Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (94 page)

"I know what you're
trying to do," Steve screamed in an agony of suspicion. 
"You're all against me!  You've framed up on me and you're
trying to beat me out of my share."

He was weeping with
genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of a beaten child. 
Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so foul, whipped,
and frightened.  Then, with a sense of unreal horror and
disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations. 
This disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in
books, not one's own.  They were snarling like curs over one
bone--their little shares in the money of an unburied dead man who
lay, with low moanings of disease, not thirty feet away.

The family drew off in
two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke on one side and
Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other.  Eugene,
who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space with
momentary anchorings to earth.  He loafed along the avenue, and
lounged in Wood's; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted
the summer girls on boarding-house porches; he visited Roy Brock in a
high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he
went to South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist's wife at
Dixieland.  She was a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who wore
glasses and had sparse hair.  She was a Daughter of the
Confederacy and wore the badge constantly on
her
starched waists.

He thought of her only as
a very chill and respectable woman.  He played Casino--the only
game he knew--with her and the other boarders, and called her
"ma'am."  Then one night she took his hand, saying she
would show him how to make love to a girl.  She tickled the
palm, put it around her waist, lifted it to her breast, and plumped
over on his shoulder, breathing stertorously through her pinched
nostrils and saying, "God, boy!" over and over.  He
plunged around the dark cool streets until three in the morning,
wondering what he would do about it.  Then he came back to the
sleeping house, and crept on shoeless feet into her room.  Fear
and disgust were immediate.  He climbed the hills to ease his
tortured spirit and stayed away from the house for hours.  But
she would follow him down the halls or open her door suddenly on him,
clad in a red kimono.  She became very ugly and bitter, and
accused him of betraying, dishonoring, and deserting her.  She
said that where she came from--the good old State of South
Carolina--a man who treated a woman in such fashion would get a
bullet in him.  Eugene thought of new lands.  He was in an
agony of repentance and guilty abasement: he framed a long plea for
pardon and included it in his prayers at night, for he still prayed,
not from devout belief, but from the superstition of habit and
number, muttering a set formula over sixteen times, while he held his
breath.  Since childhood he had believed in the magical efficacy
of certain numbers--on Sunday he would do only the second thing that
came into his head and not the first--and this intricate ritual of
number and prayer he was a slave to, not to propitiate God, but to
fulfil a mysterious harmonic relation with the universe, or to pay
worship to the demonic force that brooded over him.  He could
not sleep of nights until he did this.

Eliza finally grew
suspicious of the woman, picked a quarrel with her, and ejected her.

No one said very much to
him about going to Harvard.  He himself had no very clear reason
for going, and only in September, a few days before the beginning of
the term, decided to go.  He talked about it at intervals during
the summer, but, like all his family, he needed the pressure of
immediacy to force a decision.  He was offered employment on
several newspapers in the State, and on the teaching staff of the
run-down military academy that topped a pleasant hill two miles from
town.
 
But in his heart he knew he
was going to leave.  And no one opposed him very much. 
Helen railed against him at times to Luke, but made only a few
indifferent and unfriendly comments to himself about it. Gant moaned
wearily, saying:  "Let him do as he likes.  I can't
pay out any more money on his education.  If he wants to go, his
mother must send him."  Eliza pursed her lips thoughtfully,
made a bantering noise, and said:

"Hm!  Harvard! 
That's mighty big talk, boy.  Where are you going to get the
money?"

"I can get it,"
he said darkly.  "People will lend it to me."

"No, son," she
said with instant grave caution.  "I don't want you to do
anything like that.  You mustn't start life by accumulating
debts."

He was silent, trying to
force the terrible sentence through his parched lips.

"Then," he said
finally, "why can't I pay my way from my share in papa's
estate?"

"Why, child!"
said Eliza angrily.  "You talk as if we were millionaires. 
I don't even know that there's going to be any share for anybody. 
Your papa was persuaded into that against his better judgment,"
she added fretfully.

Eugene began to beat
suddenly against his ribs.

"I want to go!"
he said.  "I've got to have it now!  Now!"

He was mad with a sense
of frustration.

"I don't want it
when I'm rotten!  I want it now!  To hell with the real
estate!  I want none of your dirt!  I hate it!  Let me
go!" he screamed; and in his fury he began to beat his head
against the wall.

Eliza pursed her lips for
a moment.

"Well," she
said, at length.  "I'll send you for a year.  Then
we'll see."
 
 

But, two or three days
before his departure, Luke, who was taking Gant to Baltimore the next
day, thrust a sheet of typed paper into his hand.

"What is it?"
he asked, looking at it with sullen suspicion.

"Oh, just a little
form Hugh wants you to sign, in case anything should happen. 
It's a release."

"A release from
what?" said Eugene, staring at it.

Then, as his mind picked
its way slowly through the glib jargon of the law, he saw that the
paper was an acknowledgment that he had already received the sum of
five thousand dollars in consideration of college fees and expenses. 
He lifted his scowling face to his brother.  Luke looked at him
for a moment, then burst into a crazy whah-whah, digging him in the
ribs.  Eugene grinned sullenly, and said:

"Give me your pen."

He signed the paper and
gave it back to his brother with a feeling of sad triumph.

"Whah-whah! 
Now you've done it!" said Luke, with witless guffaw.

"Yes," said
Eugene, "and you think me a fool for it.  But I'd rather be
done now than later.  That's my release, not yours."

He thought of Hugh
Barton's grave foxy face.  There was no victory for him there
and he knew it.  After all, he thought, I have my ticket and the
money for my escape in my pocket.  Now, I am done with it
cleanly.  It's a good ending, after all.

When Eliza heard of this
occurrence, she protested sharply:

"Why here!" she
said.  "They've no right to do that.  The child's
still a minor.  Your papa always said he intended to give him
his education."

Then, after a thoughtful
pause, she said doubtfully:  "Well, we'll see, then. 
I've promised to send him for a year."

In the darkness by the
house, Eugene clutched at his throat.  He wept for all the
lovely people who would not come again.

Eliza stood upon the
porch, her hands clasped loosely across her stomach.  Eugene was
leaving the house and going toward the town. It was the day before
his departure; dusk was coming on, the hills were blooming in strange
purple dusk.  Eliza watched him go.

"Spruce up there,
boy!" she called.  "Spruce up!  Throw your
shoulders back!"

In the dark he knew that
she was smiling tremulously at him, pursing her lips.  She
caught his low mutter of annoyance:

"Why, yes," she
said, nodding briskly.  "I'd show them!  I'd act as if
I thought I was Somebody.  Son," she said more gravely,
with a sudden change from her tremulous banter, "it worries me
to see you walk like that.  You'll get lung-trouble as sure as
you're born if you go all humped over.  That's one thing about
your papa; he always carried himself as straight as a rod.  Of
course, he's not as straight now as he used to be--as the fellow
says" (she smiled tremulously)--"I reckon we all have a
tendency to shrink up a little as we get older.  But in his
young days there wasn't a straighter man in town."

And then the terrible
silence came between them again.  He had turned sullenly upon
her while she talked.  Indecisively she stopped, peered down at
him with white pursed face, and in that silence, behind the trivial
arras of her talk, he heard the bitter song of all her life.

The marvellous hills were
blooming in the dusk.  Eliza pursed her lips reflectively a
moment, then continued:

"Well, when you get
way up there--as the fellow says--in Yankeedom, you want to look up
your Uncle Emerson and all your Boston kin. Your Aunt Lucy took a
great liking to you when they were down here--they always said they'd
be glad to see any of us if we ever came up--when you're a stranger
in a strange land it's mighty good sometimes to have some one you
know.  And say--when you see your Uncle Emerson, you might just
tell him not to be surprised to see me at any time now" (she
nodded pertly at him)--"I reckon I can pick right up and light
out the same as the next fellow when I get ready--I may just pack up
and come--without saying a word to any one--I'm not going to spend
all my days slaving away in the kitchen--it don't pay--if I can turn
a couple of trades here this Fall, I may start out to see the world
like I always intended to?I was talking to Cash Rankin about it the
other day--'Why, Mrs. Gant,' he said, 'if I had your head I'd be a
rich man in five years--you're the best trader in this town,' he
said.  'Don't you talk to me about any more trades,' I
said--'when I get rid of what I've got now I'm going to get out of
it, and not even listen to any one who says real-estate to me--we
can't take any of it with us, Cash,' I said--'there are no pockets in
shrouds and we only need six feet of earth to bury us in the end--so
I'm going to pull out and begin to enjoy life--or as the feller
says--before it's too late'--'Well, I don't know that I blame you,
Mrs. Gant,' he said--'I reckon you're right--we can't take any of it
with us,' he said--'and besides, even if we could, what good would it
do us where we're goin'?'--Now here" (she addressed Eugene with
sudden change, with the old looser masculine gesture of her
hand)--"here's the thing I'm going to do--you know that lot I
told you I owned on Sunset Crescent--"

And now the terrible
silence came between them once again.

The marvellous hills were
blooming in the dusk.  We shall not come again.  We never
shall come back again.

Without speech now they
faced each other, without speech they knew each other.  In a
moment Eliza turned quickly from him and with the queer unsteady
steps with which she had gone out from the room where Ben lay dying,
she moved toward the door.

He rushed back across the
walk and with a single bound took the steps that mounted to the
porch.  He caught the rough hands that she held clasped across
her body, and drew them swiftly, fiercely, to his breast.

"Good-bye," he
muttered harshly.  "Good-bye!  Good-bye, mama!" 
A wild strange cry, like that of a beast in pain, was torn from his
throat.  His eyes were blind with tears; he tried to speak, to
get into a word, a phrase, all the pain, the beauty, and the wonder
of their lives--every step of that terrible voyage which his
incredible memory and intuition took back to the dwelling of her
womb.  But no word came, no word could come; he kept crying
hoarsely again and again, "Good-bye, good-bye."

She understood, she knew
all he felt and wanted to say, her small weak eyes were wet as his
with tears, her face was twisted in the painful grimace of sorrow,
and she kept saying:

"Poor child! 
Poor child!  Poor child!"  Then she whispered huskily,
faintly:  "We must try to love one another."

The terrible and
beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can
give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily.  It
stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our
lives.  No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining,
no hating.

O mortal and perishing
love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory
will haunt the earth forever.

And now the voyage out. 
Where?
 
 

40
 

The Square lay under
blazing moonlight.  The fountain pulsed with a steady breezeless
jet: the water fell upon the pool with a punctual slap.  No one
came into the Square.

The chimes of the bank's
clock struck the quarter after three as Eugene entered from the
northern edge, by Academy Street.

He came slowly over past
the fire department and the City Hall.  On Gant's corner, the
Square dipped sharply down toward Niggertown, as if it had been bent
at the edge.

Eugene saw his father's
name, faded, on the old brick in moonlight. On the stone porch of the
shop, the angels held their marble posture.  They seemed to have
frozen, in the moonlight.