Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (89 page)

O but I can't go now,
said Eugene to it.  (Why not? it whispered.) Because her face is
so white, and her forehead is so broad and high, with the black hair
drawn back from it, and when she sat there at the bed she looked like
a little child.  I can't go now and leave her here alone. 
(She is alone, it said, and so are you.) And when she purses up her
mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little
child.  (You are alone now, it said.  You must escape, or
you will die.)  It is all like death: she fed me at her breast,
I slept in the same bed with her, she took me on her trips.  All
of that is over now, and each time it was like a death.  (And
like a life, it said to him.  Each time that you die, you will
be born again.  And you will die a hundred times before you
become a man.)  I can't!  I can't!  Not now--later,
more slowly.  (No.  Now, it said.)  I am afraid. 
I have nowhere to go.  (You must find the place, it said.) 
I am lost. (You must hunt for yourself, it said.)  I am alone. 
Where are you? (You must find me, it said.)

Then, as the bright thing
twisted about in him, Eugene heard the whine of the bleak wind about
the house that he must leave, and the voice of Eliza calling up from
the past the beautiful lost things that never happened.

"--and I said, 'Why,
what on earth, boy, you want to dress up warm around your neck or
you'll catch your death of cold.'"

Eugene caught at his
throat and plunged for the door.

"Here, boy! 
Where are you going?" said Eliza, looking up quickly.

"I've got to go,"
he said in a choking voice.  "I've got to get away from
here."

Then he saw the fear in
her eyes, and the grave troubled child's stare.  He rushed to
where she sat and grasped her hand.  She held him tightly and
laid her face against his arm.

"Don't go yet,"
she said.  "You've all your life ahead of you. Stay with me
just a day or two."

"Yes, mama," he
said, falling to his knees.  "Yes, mama."  He
hugged her to him frantically.  "Yes, mama.  God bless
you, mama. It's all right, mama.  It's all right."

Eliza wept bitterly.

"I'm an old woman,"
she said, "and one by one I've lost you all. He's dead now, and
I never got to know him.  O son, don't leave me yet. 
You're the only one that's left: you were my baby.  Don't go!
Don't go."  She laid her white face against his sleeve.

It is not hard to go (he
thought).  But when can we forget?
 
 

It was October and the
leaves were quaking.  Dusk was beginning. The sun had gone, the
western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still
burned with ragged bands of orange.  It was October.

Eugene walked swiftly
along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road.  There was a
smell of fog and supper in the air: a warm moist blur at
window-panes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery.  There were
mist-far voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow
blur of lights.

He turned into an unpaved
road by the big wooden sanitarium.  He heard the rich kitchen
laughter of the negroes, the larded sizzle of food, the dry veranda
coughing of the lungers.

He walked briskly along
the lumpy road, with a dry scuffling of leaves.  The air was a
chill dusky pearl: above him a few pale stars were out.  The
town and the house were behind him.  There was a singing in the
great hill-pines.

Two women came down the
road and passed him.  He saw that they were country women. 
They were dressed rustily in black, and one of them was weeping. 
He thought of the men who had been laid in the earth that day, and of
all the women who wept.  Will they come again? He wondered.

When he came to the gate
of the cemetery he found it open.  He went in quickly and walked
swiftly up the winding road that curved around the crest of the
hill.  The grasses were dry and sere; a wilted wreath of laurel
lay upon a grave.  As he approached the family plot, his pulse
quickened a little.  Some one was moving slowly, deliberately,
in among the grave-stones.  But as he came up he saw that it was
Mrs. Pert.

"Good-evening, Mrs.
Pert," said Eugene.

"Who is it?"
she asked, peering murkily.  She came to him with her grave
unsteady step.

"It's 'Gene,"
he said.

"Oh, is it Old
'Gene?" she said.  "How are you, 'Gene?"

"Pretty well,"
he said.  He stood awkwardly, chilled, not knowing how to
continue.  It was getting dark.  There were long lonely
preludes to winter in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in
the long grasses.  Below them, in the gulch, night had come.
There was a negro settlement there--Stumptown, it was called. 
The rich voices of Africa wailed up to them their jungle dirge.
 
But in the distance, away on their level
and above, on other hills, they saw the town.  Slowly, in
twinkling nests, the lights of the town went up, and there were
frost-far voices, and music, and the laughter of a girl.

"This is a nice
place," said Eugene.  "You get a nice view of the town
from here."

"Yes," said
Mrs. Pert.  "And Old Ben's got the nicest place of all. You
get a better view right here than anywhere else.  I've been here
before in the daytime."  In a moment she went on. 
"Old Ben will turn into lovely flowers.  Roses, I think."

"No," said
Eugene, "dandelions--and big flowers with a lot of thorns on
them."

She stood looking about
fuzzily for a moment, with the blurred gentle smile on her lips.

"It is getting dark,
Mrs. Pert," said Eugene hesitantly.  "Are you out here
alone?"

"Alone?  I've
got Old 'Gene and Old Ben here, haven't I?" she said.

"Maybe we'd better
go back, Mrs. Pert?" he said.  "It's going to turn
cold to-night.  I'll go with you."

"Fatty can go by
herself," she said with dignity.  "Don't worry,
'Gene.  I'll leave you alone."

"That's all right,"
said Eugene, confused.  "We both came for the same reason,
I suppose."

"Yes," said
Mrs. Pert.  "Who'll be coming here this time next year, I
wonder?  Will Old 'Gene come back then?"

"No," said
Eugene.  "No, Mrs. Pert.  I shall never come here
again."

"Nor I, 'Gene,"
she said.  "When do you go back to school?"

"To-morrow," he
said.

"Then Fatty will
have to say good-bye," she said reproachfully. "I'm going
away too."

"Where are you
going?" he asked, surprised.

"I'm going to live
with my daughter in Tennessee.  You didn't know Fatty was a
grandmother, did you?" she said, with her soft blurred smile. 
"I've a little grandson two years old."

"I'm sorry to see
you go," Eugene said.

Mrs. Pert was silent a
moment, rocking vaguely upon her feet.

"What did they say
was wrong with Ben?" she asked.

"He had pneumonia,
Mrs. Pert," said Eugene.

"Oh, pneumonia! 
That's it!"  She nodded her head wisely as if satisfied. 
"My husband's a drug salesman, you know, but I never can
remember all the things that people have.  Pneumonia."

She was silent again,
reflecting.
 
"And when they
shut you up in a box and put you in the ground, the way they did Old
Ben, what do they call that?" she asked with a soft inquiring
smile.

He did not laugh.

"They call that
death, Mrs. Pert."
 
"Death! 
Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Pert brightly, nodding her head in
agreement.  "That's one kind, 'Gene.  There are some
other lands, too.  Did you know that?"  She smiled at
him.

"Yes," said
Eugene.  "I know that, Mrs. Pert."

She stretched out her
hands suddenly to him, and clasped his cold fingers.  She did
not smile any more.

"Good-bye, my dear,"
she said.  "We both knew Ben, didn't we?  God bless
you."

Then she turned and
walked away down the road, at her portly uncertain gait, and was lost
in the gathering dark.

The great stars rode
proudly up into heaven.  And just over him, just over the town,
it seemed, there was one so rich and low he could have touched it. 
Ben's grave had been that day freshly sodded: there was a sharp cold
smell of earth there.  Eugene thought of Spring, and the
poignant and wordless odor of the elvish dandelions that would be
there.  In the frosty dark, far-faint, there was the departing
wail of a whistle.

And suddenly, as he
watched the lights wink cheerfully up in the town, their warm message
of the hived life of men brought to him a numb hunger for all the
words and the faces.  He heard the far voices and laughter. 
And on the distant road a powerful car, bending around the curve,
cast over him for a second, over that lonely hill of the dead, its
great shaft of light and life.  In his numbed mind, which for
days now had fumbled curiously with little things, with little things
alone, as a child fumbles with blocks or with little things, a light
was growing.

His mind gathered itself
out of the wreckage of little things: out of all that the world had
shown or taught him he could remember now only the great star above
the town, and the light that had swung over the hill, and the fresh
sod upon Ben's grave, and the wind, and far sounds and music, and
Mrs. Pert.

Wind pressed the boughs,
the withered leaves were shaking.  It was October, but the
leaves were shaking.  A star was shaking.  A light was
waking.  Wind was quaking.  The star was far.  The
night, the light.  The light was bright.  A chant, a song,
the slow dance of the little things within him.  The star over
the town, the light over the hill, the sod over Ben, night over all. 
His mind fumbled with little things.  Over us all is something. 
Star, night, earth, light . . . light . . . O lost! . . . a stone . .
. a leaf . . . a door . . . O ghost! . . . a light . . . a song . . .
a light . . . a light swings over the hill . . . over us all . . . a
star shines over the town . . . over us all . . . a light.

We shall not come again. 
We never shall come back again.  But over us all, over us all,
over us all is--something.

Wind pressed the boughs;
the withered leaves were shaking.  It was October, but some
leaves were shaking.

A light swings over the
hill.  (We shall not come again.)  And over the town a
star.  (Over us all, over us all that shall not come again.) 
And over the day the dark.  But over the darkness--what?

We shall not come again. 
We never shall come back again.

Over the dawn a lark. 
(That shall not come again.)  And wind and music far.  O
lost!  (It shall not come again.)  And over your mouth the
earth.  O ghost!  But, over the darkness--what?

Wind pressed the boughs;
the withered leaves were quaking.

We shall not come again. 
We never shall come back again.  It was October, but we never
shall come back again.

When will they come
again?  When will they come again?

The laurel, the lizard,
and the stone will come no more.  The women weeping at the gate
have gone and will not come again.  And pain and pride and death
will pass, and will not come again.  And light and dawn will
pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come
again.  And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

What things will come
again?  O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will
come again.  And the strange and buried men will come again, in
flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, and death
and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust will die. 
And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf,
in wind and music far, he will come back again.

O lost, and by the wind
grieved, ghost, come back again!

It had grown dark. 
The frosty night blazed with great brilliant stars.  The lights
in the town shone with sharp radiance. Presently, when he had lain
upon the cold earth for some time, Eugene got up and went away toward
the town.

Wind pressed the boughs;
the withered leaves were shaking.
 
 

38
 

Three weeks after
Eugene's return to the university the war ended. The students cursed
and took off their uniforms.  But they rang the great bronze
bell, and built a bonfire on the campus, leaping around it like
dervishes.

Life fell back into
civilian patterns.  The gray back of winter was broken: the
Spring came through.

Eugene was a great man on
the campus of the little university.  He plunged exultantly into
the life of the place.  He cried out in his throat with his joy:
all over the country, life was returning, reviving, awaking. 
The young men were coming back to the campus. The leaves were out in
a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich black
earth, and peach-bloom fell upon the shrill young isles of grass. 
Everywhere life was returning, awaking, reviving.  With
victorious joy, Eugene thought of the flowers above Ben's grave.

He was wild with ecstasy
because the Spring had beaten death.  The grief of Ben sank to a
forgotten depth in him.  He was charged with the juice of life
and motion.  He did not walk: he bounded along. He joined
everything he had not joined.  He made funny speeches in chapel,
at smokers, at meetings of all sorts.  He edited the paper, he
wrote poems and stories--he flung outward without pause or thought.