Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (81 page)

When the big freighter
slid away from the pier, he stood in the bow with spread legs,
darting his eyes about with fierce eagle glances. The iron decks
blistered his feet through the thin soles of his shoes.  He did
not mind.  He was the captain.

She anchored seaward down
the Roads, and the great barges were nosed in by the tugs.  All
through the day, under a broiling sun, they loaded her from the
rocking barges: her huge yellow booms swung up and down; by nightfall
she rode deeply in the water, packed to her throat with shells and
powder, and bearing on the hot plates of her deck 1200 grisly tons of
field artillery.

Eugene stood with fierce
appraising eyes, walking about the guns with a sense of authority,
jotting down numbers, items, pieces. From time to time he thrust a
handful of moist scrap-tobacco into his mouth, and chewed with an air
of relish.  He spat hot sizzling gobs upon the iron deck. 
God! thought he.  This is man's work. Heave-ho, ye black
devils!  There's a war on!  He spat.

The tug came at nightfall
and took him off.  He sat apart from the stevedores, trying to
fancy the boat had come for him alone.  The lights went
twinkling up the far Virginia shores.  He spat into the swirling
waters.
 
When the trains slid in
and out, the stevedores raised the wooden bridges that spanned the
tracks.  Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and halt, the gangs
tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of their leader
their song of love and labor:

"Jelly Roll! 
(Heh!)  Je-e-elly Roll."

They were great black
men, each with his kept woman.  They earned fifty or sixty
dollars a week.
 
 

Once or twice again, in
the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk. He saw the sailor, but he
no longer tried to see Laura.  She seemed far and lost.

He had not written home
all summer.  He found a letter from Gant, written in his
father's Gothic sprawl--a sick and feeble letter, written sorrowfully
and far away.  O lost!  Eliza, in the rush and business of
the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money. 
Get plenty of good food.  Keep well.  Be a goodboy.

The boy was a lean column
of brown skin and bone.  He had lost over thirty pounds during
the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed little more than
one hundred and thirty pounds.

The sailor was shocked at
his emaciation, and bullied him with blustering reproof:

"Why didn't you
t-t-tell me where you were, idiot?  I'd have sent you money. 
For G-g-god's sake!  Come on and eat!"  They ate.

The summer waned. 
When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day
or two in Norfolk, started homeward.  But, at Richmond, where
there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans
suddenly and went to a good hotel.

He was touched with pride
and victory.  In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily
by his own toil.  He had lived alone, he had known pain and
hunger, he had survived.  The old hunger for voyages fed at his
heart.  He thrilled to the glory of the secret life.  The
fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of
all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called
up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness.  To go alone, as he
had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass
again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend,
across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing
than that.

He thought of his own
family with fear, almost with hatred.  My God!  Am I never
to be free? he thought.  What have I done to deserve this
slavery?  Suppose--suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at
the South Pole.  I should always be afraid of his dying while I
was away.  (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how
they would rub it in to me if I were not there!  Enjoying
yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying.
Unnatural son!  Yes, but curse them!  Why should I be
there?  Can they not die alone?  Alone!  O God, is
there no freedom on this earth?

With quick horror, he saw
that such freedom lay a weary world away, and could be bought by such
enduring courage as few men have.

He stayed in Richmond
several days, living sumptuously in the splendid hotel, eating from
silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly through the wide
streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come once as a
Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university's team had played
Virginia there.  He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress
in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained
booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when
the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her
distaste because it had onions in it.

Before he went home he
wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at Norfolk, a pitiable and
boasting letter which rose at its end to an insane crow:  "I
was there all summer and I never looked you up. You were not decent
enough to answer my letters; I saw no reason why I should bother with
you any more.  Besides, the world is full of women; I got my
share and more this summer."
 
He
mailed the letter, with a sense of malevolent triumph.  But the
moment the iron lid of the box clanged over it, his face was
contorted by shame and remorse: he lay awake, writhing as he recalled
the schoolboy folly of it.  She had beaten him again.
 
 

34
 

Eugene returned to
Altamont two weeks before the term began at Pulpit Hill.  The
town and the nation seethed in the yeasty ferment of war.  The
country was turning into one huge camp.  The colleges and
universities were being converted into training-camps for officers. 
Every one was "doing his bit."

It had been a poor season
for tourists.  Eugene found Dixieland almost deserted, save for
a glum handful of regular or semi-regular guests.  Mrs. Pert was
there, sweet, gentle, a trifle more fuzzy than usual.  Miss
Newton, a wrenny and neurotic old maid, with asthma, who had
gradually become Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of
the house, was there.  Miss Malone, the gaunt drug-eater with
the loose gray lips, was there.  Fowler, a civil engineer with
blond hair and a red face, who came and departed quietly, leaving a
sodden stench of corn-whiskey in his wake, was there.  Gant, who
had now moved definitely from the house on Woodson Street, which he
had rented, to a big back room at Eliza's, was there--a little more
waxen, a little more petulant, a little feebler than he had been
before.  And Ben was there.

He had been home for a
week or two when Eugene arrived.  He had been rejected again by
both army and navy examining boards, he had been rejected as unfit in
the draft; he had left his work suddenly in the tobacco town and come
quietly and sullenly home.  He was thinner and more like old
ivory than ever.  He prowled softly about the house, smoking
innumerable cigarettes, cursing in brief snarling fury, touched with
despair and futility.  His old surly scowl was gone, his old
angry mutter; his soft contemptuous laugh, touched with so much
hidden tenderness, had given way to a contained but savage madness.
 
During the brief two weeks that Eugene
remained at home before departing again for Pulpit Hill, he shared
with Ben a little room and sleeping-porch upstairs.  And the
quiet one talked?talked himself from a low fierce mutter into a
howling anathema of bitterness and hate that carried his voice, high
and passionate, across all the sleeping world of night and rustling
autumn.

"What have you been
doing to yourself, you little fool?" he began, looking at the
boy's starved ribs.  "You look like a scarecrow."

"I'm all right,"
said Eugene.  "I wasn't eating for a while.  But I
didn't write them," he added proudly.  "They thought I
couldn't hold out by myself.  But I did.  I didn't ask for
help.  And I came home with my own money.  See?" 
He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his soiled roll of
banknotes, boastfully displaying it.

"Who wants to see
your lousy little money?" Ben yelled furiously. "Fool. 
You come back, looking like a dead man, as if you'd done something to
be proud of.  What've you done?  What've you done except
make a monkey of yourself?"

"I've paid my own
way," Eugene cried resentfully, stung and wounded.  "That's
what I've done."

"Ah-h," said
Ben, with an ugly sneer, "you little fool!  That's what
they've been after!  Do you think you've put anything over on
them?  Do you?  Do you think they give a damn whether you
die or not, as long as you save them expense?  What are you
bragging about?  Don't brag until you've got something out of
them."

Propped on his arm, he
smoked deeply, in bitter silence, for a moment.  Then more
quietly, he continued.

"No, 'Gene. 
Get it out of them any way you can.  Make them give it to you. 
Beg it, take it, steal it--only get it somehow.  If you don't,
they'll let it rot.  Get it, and get away from them.  Go
away and don't come back.  To hell with them!" he yelled.

Eliza, who had come
softly upstairs to put out the lights, and had been standing for a
moment outside the door, rapped gently and entered.  Clothed in
a tattered old sweater and indefinable under-lappings, she stood for
a moment with folded hands, peering in on them with a white troubled
face.

"Children," she
said, pursing her lips reproachfully, and shaking her head, "it's
time every one was in bed.  You're keeping the whole house awake
with your talk."

"Ah-h," said
Ben with an ugly laugh, "to hell with them."

"I'll vow, child!"
she said fretfully.  "You'll break us up.  Have you
got that porch light on, too?"  Her eyes probed about
suspiciously.  "What on earth do you mean by burning up all
that electricity!"

"Oh, listen to this,
won't you?" said Ben, jerking his head upward with a jeering
laugh.

"I can't afford to
pay all these bills," said Eliza angrily, with a smart shake of
her head.  "And you needn't think I can.  I'm not
going to put up with it.  It's up to us all to economize."

"Oh, for God's
sake!" Ben jeered.  "Economize!  What for? 
So you can give it all away to Old Man Doak for one of his lots?"

"Now, you needn't
get on your high-horse," said Eliza.  "You're not the
one who has to pay the bills.  If you did, you'd laugh out of
the other side of your mouth.  I don't like any such talk. 
You've squandered every penny you've earned because you've never
known the value of a dollar."

"Ah-h!" he
said.  "The value of a dollar!  By God, I know the
value of a dollar better than you do.  I've had a little
something out of mine, at any rate.  What have you had out of
yours?  I'd like to know that.  What the hell's good has it
ever been to any one?  Will you tell me that?" he yelled.

"You may sneer all
you like," said Eliza sternly, "but if it hadn't been for
your papa and me accumulating a little property, you'd never have had
a roof to call your own.  And this is the thanks I get for all
my drudgery in my old age," she said, bursting into tears. 
"Ingratitude!  Ingratitude!"

"Ingratitude!"
he sneered.  "What's there to be grateful for?  You
don't think I'm grateful to you or the old man for anything, do you? 
What have you ever given me?  You let me go to hell from the
time I was twelve years old.  No one has ever given me a damned
nickel since then.  Look at your kid here.  You've let him
run around the country like a crazy man.  Did you think enough
of him this summer to send him a post-card?  Did you know where
he was? Did you give a damn, as long as there was fifty cents to be
made out of your lousy boarders?"

"Ingratitude!"
she whispered huskily, with a boding shake of the head.  "A
day of reckoning cometh."

"Oh, for God's
sake!" he said, with a contemptuous laugh.  He smoked for a
moment.  Then he went on quietly:

"No, mama. 
You've done very little to make us grateful to you. The rest of us
ran around wild and the kid grew up here among the dope-fiends and
street-walkers.  You've pinched every penny and put all you've
had into real estate which has done no one any good.  So don't
wonder if your kids aren't grateful to you."

"Any son who will
talk that way to his mother," said Eliza with rankling
bitterness, "is bound to come to a bad end.  Wait and see!"

"The hell you say!"
he sneered.  They stared at each other with hard bitter eyes. 
He turned away in a moment, scowling with savage annoyance, but
stabbed already with fierce regret.

"All right!  Go
on, for heaven's sake!  Leave us alone!  I don't want you
around!"  He lit a cigarette to show his indifference.
The lean white fingers trembled, and the flame went
out.

"Let's stop it!"
said Eugene wearily.  "Let's stop it!  None of us is
going to change!  Nothing's going to get any better.  We're
all going to be the same.  We've said all this before.  So,
for God's sake, let's stop it!  Mama, go to bed, please. 
Let's all go to bed and forget about it."  He went to her,
and with a strong sense of shame, kissed her.

"Well, good-night,
son," said Eliza slowly, with gravity.  "If I were you
I'd put the light out now and turn in.  Get a good night's
sleep, boy.  You mustn't neglect your health."