Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (92 page)

He felt a desperate
frustration, as if he were being shut out from the rich banquet of
life.  And against all caution, he determined to break the
pattern of custom, and look within.  Driven on by this hunger,
he would suddenly rush away from Pulpit Hill and, as dusk came on,
prowl up and down the quiet streets of towns.  Finally, lifted
beyond all restraint, he would mount swiftly to a door and ring the
bell.  Then, to whoever came, reeling against the wall and
clutching at his throat, he would say:

"Water!  In
God's name, water!  I am ill!"

Sometimes there were
women, seductive and smiling, aware of his trick, but loath to let
him go; sometimes women touched with compassion and tenderness. 
Then, having drunk, he would smile with brave apology into startled
and sympathetic faces, murmuring:

"Pardon me.  It
came on suddenly--one of my attacks.  I had no time to go for
help.  I saw your light."

Then they would ask him
where his friends were.

"Friends!" he
glanced about wildly and darkly.  Then, with a bitter laugh, he
said, "Friends!  I have none!  I am a stranger here."

Then they would ask him
what he did.

"I am a Carpenter,"
he would answer, smiling strangely.

Then they would ask him
where he came from.

"Far away. 
Very far," he would say deeply.  "You would not know
if I told you."

Then he would rise,
looking about him with grandeur and compassion.

"And now I must go!"
he would say mysteriously.  "I have a long way to go before
my journey is done.  God bless you all!  I was a stranger
and you gave me shelter.  The Son of Man was treated not so
well."

Sometimes, he would ring
bells with an air of timid inquiry, saying:

"Is this number 26? 
My name is Thomas Chatterton.  I am looking for a gentleman by
the name of Coleridge--Mr. Samuel T. Coleridge. Does he live here? .
. .  No?  I'm sorry. . . .  Yes, 26 is the number I
have, I'm sure. . . .  Thank you . . . I've made a mistake . . .
I'll look it up in the telephone directory."

But what, thought Eugene,
if one day, in the million streets of life, I should really find him?

These were the golden
years.
 
 

39
 

Gant and Eliza came to
his graduation.  He found them lodgings in the town: it was
early June--hot, green, fiercely and voluptuously Southern.  The
campus was a green oven; the old grads went about in greasy pairs;
the cool pretty girls, who never sweated, came in to see their young
men graduate, and to dance; the mamas and papas were shown about
dumbly and shyly.

The college was charming,
half-deserted.  Most of the students, except the graduating
class, had departed.  The air was charged with the fresh sensual
heat, the deep green shimmer of heavy leafage, a thousand spermy
earth and flower-scents.  The young men were touched with
sadness, with groping excitement, with glory.

On this rich stage, Gant,
who had left his charnel-house of death for three days, saw his son
Eugene.  He came, gathered to life again, out of his grave. 
He saw his son enthroned in all the florid sentiment of commencement,
and the whole of his heart was lifted out of the dust.  Upon the
lordly sward, shaded by great trees, and ringed by his solemn
classmen and their families, Eugene read the Class Poem ("O
Mother Of Our Myriad Hopes").  Then Vergil Weldon spoke,
high-husky, deep, and solemn-sad; and Living Truth welled in their
hearts.  It was a Great Utterance.  Be true!  Be
clean!  Be good!  Be men!  Absorb the Negation! 
The world has need of.  Life was never so worth.  Never in
history had there been. No other class had shown so great a promise
as.  Among other achievements, the editor of the paper had
lifted the moral and intellectual level of the State two inches. 
The university spirit! Character!  Service!  Leadership!

Eugene's face grew dark
with pride and joy there in the lovely wilderness.  He could not
speak.  There was a glory in the world: life was panting for his
embrace.

Eliza and Gant listened
attentively to all the songs and speeches. Their son was a great man
on the campus.  They saw and heard him before his class, on the
campus, and at graduation, when his prizes and honors were
announced.  And his teachers and companions spoke to them about
him, and said he would have "a brilliant career." And Eliza
and Gant were touched a little by the false golden glow of youth. 
They believed for a moment that all things were possible.

"Well, son,"
said Gant, "the rest is up to you now.  I believe you're
going to make a name for yourself."  He laid a great dry
hand clumsily upon his son's shoulder, and for a moment Eugene saw in
the dead eyes the old dark of umber and unfound desire.

"Hm!" Eliza
began, with a tremulous bantering smile, "your head will get
turned by all the things they're saying about you."  She
took his hand in her rough warm grasp.  Her eyes grew suddenly
wet.

"Well, son,"
she said gravely.  "I want you to go ahead now and try to
be Somebody.  None of the others ever had your opportunity, and
I hope you do something with it.  Your papa and I have done the
best we could.  The rest is up to you."

He took her hand in a
moment of wild devotion and kissed it.

"I'll do something,"
he said.  "I will."

They looked shyly at his
strange dark face, with all its passionate and naé ardor, and they
felt tenderness and love for his youth and all that was unknown to
it.  And a great love and pity welled up in him because of their
strange and awkward loneliness, and because he felt, through some
terrible intuition, that he was already indifferent to the titles and
honors they desired for him, and because those which he had come to
desire for himself were already beyond the scale of their value. 
And, before the vision of pity and loss and loneliness, he turned
away, clutching his lean hand into his throat.

It was over.  Gant,
who under the stimulus of his son's graduation had almost regained
the vitality of his middle years, relapsed now into whining dotage. 
The terrible heat came down and smote him. He faced with terror and
weariness the long hot trip into the hills again.

"Merciful God!"
he whined.  "Why did I ever come!  O Jesus, how will I
ever face that trip again!  I can't bear it.  I'll die
before I get there!  It's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel." 
And he wept weak snuffling sobs.

Eugene took them to
Exeter and got them comfortably disposed in a Pullman.  He was
remaining for a few days to gather his belongings--the clutter of
four years, letters, books, old manuscript, worthless rubbish of
every description, for he seemed to inherit Eliza's mania for blind
accumulation.  Extravagant with money, and unable to husband it,
he saved everything else even when his spirit grew sick at the stale
and dusty weariness of the past.

"Well, son,"
said Eliza, in the quiet moment before departure. "Have you
thought yet of what you're going to do?"

"Yes," said
Gant, wetting his thumb, "for you've got to shift for yourself
from now on.  You've had the best education money can buy. The
rest is up to you."
 
"I'll
talk to you in a few days when I see you at home," said Eugene. 
"I'll tell you about it then."

Mercifully the train
began to move: he kissed them quickly and ran down the aisle.

He had nothing to tell
them.  He was nineteen; he had completed his college course; but
he did not know what he was going to do.  His father's plan that
he should study law and "enter politics" had been forgotten
since his sophomore year, when it became apparent that the impulse of
his life was not toward law.  His family felt obscurely that he
was an eccentric--"queer," they called it--and of an
impractical or "literary" turn.
 
Without
asking sharply why, they felt the absurdity of clothing this bounding
figure, with the wild dark face, in a frock-coat and string tie: he
did not exist in business, trade, or law.  More vaguely, they
classified him as bookish and a dreamer?Eliza referred to him as "a
good scholar," which, in fact, he had never been.  He had
simply performed brilliantly in all things that touched his hunger,
and dully, carelessly, and indifferently in all things that did not. 
No one saw very clearly what he was going to do--he, surely, least of
all--but his family, following the tack of his comrades, spoke
vaguely and glibly of "a career in journalism." This meant
newspaper work.  And, however unsatisfactory this may have been,
their inevitable question was drugged for the moment by the glitter
of success that had surrounded his life at the university.

But Eugene was untroubled
by thought of a goal.  He was mad with such ecstasy as he had
never known.  He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of mane, torn
apart with hunger for the golden world.  He became at times
almost incapable of coherent speech.  While talking with people,
he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away,
his face contorted with an idiot joy.  He would hurl himself
squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the
ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires.  The world lay before
him for his picking--full of opulent cities, golden vintages,
glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and
magnificent possibilities.  Nothing was dull or tarnished. 
The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited.  He was young and
he could  never die.

He went back to Pulpit
Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted
college.  He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under
the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand
rich odors of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive
South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his
departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of
the boys he had known who would come no more.

And in the day he went to
talk with Vergil Weldon.  The old man was charming,
confidential, full of wise intimacy, gentle humor.  They sat
beneath the great trees of his yard and drank iced tea.  Eugene
was thinking of California, Peru, Asia, Alaska, Europe, Africa,
China.  But he mentioned Harvard.  For him, it was not the
name of a university--it was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud
loneliness, rich books and golden browsing; it was an enchanted name
like Cairo and Damascus.  And he felt somehow that it gave a
reason, a goal of profit, to his wild ecstasy.

"Yes," said
Vergil Weldon approvingly.  "It's the place for you, Mr.
Gant.  It doesn't matter about the others.  They're ready
now. But a mind like yours must not be pulled green.  You must
give it a chance to ripen.  There you will find yourself."

And he talked
enchantingly about the good free life of the mind, cloistered study,
the rich culture of the city, and about the food. "They give you
food there that a man can eat, Mr. Gant," he said. "Your
mind can do its work on it."  Then he spoke of his own
student days there, and of the great names of Royce and Everett, and
William James.

Eugene looked with
passionate devotion at the grand old head, calm, wise and
comforting.  In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here
was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give
the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of
our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment.  He believed,
and no experience, he knew, would ever make him disbelieve, that one
of the great lives of his time had unfolded itself quietly in the
little college town.

Oh, my old Sophist, he
thought.  What were all the old philosophies that you borrowed
and pranked up to your fancy, to you, who were greater than all? 
What was the Science of Thinking, to you, who were Thought? 
What if all your ancient game of metaphysics never touched the dark
jungle of my soul?  Do you think you have replaced my
childhood's God with your Absolute?  No, you have only replaced
his beard with a mustache, and a glint of demon hawk-eyes.  To
me, you were above good, above truth, above righteousness.  To
me, you were the sufficient negation to all your teachings. 
Whatever you did was, by its doing, right.  And now I leave you
throned in memory.  You will see my dark face burning on your
bench no more; the memory of me will grow mixed and broken; new boys
will come to win your favor and your praise.  But you? 
Forever fixed, unfading, bright, my lord.

Then, while the old man
talked, Eugene leaped suddenly to his feet, and grasped the lean hand
tightly in his own.

"Mr. Weldon!"
he said.  "Mr. Weldon!  You are a great man!  I
shall never forget you!"

Then, turning, he plunged
off blindly down the path.
 
 

He still loitered,
although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain,
he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known
so much joy.  At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking
quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered
strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms
of lost boys.  He could not face a final departure.  He
said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least
once a year thereafter.
 
Then one
hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left.  As the car that was
taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot
green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream,
far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell.  And suddenly
it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the
footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. 
Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners
thudded into oblivion.  Soon the car roared up by Vergil
Weldon's house, and as he passed, he saw the old man sitting below
his tree.