Thomas Wolfe, page 40
“Let’s go for a smoke,” said Max Isaacs.
They went back and stood wedged for stability on the closed platform of the car. They lighted cigarettes.
Light broke against the east, in a murky rim. The far dark was eaten cleanly away. The horizon sky was barred with hard fierce strips of light. Still buried in night, they looked across at the unimpinging sheet of day. They looked under the lifted curtain at brightness. They were knifed sharply away from it. Then, gently, light melted across the land like dew. The world was gray.
The east broke out in ragged flame. In the car, the little waitress breathed deeply, sighed, and opened her clear eyes.
Max Isaacs fumbled his cigarette awkwardly, looked at Eugene, and grinned sheepishly with delight, craning his neck along his collar, and making a nervous grimace of his white fuzz-haired face. His hair was thick, straight, the color of taffy. He had blond eyebrows. There was much kindness in him. They looked at each other with clumsy tenderness. They thought of the lost years at Woodson Street. They saw with decent wonder their awkward bulk of puberty. The proud gate of the years swung open for them. They felt a lonely glory. They said farewell.
Charleston, fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf, lived in another time. The hours were days, the days weeks.
They arrived in the morning. By noon, several weeks had passed, and he longed for the day’s ending. They were quartered in a small hotel on King Street—an old place above stores, with big rooms. After lunch, they went out to see the town. Max Isaacs and Malvin Bowden turned at once toward the Navy Yard. Mrs. Bowden went with them. Eugene was weary for sleep. He promised to meet them later.
When they had gone, he pulled off his shoes and took off his coat and shirt, and lay down to sleep in a big dark room, into which the warm sun fell in shuttered bars. Time droned like a sleepy October fly.
At five o’clock, Louise, the little waitress, came to wake him. She, too, had wanted to sleep. She knocked gently at the door. When he did not answer, she opened it quietly and came in, closing it behind her. She came to the side of the bed and looked at him for a moment.
“Eugene!” she whispered. “Eugene.”
He murmured drowsily, and stirred. The little waitress smiled and sat down on the bed. She bent over him and tickled him gently in the ribs, chuckling to see him squirm. Then she tickled the soles of his feet. He wakened slowly, yawning, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s time to go out there,” she said.
“Out where?”
“To the Navy Yard. We promised to meet them.”
“Oh, damn the Navy Yard!” he groaned. “I’d rather sleep.”
“So would I!” she agreed. She yawned luxuriously, stretching her plump arms above her head. “I’m so sleepy. I could stretch out anywhere.” She looked meaningly at the bed.
He wakened at once, sensuously alert. He lifted himself upon one elbow: a hot torrent of blood swarmed through his cheeks. His pulses beat thickly.
“We’re all alone up here,” said Louise smiling. “We’ve got the whole floor to ourselves.”
“Why don’t you lie down and take a nap, if you’re still sleepy?” he asked. “I’ll wake you up,” he added, with gentle chivalry.
“I’ve got such a little room. It’s hot and stuffy. That’s why I got up,” said Louise. “What a nice big room you’ve got!”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a nice big bed, too.” They were silent a waiting moment.
“Why don’t you lie down here, Louise?” he said, in a low unsteady voice. “I’ll get up,” he added hastily, sitting up. “I’ll wake you.”
“Oh, no,” she said, “I wouldn’t feel right.”
They were again silent. She looked admiringly at his thin young arms.
“My!” she said. “I bet you’re strong.”
He flexed his long stringy muscles manfully, and expanded his chest.
“My!” she said. “How old are you, ’Gene?”
He was just at his fifteenth year.
“I’m going on sixteen,” he said. “How old are you, Louise?”
“I’m eighteen,” she said. “I bet you’re a regular heart-breaker, ’Gene. How many girls have you got?”
“Oh—I don’t know. Not many,” he said truthfully enough. He wanted to talk—he wanted to talk madly, seductively, wickedly. He would excite her by uttering, in grave respectful tones, honestly, matter-of-factly, the most erotic suggestions.
“I guess you like the tall ones, don’t you?” said Louise. “A tall fellow wouldn’t want a little thing like me, would he? Although,” she said quickly, “you never know. They say opposites attract each other.”
“I don’t like tall girls,” said Eugene. “They’re too skinny. I like them about your size, when they’ve got a good build.”
“Have I got a good build, ’Gene?” said Louise, holding her arms up and smiling.
“Yes, you have a pretty build, Louise—a fine build,” said Eugene earnestly. “The kind I like.”
“I haven’t got a pretty face. I’ve got an ugly face,” she said invitingly.
“You haven’t got an ugly face. You have a pretty face,” said Eugene firmly. “Anyway, the face doesn’t matter much with me,” he added, subtly.
“What do you like best, ’Gene?” Louise asked.
He thought carefully and gravely.
“Why,” he said, “a woman ought to have pretty legs. Sometimes a woman has an ugly face, but a pretty leg. The prettiest legs I ever saw were on a High Yellow.”
“Were they prettier than mine?” said the waitress, with an easy laugh.
She crossed her legs slowly and displayed her silk-shod ankle.
“I don’t know, Louise,” he said, staring critically. “I can’t see enough.”
“Is that enough?” she said, pulling her tight skirt above her calves.
“No,” said Eugene.
“Is that?” she pulled her skirt back over her knees, and displayed her plump thighs, gartered with a ruffled band of silk and red rosettes. She thrust her small feet out, coyly turning the toes in.
“Lord!” said Eugene, staring with keen interest at the garter. “I never saw any like that before. That’s pretty.” He gulped noisily. “Don’t those things hurt you, Louise?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, as if puzzled, “why?”
“I should think they’d cut into your skin,” he said. “I know mine do if I wear them too tight. See.”
He pulled up his trousers’ leg and showed his young gartered shank, lightly spired with hair.
Louise looked, and felt the garter gravely with a plump hand.
“Mine don’t hurt me,” she said. She snapped the elastic with a ripe smack. “See!”
“Let me see,” he said. He placed his trembling fingers lightly upon her garter.
“Yes,” he said unsteadily. “I see.”
Her round young weight lay heavy against him, her warm young face turned blindly up to his own. His brain reeled as if drunken, he dropped his mouth awkwardly upon her parted lips. She sank back heavily on the pillows. He planted dry and clumsy kisses upon her mouth, her eyes, in little circles round her throat and face. He fumbled at the throat-hook of her waist, but his fingers shook so violently that he could not unfasten it. She lifted her smooth hands with a comatose gesture, and unfastened it for him.
Then he lifted his beet-red face, and whispered tremulously, not knowing well what he said:
“You’re a nice girl, Louise. A pretty girl.”
She thrust her pink fingers slowly through his hair, drew back his face into her breasts again, moaned softly as he kissed her, and clutched his hair in an aching grip. He put his arms around her and drew her to him. They devoured each other with young wet kisses, insatiate, unhappy, trying to grow together in their embrace, draw out the last distillation of desire in a single kiss.
He lay sprawled, scattered and witless with passion, unable to collect and focus his heat. He heard the wild tongueless cries of desire, the inchoate ecstasy that knows no gateway of release. But he knew fear—not the social fear, but the fear of ignorance, of discovery. He feared his potency. He spoke to her thickly, wildly, not hearing himself speak.
“Do you want me to? Do you want me to, Louise?”
She drew his face down, murmuring:
“You won’t hurt me, ’Gene? You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, honey? If anything happens—” she said drowsily.
He seized the straw of her suggestion.
“I won’t be the first. I won’t be the one to begin you. I’ve never started a a girl off,” he babbled, aware vaguely that he was voicing an approved doctrine of chivalry. “See here, Louise!” he shook her—she seemed drugged. “You’ve got to tell me before—. I won’t do that! I may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever did that. Do you hear!” His voice rose shrilly; his face worked wildly; he was hardly able to speak.
“I say, do you hear? Am I the first one, or not? You’ve got to answer! Did you ever—before?”
She looked at him lazily. She smiled.
“No,” she said.
“I may be bad, but I won’t do that.” He had become inarticulate; his voice went off into a speechless jargon. Gasping, stammering, with contorted and writhing face, he sought for speech.
She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly around him. Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her breast. She stroked his head, and talked quietly to him.
“I know you wouldn’t, honey. I know you wouldn’t. Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Why, you’re all excited, dear. There. Why, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re high-strung, honey. That’s what it is. You’re a bundle of nerves.”
He wept soundlessly into her arm.
He became quieter. She smiled, and kissed him softly.
“Put on your clothes,” said Louise. “We ought to get started if we’re going out there.”
In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs. Bowden’s cast-off pumps. Louise laughed richly, and thrust her fingers through his hair.
At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor Max Isaacs. A young sailor took them over a destroyer. Louise went up a railed iron ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely thighs. She showed her legs. She stared impudently at a picture of a chorus lady, cut from the Police Gazette. The young sailor rolled his eyes aloft with an expression of innocent debauchery. Then he winked heavily at Eugene.
The deck of the Oregon.
“What’s that for?” said Louise, pointing to the outline in nails of Admiral Dewey’s foot.
“That’s where he stood during the fight,” said the sailor.
Louise put her small foot within the print of the greater one. The sailor winked at Eugene. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.
“She’s a nice girl,” said Eugene.
“Yeah,” said Max Isaacs. “She’s a nice lady.” He craned his neck awkwardly, and squinted. “About how old is she?”
“She’s eighteen,” said Eugene.
Malvin Bowden stared at him.
“You’re crazy!” said he. “She’s twenty-one.”
“No,” said Eugene, “she’s eighteen. She told me so.”
“I don’t care,” said Malvin Bowden, “she’s no such thing. She’s twenty-one. I reckon I ought to know. My folks have known her for five years. She had a baby when she was eighteen.”
“Aw!” said Max Isaacs.
“Yes,” said Malvin Bowden, “a travelling man got her in trouble. Then he ran away.”
“Aw!” said Max Isaacs. “Without marryin’ her or anything?”
“He didn’t do nothing for her. He ran away,” said Malvin Bowden. “Her people are raising the kid now.”
“Great Day!” said Max Isaacs slowly. Then, sternly, he added, “A man who’d do a thing like that ought to be shot.”
“You’re right!” said Malvin Bowden.
They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of ruined Camelot.
“Those are nice old places,” said Max Isaacs. “They’ve been good houses in their day.”
He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old lust of his childhood for iron-scraps awoke.
“Those are old Southern mansions,” said Eugene, reverently.
The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm standing water.
“They’ve let the place run down,” said Malvin. “It’s no bigger now than it was before the Civil War.”
No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but sacred, traditions.
“They need some Northern capital,” said Max Isaacs sagely. They all did.
An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a high veranda from one of the houses, by an attentive negress. She seated herself in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the sun. Eugene looked at her sympathetically. She had probably not been informed by her loyal children of the unsuccessful termination of the war. United in their brave deception, they stinted themselves daily, reining in on their proud stomachs in order that she might have all the luxury to which she had been accustomed. What did she eat? The wing of a chicken, no doubt, and a glass of dry sherry. Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had been pawned or sold. Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not see the wastage of their fortune. It was very sad. But did she not sometimes think of that old time of the wine and the roses? When knighthood was in flower?
“Look at that old lady,” whispered Malvin Bowden.
“You can tell she’s a lady,” said Max Isaacs. “I bet she’s never turned her hand over.”
“An old family,” said Eugene gently. “The Southern aristocracy.”
An old negro came by, fringed benevolently by white whiskers. A good old man—an ante-bellum darkey. Dear Lord, their number was few in these unhappy days.
Eugene thought of the beautiful institution of human slavery, which his slaveless maternal ancestry had fought so valiantly to preserve. Bress de Lawd, Marse! Ole Mose doan’ wan’ to be free niggah. How he goan’ lib widout marse? He doan’ wan’ stahve wid free niggahs. Har, har, har!
Philanthropy. Pure philanthropy. He brushed a tear from his een.
They were going across the harbor to the Isle of Palms. As the boat churned past the round brick cylinder of Fort Sumter, Malvin Bowden said:
“They had the most men. If things had been even, we’d have beaten them.”
“They didn’t beat us,” said Max Isaacs. “We wore ourselves out beating them.”
“We were defeated,” said Eugene, quietly, “not beaten.”
Max Isaacs stared at him dumbly.
“Aw!” he said.
They left the little boat, and ground away toward the beach in a street-car. The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of the summer. The foliage was coated with dust: they rattled past cheap summer houses, baked and blistered, stogged drearily in the sand. They were small, flimsy, a multitudinous vermin—all with their little wooden sign of lodging. “The Ishkabibble,” “Seaview,” “Rest Haven,” “Atlantic Inn,”—Eugene looked at them, reading with weariness the bleached and jaded humor of their names.
“There are a lot of boarding-houses in the world,” said he.
A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through the long parched leaves of stunted palms. Before them rose the huge rusted spokes of a Ferris Wheel. St. Louis. They had reached the beach.
Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car.
“Last one in’s a rotten egg!” he cried, and streaked for the bathhouse.
“Kings! I’ve got kings, son,” yelled Max Isaacs. He held up his crossed fingers. The beach was bare: two or three concessions stood idly open for business. The sky curved over them, a cloudless blue burnished bowl. The sea offshore was glazed emerald: the waves rode heavily in, thickening murkily as they turned with sunlight and sediment to a beachy yellow.
They walked slowly down the beach toward the bathhouse. The tranquil, incessant thunder of the sea made in them a lonely music. Seawards, their eyes probed through the seething glare.
“I’m going to join the navy, ’Gene,” said Max Isaacs. “Come on and go with me.”
“I’m not old enough,” said Eugene. “You’re not, either.”
“I’ll be sixteen in November,” said Max Isaacs defensively.
“That’s not old enough.”
“I’m going to lie to get in,” said Max Isaacs. “They won’t bother you. You can get in. Come on.”
“No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” said Max Isaacs. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to college,” said Eugene. “I’m going to get an education and study law.”
“You’ll have lots of time,” said Max Isaacs. “You can go to college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good training. You go everywhere.”
“No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.”
But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end.
Mrs. Bowden’s niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh.
Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk.
Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears.
