Thomas Wolfe, page 278
The whole car was as quiet as death. In another moment the stunned faces turned toward one another, and the men began to talk in furtive whispers.
Through all of this the expression on that white and sunken face had never altered, and the shadow of that ghostly smile still lingered around the mouth. But now, low and casually, he said to the young man:
“How are you, son? I’m glad to see you.” And in that simple phrase, spoken by the blind man, there was the suggestion of a devilish humor, although his expression did not change a bit.
“You—you’ve been in Baltimore, Judge Bland?”
“Yes, I still come up to Hopkins now and then. It does no good, of course. You see, son,” the tone was low and friendly now, “I’ve gone completely blind since I last saw you.”
“I didn’t know. But you don’t mean that you——”
“Oh, utterly! Utterly!” replied Judge Bland, and all at once he threw his sightless face up and laughed with sardonic glee, displaying blackened rims of teeth, as if the joke was too good to be kept. “My dear boy, I assure you that I am utterly blind. I can no longer distinguish one of our most prominent local bastards two feet off.—Now, Jarvis!” he suddenly cried out in a chiding voice in the direction of the unfortunate Riggs, who had loudly resumed his discussion of property values—“you know that’s not true! Why, man, I can tell by the look in your eyes that you’re lying!” And again he lifted his face and was shaken by devilish, quiet laughter. “Excuse the interruption, son,” he went on. “I believe the subject of our discourse was bastardy. Why, can you believe it?—” he leaned forward again, his long fingers playing gently on the polished ridges of his stick—“where bastardy is concerned, I find I can no longer trust my eyes at all. I rely exclusively on the sense of smell. And—” for the first time his face was sunken deliberately in weariness and disgust—“it is enough. A sense of smell is all you need.” Abruptly changing now, he said: “How are the folks?”
“Why—Aunt Maw’s dead. I—I’m going home to the funeral.”
“Dead, is she?”
That was all he said. None of the usual civilities, no expression of polite regret, just that and nothing more. Then, after a moment:
“So you’re going down to bury her.” It was a statement, and he said it reflectively, as though meditating upon it; then—“And do you think you can go home again?”
George was a little startled and puzzled: “Why—I don’t understand. How do you mean, Judge Bland?”
There was another flare of that secret, evil laughter. “I mean, do you think you can really go home again?” Then, sharp, cold, peremptory—“Now answer me! Do you think you can?”
“Why—why yes! Why—” the young man was desperate, almost frightened now, and, earnestly, beseechingly, he said—“why look here, Judge Bland—I haven’t done anything—honestly I haven’t!”
Again the low, demonic laughter: “You’re sure?”
Frantic now with the old terror which the man had always inspired in him as a boy: “Why—why of course I’m sure! Look here, Judge Bland—in the name of God, what have I done?” He thought desperately of a dozen wild, fantastic things, feeling a sickening and overwhelming consciousness of guilt, without knowing why. He thought: “Has he heard about my book? Does he know I wrote about the town? Is that what he means?”
The blind man cackled thinly to himself, enjoying with evil tenderness his little cat’s play with the young man: “The guilty fleeth where no man pursueth. Is that it, son?”
Frankly distracted: “Why—why—I’m not guilty!” Angrily: “Why damn it, I’m not guilty of anything!” Passionately, excitedly: “I can hold up my head with any man! I can look the whole damn world in the eye! I make no apologies to——”
He stopped short, seeing the evil ghost-shadow of a smile at the corners of the blind man’s mouth. “That disease!” he thought—“the thing that ruined his eyes—maybe—maybe—why, yes—the man is crazy!” Then he spoke, slowly, simply:
“Judge Bland.” He rose from the seat. “Good-bye, Judge Bland.”
The smile still played about the blind man’s mouth, but he answered with a new note of kindness in his voice:
“Good-bye, son.” There was a barely perceptible pause. “But don’t forget I tried to warn you.”
George walked quickly away with thudding heart and trembling limbs. What had Judge Bland meant when he asked, “Do you think you can go home again?” And what had been the meaning of that evil, silent, mocking laughter? What had he heard? What did he know? And these others—did they know, too?
He soon learned that his fear and panic in the blind man’s presence were shared by all the people in the car. Even the passengers who had never seen Judge Bland before had heard his naked, brutal words, and they were now horrified by the sight of him. As for the rest, the men from Libya Hill, this feeling was greatly enhanced, sharpened by all that they knew of him. He had pursued his life among them with insolent shamelessness. Though he still masked in all the outward aspects of respectability, he was in total disrepute, and yet he met the opinion of the town with such cold and poisonous contempt that everyone held him in a kind of terrified respect. As for Parson Flack, Jarvis Riggs, and Mayor Kennedy, they were afraid of him because his blind eyes saw straight through them. His sudden appearance in the car, where none had expected to meet him, had aroused in all of them a sense of stark, underlying terror.
As George went into the washroom suddenly, he came upon the Mayor cleaning his false teeth in the basin. The man’s plump face, which George had always known in the guise of cheerful, hearty amiability, was all caved in. Hearing a sound behind him, the Mayor turned upon the newcomer. For a moment there was nothing but nameless fright in his weak brown eyes. He mumbled frantically, incoherently, holding his false teeth in his trembling fingers. Like a man who did not know what he was doing, he brandished them in a grotesque yet terrible gesture indicative of—God knows what!—but despair and terror were both in it. Then he put the teeth into his mouth again, smiled feebly, and muttered apologetically, with some counterfeit of his usual geniality:
“Ho, ho!—well, son! You caught me that time, all right! A man can’t talk without his teeth!”
The same thing was now apparent everywhere. George saw it in the look of an eye, the movement of a hand, the give-away expression of a face in repose. The merchant, Sol Isaacs, took him aside and whispered:
“Have you heard what they’re saying about the bank?” He looked around quickly and checked himself, as if afraid of the furtive sound of his own voice. “Oh, everything’s O.K.! Sure it is! They just went a little too fast there for a while! Things are rather quiet right now—but they’ll pick up!”
Among all of them there was the same kind of talk that George had heard before. “It’s worth all of that,” they told each other eagerly. “It’ll bring twice as much in a year’s time.” They caught him by the lapel in the most friendly and hearty fashion and said he ought to settle down in Libya Hill and stay for good—“Greatest place on earth, you know!” They made their usual assured pronouncements upon finance, banking, market trends, and property values. But George sensed now that down below all this was just utter, naked, frantic terror—the terror of men who know that they are ruined and are afraid to admit it, even to themselves.
It was after midnight, and the great train was rushing south across Virginia in the moonlight. The people in the little towns lay in their beds and heard the mournful whistle, then the sudden roar as the train went through, and they turned over restlessly and dreamed of fair and distant cities.
In K 19 most of the passengers had retired to their berths. Nebraska Crane had turned in early, but George was still up, and so, too, were the banker, the Mayor, and the political boss. Crass, world-weary, unimaginative fellows that they were, they were nevertheless too excited by something of the small boy in them that had never died to go to bed at their usual hour aboard a train, and were now drawn together for companionship in the smoke-fogged washroom. Behind the green curtains the complex of male voices rose and fell in talk as they told their endless washroom stories. Quietly, furtively, with sly delight, they began to recall unsavory anecdotes remembered from the open and shameless life of Judge Rumford Bland, and at the end of each recital there would be a choking burst of strong laughter.
When the laughter and the slapping of thighs subsided, Parson Flack leaned forward again, eager to tell another. In a voice that was subdued, confidential, almost conspiratorial, he began:
“And do you remember the time that he——?”
Swiftly the curtain was drawn aside, all heads jerked up, and Judge Bland entered.
“Now, Parson—” said he in a chiding voice—“remember what?”
Before the blind, cold stare of that emaciated face the seated men were silent. Something stronger than fear was in their eyes.
“Remember what?” he said again, a trifle harshly. He stood before them erect and fragile, both hands balanced on the head of the cane which he held anchored to the floor in front of him. He turned to Jarvis Riggs: “Remember when you established what you boasted was ‘the fastest-growing bank in all the state’—and weren’t too particular what it grew on?” He turned back to Parson Flack: “Remember when one of ‘the boys,’ as you like to call them—you always look out for ‘the boys,’ don’t you, Parson?—remember when one of ‘the boys’ borrowed money from ‘the fastest-growing bank’ to buy two hundred acres on that hill across the river?”—he turned to the Mayor—“and sold the land to the town for a new cemetery? . . . Though why,” he turned his face to Parson Flack again, “the dead should have to go so far to bury their dead I do not know!”
He paused impressively, like a country lawyer getting ready to launch his peroration to a jury.
“Remember what?”—the voice rose suddenly, high and sharp. “Do I remember, Parson, how you’ve run the town through all these years? Do I remember what a good thing you’ve made of politics? You’ve never aspired to public office, have you, Parson? Oh, no—you’re much too modest. But you know how to pick the public-spirited citizens who do aspire, and whose great hearts pant with eagerness to serve their fellow men! Ah, yes. It’s a very nice little private business, isn’t it, Parson? And all ‘the boys’ are stockholders and get their cut of the profits—is that the way of it, Parson? . . . Remember what?” he cried again. “Do I remember now the broken fragments of a town that waits and fears and schemes to put off the day of its impending ruin? Why, Parson, yes—I can remember all these things. And yet I had no part in them, for, after all, I am a humble man. Oh—” with a deprecating nod—“a little nigger squeezing here and there, a little income out of Niggertown, a few illegal lendings, a comfortable practice in small usury—yet my wants were few, my tastes were very simple. I was always satisfied with, say, a modest five per cent a week. So I am not in the big money, Parson. I remember many things, but I see now I have spent my substance, wasted all my talents in riotous living—while pious Puritans have virtuously betrayed their town and given their whole-souled services to the ruin of their fellow men.”
Again there was an ominous pause, and when he went on his voice was low, almost casual in its toneless irony:
“I am afraid I have been at best a giddy fellow, Parson, and that my old age will be spent in memories of trivial things—of various merry widows who came to town, of poker chips, race horses, cards, and rattling dice, of bourbon, Scotch, and rye—all the forms of hellishness that saintly fellows, Parson, who go to prayer meeting every week, know nothing of. So I suppose I’ll warm my old age with the memories of my own sinfulness—and be buried at last, like all good men and true, among more public benefactors in the town’s expensive graveyard on the hill. . . . But I also remember other things, Parson. So can you. And maybe in my humble sphere I, too, have served a purpose—of being the wild oat of more worthy citizens.”
They sat in utter silence, their frightened, guilty eyes all riveted upon his face, and each man felt as if those cold, unseeing eyes had looked straight through him. For a moment more Judge Bland just stood there, and, slowly, without a change of muscle in the blankness of his face, the ghostly smile began to hover like a shadow at the corners of his sunken mouth.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. He turned, and with his walking stick he caught and held the curtain to one side. “I’ll be seeing you.”
All through the night George lay in his dark berth and watched the old earth of Virginia as it stroked past him in the dream-haunted silence of the moon. Field and hill and gulch and stream and wood again, the everlasting earth, the huge illimitable earth of America, kept stroking past him in the steep silence of the moon.
All through the ghostly stillness of the land, the train made on forever its tremendous noise, fused of a thousand sounds, and they called back to him forgotten memories: old songs, old faces, old memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know and live and feel, and never find a language for—the legend of dark time, the sad brevity of their days, the unknowable but haunting miracle of life itself. He heard again, as he had heard throughout his childhood, the pounding wheel, the tolling bell, the whistle-wail, and he remembered how these sounds, coming to him from the river’s edge in the little town of his boyhood, had always evoked for him their tongueless prophecy of wild and secret joy, their glorious promises of new lands, morning, and a shining city. But now the lonely cry of the great train was speaking to him with an equal strangeness of return. For he was going home again.
The undertone of terror with which he had gone to bed, the sadness of the foreshadowed changes in the town, the somber prospect of the funeral tomorrow, all combined to make him dread his home-coming, which so many times in the years since he had been away he had looked forward to some day with hope and exultation. It was all so different from what he thought it would be. He was still only an obscure instructor at one of the universities in the city, his book was not yet published, he was not by any standard which his native town could know—“successful,” “a success.” And as he thought of it, he realized that, almost more than anything, he feared the sharp, appraising eye, the worldly judgments, of that little town.
He thought of all his years away from home, the years of wandering in many lands and cities. He remembered how many times he had thought of home with such an intensity of passion that he could close his eyes and see the scheme of every street, and every house upon each street, and the faces of the people, as well as recall the countless things that they had said and the densely-woven fabric of all their histories. Tomorrow he would see it all again, and he almost wished he had not come. It would have been easy to plead the excuse of work and other duty. And it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place.
But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.
The train rushed onward through the moonlit land.
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CHAPTER 6
THE HOME-COMING
When he looked from the windows of the train next morning the hills were there. They towered immense and magical into the blue weather, and suddenly the coolness was there, the winy sparkle of the air, and the shining brightness. Above him loomed huge shapes, the dense massed green of the wilderness, the cloven cuts and gulches of the mountain passes, the dizzy steepness, with the sudden drops below. He could see the little huts stuck to the edge of bank and hollow, toy-small, far below him in the gorges. The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of something refound that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.
At last the train came sweeping down the long sloping bend into the station. But even before it had come to a full halt George had been watching out of the windows and had seen Randy Shepperton and his sister Margaret waiting for him on the platform. Randy, tall and athletic looking, was teetering restlessly from one foot to another as his glance went back and forth along the windows of the train in search of him. Margaret’s strong, big-boned figure was planted solidly, her hands clasped loosely across her waist, and her eyes were darting from car to car with swift intensity. And as George swung down from the steps of the pullman and, valise in hand, strode toward the platform across the rock ballast of the roadbed and the gleaming rails, he knew instantly, with that intuitive feeling of strangeness and recognition, just what they would say to him at the moment of their meeting.
Now they had seen him. He saw Margaret speak excitedly to her brother and motion toward his approaching figure. And now Randy was coming on the run, his broad hand extended in a gesture of welcome, his rich tenor shouting greetings as he came:
“How are you, boy?” he shouted. “Put it there!” he cried heartily as he came up, and vigorously wrung him by the hand. “Glad to see you, Monk!”
Still shouting greetings, he reached over and attempted to take the valise. The inevitable argument, vehement, good-natured, and protesting, began immediately, and in another moment Randy was in triumphant possession and the two were walking together toward the platform, Randy saying scornfully all the time in answer to the other’s protests:
“Oh, for God’s sake, forget about it! I’ll let you do as much for me when I come up to the Big Town to visit you! . . . Here’s Margaret!” he said as they reached the platform. “I know she’ll be glad to see you!”
