They
come from France, he thought, and it is strange that they should be
here.

O, the wonder, the magic
and the loss!  His life was like a great wave breaking in the
lonely sea; his hungry shoulder found no barriers--he smote his
strength at nothing, and was lost and scattered like a wrack of
mist.  But he believed that this supreme ecstasy which mastered
him and made him drunken might some day fuse its enormous light into
a single articulation.  He was Phaeton with the terrible horses
of the sun: he believed that his life might pulse constantly at its
longest stroke, achieve an eternal summit.

The hot Virginias broiled
under the fierce blue oven of the sky, but in the Roads the ships
rocked in the freshening breeze of war and glory.

Eugene remained in the
furnace of Norfolk for four days, until his money was gone.  He
watched it go without fear, with a sharp quickening of his pulses,
tasting the keen pleasure of his loneliness and the unknown turnings
of his life.  He sensed the throbbing antennae of the world:
life purred like a hidden dynamo, with the vast excitement of ten
thousand glorious threats.  He might do all, dare all, become
all.  The far and the mighty was near him, around him, above
him.  There was no great bridge to span, no hard summit to win. 
From obscurity, hunger, loneliness, he might be lifted in a moment
into power, glory, love.  The transport loading at the docks
might bear him war-ward, love-ward, fame-ward Wednesday night.

He walked by lapping
water through the dark.  He heard its green wet slap against the
crusted pier-piles: he drank its strong cod scent, and watched the
loading of great boats drenched in blazing light as they weltered
slowly down into the water.  And the night was loud with the
rumble of huge cranes, the sudden loose rattle of the donkey-engines,
the cries of the overseers, and the incessant rumbling trucks of
stevedores within the pier.

His imperial country, for
the first time, was gathering the huge thrust of her might.  The
air was charged with murderous exuberance, rioting and corrupt
extravagance.

Through the hot streets
of that town seethed the toughs, the crooks, the vagabonds of a
nation--Chicago gunmen, bad niggers from Texas, Bowery bums, pale
Jews with soft palms, from the shops of the city, Swedes from the
Middle-West, Irish from New England, mountaineers from Tennessee and
North Carolina, whores, in shoals and droves, from everywhere. 
For these the war was a fat enormous goose raining its golden eggs
upon them.  There was no thought or belief in any future. 
There was only the triumphant Now.  There was no life beyond the
moment.  There was only an insane flux and re-flux of getting
and spending.

Young men from Georgia
farms came, in the evenings, from their work on piers, in camps, in
shipyards, to dress up in their peacock plumage.  And at night,
hard and brown and lean of hand and face, they stood along the
curbing in $18.00 tan leathers, $80.00 suits, and $8.00 silk shirts
striped with broad alternating bands of red and blue.  They were
carpenters, masons, gang overseers, or said they were: they were paid
ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen dollars a day.

They shifted, veered from
camp to camp, worked for a month, loafed opulently for a week,
enjoying the brief bought loves of girls they met upon the
ocean-beach or in a brothel.

Strapping black
buck-niggers, with gorilla arms and the black paws of panthers,
earned $60 a week as stevedores, and spent it on a mulatto girl in a
single evening of red riot.

And more quietly,
soberly, in this crowd, moved the older thriftier workmen: the true
carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics--the canny
Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia coast,
the careful peasantry of the Middle-West, who had come to earn, to
save, to profit from the war.

Everywhere amid this
swarming crowd gleamed the bright raiment of blood and glory: the
sailors thronged the streets in flapping blues and spotless
whites--brown, tough, and clean.  The marines strode by in
arrogant twos, stiff as rods in the loud pomp of chevrons and striped
trousers.  Commanders gray and grim, hard-handed C. P. O.'s, and
elegant young ensigns out of college, with something blonde and
fluffy at their side, went by among the red cap-buttons of French
matelots, or the swagger sea-wise port of the Englishmen.

Through this crowd, with
matted uncut hair that fell into his eyes, that shot its spirals
through the rents of his old green hat, that curled a thick scroll up
his dirty neck, Eugene plunged with hot devouring eyes--soaked in his
sweat by day, sharp and stale by night.

In this great camp of
vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home into this world from
loneliness.  The hunger for voyages, the hunger that haunts
Americans, who are a nomad race, was half-assuaged here in this
maelstrom of the war.