Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (95 page)

Leaning against the iron
railing of the porch, above the sidewalk, a man stood smoking. 
Troubled and a little afraid, Eugene came over.  Slowly, he
mounted the long wooden steps, looking carefully at the man's face. 
It was half-obscured in shadow.

"Is there anybody
there?" said Eugene.

No one answered.

But, as Eugene reached
the top, he saw that the man was Ben.

Ben stared at him a
moment without speaking.  Although Eugene could not see his face
very well under the obscuring shadow of his gray felt hat, he knew
that he was scowling.

"Ben?" said
Eugene doubtfully, faltering a little on the top step. "Is it
you, Ben?"

"Yes," said
Ben.  In a moment, he added in a surly voice:  "Who
did you think it was, you little idiot?"

"I wasn't sure,"
said Eugene somewhat timidly.  "I couldn't see your face."

They were silent a
moment.  Then Eugene, clearing his throat in his embarrassment,
said:  "I thought you were dead, Ben."

"Ah-h!" said
Ben contemptuously, jerking his head sharply upward. "Listen to
this, won't you?"

He drew deeply on his
cigarette: the spiral fumes coiled out and melted in the moon-bright
silence.

"No," he said
in a moment, quietly.  "No, I am not dead."

Eugene came up on the
porch and sat down on a limestone base, up-ended.  Ben turned,
in a moment, and climbed up on the rail, bending forward comfortably
upon his knees.

Eugene fumbled in his
pockets for a cigarette, with fingers that were stiff and trembling. 
He was not frightened: he was speechless with wonder and strong
eagerness, and afraid to betray his thoughts to ridicule.  He
lighted a cigarette.  Presently he said, painfully, hesitantly,
in apology:

"Ben, are you a
ghost?"

Ben did not mock.

"No," he said. 
"I am not a ghost."

There was silence again,
while Eugene sought timorously for words.

"I hope," he
began presently, with a small cracked laugh, "I hope, then, this
doesn't mean that I'm crazy?"

"Why not?" said
Ben, with a swift flickering grin.  "Of course you're
crazy."

"Then," said
Eugene slowly, "I'm imagining all this?"

"In heaven's name!"
Ben cried irritably.  "How should I know? Imagining all
what?"

"What I mean,"
said Eugene, "is, are we here talking together, or not?"

"Don't ask me,"
said Ben.  "How should I know?"

With a strong rustle of
marble and a cold sigh of weariness, the angel nearest Eugene moved
her stone foot and lifted her arm to a higher balance.  The
slender lily stipe shook stiffly in her elegant cold fingers.

"Did you see that?"
Eugene cried excitedly.

"Did I see what?"
said Ben, annoyed.

"Th-th-that angel
there!" Eugene chattered, pointing with a trembling finger. 
"Did you see it move?  It lifted its arm."

"What of it?"
Ben asked irritably.  "It has a right to, hasn't it? You
know," he added with biting sarcasm, "there's no law
against an angel lifting its arm if it wants to."

"No, I suppose not,"
Eugene admitted slowly, after a moment. "Only, I've always
heard--"

"Ah!  Do you
believe all you hear, fool?" Ben cried fiercely. "Because,"
he added more calmly, in a moment, drawing on his cigarette, "you're
in a bad way if you do."

There was again silence
while they smoked.  Then Ben said:

"When are you
leaving, 'Gene?"

"To-morrow,"
Eugene answered.

"Do you know why you
are going, or are you just taking a ride on the train?"

"I know!  Of
course--I know why I'm going!" Eugene said angrily, confused. 
He stopped abruptly, bewildered, chastened.  Ben continued to
scowl at him.  Then, quietly, with humility, Eugene said:

"No, Ben.  I
don't know why I'm going.  Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I just
want a ride on the train."

"When are you coming
back, 'Gene?" said Ben.

"Why--at the end of
the year, I think," Eugene answered.

"No," said Ben,
"you're not."

"What do you mean,
Ben?" Eugene said, troubled.

"You're not coming
back, 'Gene," said Ben softly.  "Do you know that?"

There was a pause.

"Yes," said
Eugene, "I know it."

"Why aren't you
coming back?" said Ben.

Eugene caught fiercely at
the neckband of his shirt with a clawed hand.

"I want to go! 
Do you hear!" he cried.

"Yes," said
Ben.  "So did I.  Why do you want to go?"

"There's nothing
here for me," Eugene muttered.

"How long have you
felt like this?" said Ben.

"Always," said
Eugene.  "As long as I can remember.  But I didn't
know about it until you--"  He stopped.

"Until I what?"
said Ben.

There was a pause.

"You are dead, Ben,"
Eugene muttered.  "You must be dead.  I saw you die,
Ben."  His voice rose sharply.  "I tell you, I
saw you die.  Don't you remember?  The front room upstairs
that the dentist's wife has now?  Don't you remember, Ben? 
Coker, Helen, Bessie Gant who nursed you, Mrs. Pert?  The oxygen
tank?  I tried to hold your hands together when they gave it to
you."  His voice rose to a scream.  "Don't you
remember?  I tell you, you are dead, Ben."

"Fool," said
Ben fiercely.  "I am not dead."

There was a silence.

"Then," said
Eugene very slowly, "which of us is the ghost, I wonder?"

Ben did not answer.

"Is this the Square,
Ben?  Is it you I'm talking to?  Am I really here or not? 
And is this moonlight in the Square?  Has all this happened?"

"How should I know?"
said Ben again.

Within Gant's shop there
was the ponderous tread of marble feet. Eugene leaped up and peered
through the broad sheet of Jannadeau's dirty window.  Upon his
desk the strewn vitals of a watch winked with a thousand tiny points
of bluish light.  And beyond the jeweller's fenced space, where
moonlight streamed into the ware-room through the tall side-window,
the angels were walking to and fro like huge wound dolls of stone. 
The long cold pleats of their raiment rang with brittle clangor;
their full decent breasts wagged in stony rhythms, and through the
moonlight, with clashing wings the marble cherubim flew round and
round.  With cold ewe-bleatings the carved lambs grazed stiffly
across the moon-drenched aisle.

"Do you see it?"
cried Eugene.  "Do you see it, Ben?"

"Yes," said
Ben.  "What about it?  They have a right to, haven't
they?"

"Not here!  Not
here!" said Eugene passionately.  "It's not right,
here!  My God, this is the Square!  There's the fountain! 
There's the City Hall!  There's the Greek's lunch-room."

The bank-chimes struck
the half hour.

"And there's the
bank," he cried.

"That makes no
difference," said Ben.

"Yes," said
Eugene, "it does!"
 
I am
thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night--

"But not here! 
Not here, Ben!" said Eugene.

"Where?" said
Ben wearily.

"In Babylon! 
In Thebes!  In all the other places.  But not here!"
Eugene answered with growing passion.  "There is a place
where all things happen!  But not here, Ben!"

My gods, with bird-cries
in the sun, hang in the sky.

"Not here, Ben! 
It is not right!" Eugene said again.

The manifold gods of
Babylon.  Then, for a moment, Eugene stared at the dark figure
on the rail, muttering in protest and disbelief: "Ghost! 
Ghost!"

"Fool," said
Ben again, "I tell you I am not a ghost."

"Then, what are
you?" said Eugene with strong excitement.  "You are
dead, Ben."

In a moment, more
quietly, he added:  "Or do men die?"

"How should I know,"
said Ben.

"They say papa is
dying.  Did you know that, Ben?" Eugene asked.

"Yes," said
Ben.

"They have bought
his shop.  They are going to tear it down and put up a
skyscraper here."

"Yes," said
Ben, "I know it."

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

"Everything is
going.  Everything changes and passes away. To-morrow I shall be
gone and this--" he stopped.

"This--what?"
said Ben.

"This will be gone
or--O God!  Did all this happen?" cried Eugene.

"How should I know,
fool?" cried Ben angrily.

"What happens, Ben? 
What really happens?" said Eugene.  "Can you remember
some of the same things that I do?  I have forgotten the old
faces.  Where are they, Ben?  What were their names? 
I forget the names of people I knew for years.  I get their
faces mixed.  I get their heads stuck on other people's bodies. 
I think one man has said what another said.  And I
forget--forget.  There is something I have lost and have
forgotten.  I can't remember, Ben."

"What do you want to
remember?" said Ben.

A stone, a leaf, an
unfound door.  And the forgotten faces.

"I have forgotten
names.  I have forgotten faces.  And I remember little
things," said Eugene.  "I remember the fly I swallowed
on the peach, and the little boys on tricycles at Saint Louis, and
the mole on Grover's neck, and the Lackawanna freight-car, number
16356, on a siding near Gulfport.  Once, in Norfolk, an
Australian soldier on his way to France asked me the way to a ship; I
remember that man's face."

He stared for an answer
into the shadow of Ben's face, and then he turned his moon-bright
eyes upon the Square.

And for a moment all the
silver space was printed with the thousand forms of himself and Ben. 
There, by the corner in from Academy Street, Eugene watched his own
approach; there, by the City Hall, he strode with lifted knees;
there, by the curb upon the step, he stood, peopling the night with
the great lost legion of himself--the thousand forms that came, that
passed, that wove and shifted in unending change, and that remained
unchanging Him.

And through the Square,
unwoven from lost time, the fierce bright horde of Ben spun in and
out its deathless loom.  Ben, in a thousand moments, walked the
Square: Ben of the lost years, the forgotten days, the unremembered
hours; prowled by the moonlit faé vanished, returned, left and
rejoined himself, was one and many--deathless Ben in search of the
lost dead lusts, the finished enterprise, the unfound
door--unchanging Ben multiplying himself in form, by all the brick
faé entering and coming out.

And as Eugene watched the
army of himself and Ben, which were not ghosts, and which were lost,
he saw himself--his son, his boy, his lost and virgin flesh--come
over past the fountain, leaning against the loaded canvas bag, and
walking down with rapid crippled stride past Gant's toward Niggertown
in young pre-natal dawn.  And as he passed the porch where he
sat watching, he saw the lost child-face below the lumpy ragged cap,
drugged in the magic of unheard music, listening for the far-forested
horn-note, the speechless almost captured pass-word.  The fast
boy-hands folded the fresh sheets, but the fabulous lost face went
by, steeped in its incantations.

Eugene leaped to the
railing.

"You!  You! 
My son!  My child!  Come back!  Come back!"

His voice strangled in
his throat: the boy had gone, leaving the memory of his bewitched and
listening face turned to the hidden world.  O lost!

And now the Square was
thronging with their lost bright shapes, and all the minutes of lost
time collected and stood still.  Then, shot from them with
projectile speed, the Square shrank down the rails of destiny, and
was vanished with all things done, with all forgotten shapes of
himself and Ben.
 
 

And in his vision he saw
the fabulous lost cities, buried in the drifted silt of the
earth--Thebes, the seven-gated, and all the temples of the Daulian
and Phocian lands, and all Oenotria to the Tyrrhene gulf.  Sunk
in the burial-urn of earth he saw the vanished cultures: the strange
sourceless glory of the Incas, the fragments of lost epics upon a
broken shard of Gnossic pottery, the buried tombs of the Memphian
kings, and imperial dust, wound all about with gold and rotting
linen, dead with their thousand bestial gods, their mute unwakened
ushabtii, in their finished eternities.

He saw the billion living
of the earth, the thousand billion dead: seas were withered, deserts
flooded, mountains drowned; and gods and demons came out of the
South, and ruled above the little rocket-flare of centuries, and
sank--came to their Northern Lights of death, the muttering
death-flared dusk of the completed gods.