Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (80 page)

And he lay there, with
the fading glimmer of the world about him, as the war mounted to its
climax of blood and passion during that terrible month.  He lay
there, like his own ghost, thinking with pain, with grief, of all the
million towns and faces he had not known.  He was the atom for
which all life had been a plot?Caesar had died and a nameless wife of
Babylon, and somewhere here, upon this marvellous dying flesh, this
myriad brain, their mark, their spirit, rested.

And he thought of the
strange lost faces he had known, the lonely figures of his family,
damned in chaos, each chained to a destiny of ruin and loss--Gant, a
fallen Titan, staring down enormous vistas of the Past, indifferent
to the world about him; Eliza, beetle-wise, involved in blind
accretions; Helen, childless, pathless, furious--a great wave
breaking on the barren waste; and finally, Ben--the ghost, the
stranger, prowling at this moment in another town, going up and down
the thousand streets of life, and finding no doors.
 
 

But the next day, on the
pier, Eugene was weaker than ever.  He sat sprawled upon a
throne of plump oat sacks, with blurred eyes watching the loading of
the bags at the spout, marking raggedly his tally upon the sheet as
the stevedores plunged in and out.  The terrible heat steamed
through the grainy pollen of the air: he moved each limb with
forethought, picking it up and placing it as if it were a detached
object.

At the end of the day he
was asked to return for night-work.  He listened, swaying on his
feet, to the far-sounding voice of the chief checker.

The supper hour came,
upon the heated pier, with the sudden noise of silence.  There
were small completed noises up and down the enormous shed: a faint
drumming of footfalls of workers walking toward the entrance, a slap
of water at the ship's hull, a noise from the bridge.

Eugene went behind the
oat pile and climbed blindly up until he reached his little fortress
at the top.  The world ebbed from his fading sense: all sound
grew fainter, more far.  Presently, he thought, when I have
rested here, I shall get up and go down to work.  It has been a
hot day.  I am tired.  But when he tried to move he could
not.  His will struggled against the imponderable lead of his
flesh, stirring helplessly like a man in a cage.  He thought
quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy.  They will not find me
here.  I cannot move.  It is over.  If I had thought
of this long ago, I would have been afraid.  But I'm not, now. 
Here--upon this oat pile--doing my bit--for Democracy.  I'll
begin to stink.  They'll find me then.

Life glimmered away out
of his weary eyes.  He lay, half-conscious, sprawled upon the
oats.  He thought of the horse.

In this way the young
checker, who had loaned him money, found him. The checker knelt above
him, supporting Eugene's head with one hand, and putting a bottle of
raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other.  When the boy had
revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile and
walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.
 
They went across the road to a little
grocery-store.  The checker ordered a bottle of milk, a box of
crackers, and a big block of cheese.  As Eugene ate, the tears
began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty gullies on his
skin.  They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could not
restrain them.

The checker stood over
him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare.  He was a young
man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly
spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.

"Why didn't you tell
me, boy?  I'd have let you have the money," he said.

"I--don't--know,"
said Eugene, between bites of cheese. "Couldn't."

With the checker's loan
of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day.  Then,
after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed
for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due
a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday.  Eugene stayed
on.
 
 

He was like a man who had
died, and had been re-born.  All that had gone before lived in a
ghostly world.  He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura
James, as if they were ghosts.  The world itself turned ghost. 
All through that month of August, while the war marched to its
ending, he looked upon its dying carnival.  Nothing seemed any
longer hard and hot and raw and new.  Everything was old. 
Everything was dying.  A vast aerial music, forever far- faint,
like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. 
He had known birth.  He had known pain and love.  He had
known hunger.  Almost he had known death.

At night, when he was not
called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia
beaches.  But the only sound that was real, that was near and
present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting
sea.  He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap
million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the
confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless
noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. 
The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played
K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby's
Prayer at Twilight.

And that cheap music
turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic--it became a part of
the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it
rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own
magnificent sorrow--his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and
hunger.

His face was thin and
bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his
body as lean as a starved cat's; his eyes
bright
and fierce.

O sea! (he thought) I am
the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk
here at your side.  O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange
and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my
life, like yours, have touched strange shores.  You are like a
woman lying below yourself on the coral floor.  You are an
immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of
curling woman's hair floating like green moss above your belly. 
And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in
bright ships.

There by the sea of the
dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million
patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh.  The child
that heard Swain's cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of
news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with
Jim Trivett.  And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura?  Dead,
too?  Where?  How?  Why?  Why has the web been
woven? Why do we die so many deaths?  How came I here beside the
sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where?
 
 

Sometimes, as he walked
back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and
saw himself among them.  He seemed to be two people: he
constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail
of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young
people.  He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter
than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was
big enough for him.

And while he stared and
saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt
suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged
away, with cursing mouth.
 
 

O my sweet bitches! 
My fine cheap sluts!  You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you
will snigger at me!  At me!  At me!  (He beat his
hands against his ribs.)  You will mock at me, with your
drug-store pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute
little side-porch chippies!  What do you understand?  The
lust of a goat, the  stink of your kind--that does for you, my
girls.  And yet you laugh at me!  Ah, but I'll tell you why
you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. 
You hate me because I do not belong.  You see I am finer and
greater than any one you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. 
That's it!  The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my
boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of
my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the
ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my
marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a
flower--all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. 
Ah me!  (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist
with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.)  Ah,
but She will know.  The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty
eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant
small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his
shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears.  Dearest! 
Dearest!  We stand here on a star.  We are beyond them
now.  Behold!  They shrink, they fade, they
pass?victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain.

Brooding thus on the
vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty
eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its
vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their
own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame
house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars
could be bought and clothed with his own fable.  Her name was
Stella Blake.  She was never in a hurry.

With her lived a young
corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. 
Sometimes he went to see her.
 
 

Twice a week the troops
went through.  They stood densely in brown and weary thousands
on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went
through their clearance papers.  Then, each below the sweating
torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier
into the hotter prison of the ship.  The great ships, with their
motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid
in and out in unending squadrons.

Sometimes the troops were
black--labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks
from Texas.  They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter:
they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers
"boss."

"And don't you call
me 'boss' again, you bastards!" screamed a young Tennessee
lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he
nursed his charges through hell.  They grinned at him
cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he
stamped, raving, up and down the pier.  From time to time they
goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints about lost hats,
bayonets, small arms, and papers.  Somehow he found things for
them; somehow he cursed his way through, keeping them in order. They
grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss.

"And what in Jesus'
name have you done now?" he yelled, as a huge black sergeant
with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner's table,
burst suddenly into loud roars of grief.

The fiery lieutenant
rushed at the table, cursing.

The sergeant and several
enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a
clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured.

"Boss,"
blubbered the big black sergeant, "we wants to go to France. 
We don't want to git lef' in dis Gawd-dam hole."

(Nor do I blame them,
thought Eugene.)

"I'll kill you! 
So help me God, I'll kill you!" screamed the officer, hurling
his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment
later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for
examination behind the great wall of sacked oats.  Five minutes
later they emerged.  The negroes were cavorting with joy: they
pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand,
fawning upon him, adoring him.

"You see," said
the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, "that's
what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers.  You
can't
be nice to 'em.  They'd do anything for that guy."

"He would for them,"
said Eugene.

These negroes, he
thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana,
and live in Texas, are now on their way to France.

Mr. Finch, the chief
checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of
false warmth.  His gray jaws worked.

"I've got a job for
you, Gant," he said.  "Double-time pay.  I want
you to get in on some of the easy money."

"What is it?"
said Eugene.
 
"They're loading
this ship with big stuff," said Mr. Finch. "They're taking
her into the stream to get it on.  I want you to go out with
her.  They'll take you off in a tug to-night."

The dish-faced checker,
when jubilantly he told him of his appointment, said:

"They asked me to
go, but I wouldn't."

"Why not?" said
Eugene.

"I don't want the
money bad enough.  They're loading her with T. N. T. and
nitro-glycerin.  The niggers play baseball with those cases. If
they ever drop one, they'll bring you home in a bucket."

"It's all in the
day's work," said Eugene dramatically.

This was danger, war. 
He was definitely in on it, risking his hide for Democracy.  He
was thrilled.