Thomas Wolfe, page 46
“I’ll take the same,” said Eugene.
“Eat!” said Ben fiercely. “Eat!”
Eugene studied the card thoughtfully.
“Bring me some veal cutlets breaded with tomato sauce,” he said, “with a side-order of hash-brown potatoes, a dish of creamed carrots and peas, and a plate of hot biscuits. Also a cup of coffee.”
Eugene got back his heart again. He got it back fiercely and carelessly, with an eldritch wildness. During the remainder of his holiday, he plunged recklessly through the lively crowds, looking boldly but without insolence at the women and young girls. They grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter like splendid flowers. He was eager and alone. Fear is a dragon that lives among crowds—and in armies. It lives hardly with men who are alone. He felt released—beyond the last hedge of desperation.
Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment at all the possessed and possessing world about him. Life hung for his picking fingers like a strange and bitter fruit. They—the great clan huddled there behind the stockade for warmth and safety—could hunt him down some day and put him to death: he thought they would.
But he was not now afraid—he was content, if only the struggle might be fruitful. He looked among the crowds printed with the mark of his danger, seeking that which he might desire and take.
He went back to the university sealed up against the taunts of the young men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about him with thronging jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he met them, with constraint.
There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested in the hard insolence of money. He was followed by his court jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.
“Hello, Gant,” said Tom French harshly. “Been to Exeter lately?” Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.
“Yes,” said Eugene, “I’ve been there lately, and I’m on my way there now. What’s it to you, French?”
Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man’s son drew back.
“We hear you’re stepping out among them, ’Gene,” said Roy Duncan, cackling.
“Who’s we?” said Eugene. “Who’s them?”
“They say,” said Tom French, “that you’re as pure as the flowing sewer.”
“If I need cleaning,” said Eugene, “I can always use the Gold Dust Twins, can’t I? French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins—who never do any work.”
The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who had gathered above them on the seats back and front, laughed loudly.
“That’s right! That’s right! Talk to them, ’Gene!” said Zeno Cochran, softly. He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and powerful, with the grace of a running horse. He had punted against the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl. He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the athlete.
Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:
“Nobody has anything on me. I’ve been too slick for them. Nobody knows anything about me.”
“You mean,” said Eugene, “that every one knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about you.”
The crowd laughed.
“Wow!” said Jimmy Revell.
“What about that, Tom?” he asked challengingly. He was very small and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by various schemes. He was a “kidder,” an egger-on, finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud good-humor.
Eugene turned quietly on Tom French. “Stop it!” he said. “Don’t go on because the others are listening. I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t like it. I don’t like you. I want you to leave me alone now. Do you hear?”
“Come on,” said Roy Duncan, rising, “leave him alone, Tom. He can’t take a joke. He takes things too seriously.”
They left him. Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip of winter.
Winter ended. The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw and the rain. The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of mud and slime. The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet patches. He hurtled down the campus lanes, bounding along like a kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a budding twig with his teeth. He cried loudly in his throat—a whinnying squeal—the centaur-cry of man or beast, trying to unburden its overladen heart in one blast of pain and joy and passion. At other times he slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable burden of weariness and dejection.
He lost count of the hours—he had no sense of time—no regular periods for sleep, work, or recreation, although he attended his classes faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by compulsion of dining-hall or boarding-house schedules. The food was abundant, coarse, greasily and badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the boarding-houses, fifteen. He ate at the commons for a month: his interest in food was too profound and too intelligent to stand it longer. The commons was housed in a large bleak building of white brick. It was called officially Stiggins Hall, but in the more descriptive epithet of the students—The Sty.
He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. They lived thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. It was a town of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and a capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. At the head of the main street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered building of lichened stone, was a cheap hotel—the largest and most notorious brothel in town. There were also three denominational colleges for young women.
The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on the street above the Governor’s Mansion. They lived in three or four rooms on the ground floor.
It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man, from Baltimore, on his slow drift to the South. It was in Sydney that he had first started business for himself and conceived, from the loss of his first investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular spinstress who had died within two years of their marriage.
Their father’s great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town, above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us away.
Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.
“This must be it,” she said. “His shop stood here. It’s gone now.”
She was silent a moment. “Poor old Papa.” She turned her wet eyes away.
There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was buried—buried with a dead woman below the long gray tide of the years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.
In April the nation declared war on Germany. Before the month was out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible—those who were twenty-one—were going into service. At the gymnasium he watched the doctors examine them, envying them the careless innocence with which they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain, before the doctors. They were clean-limbed, sound and white of tooth, graceful and fast in their movements. The fraternity men joined first—those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses—those temples where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for “black cows,” at the drug store. And, with a stab of failure, with regret, with pain at his social deficiency, he had watched their hot campaigns for the favor of some desirable freshman—some one vastly more elegant than himself, some one with blood and with money. They were only the sons of the little rich men, the lords of the village and county, but as he saw them go so surely, with such laughing unconstraint, in well-cut clothes, well-groomed, well-brushed, among the crowd of humbler students, who stiffened awkwardly with peasant hostility and constraint,—they were the flower of chivalry, the sons of the mansion-house. They were Sydney, Raleigh, Nash. And now, like gentlemen, they were going to war.
The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix.
“Look!” said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. “Look at that, will you!” He nodded toward a group of students ahead. “That little Horse’s Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus.”
Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and bought two cheap cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father was foreman in a cotton mill.
“They’re all Horse’s Necks,” he said. “They can go to hell before I’ll boot to get in.”
“Yes,” said Eugene.
But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to go to war.
On the central campus, several students who had been approved by the examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing packed valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward the village street. From time to time they threw up an arm in farewell.
“So long, boys! See you in Berlin.” The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.
He read a great deal—but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe, Smollet, Sterne, and Fielding—the fine salt of the English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson’s suggestion, he read Murray’s Euripides (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis—noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus fable—but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In fact, Æschylus he found sublime—and dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather—he could. He was Literature—a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero—that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet—he spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the Œdipus Rex is not only one of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. This story—perfect, inevitable, and fabulous—wreaked upon him the nightmare coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its great snake-eye of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.
He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose.
The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire (as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese-slaughterings of the present degenerate age. Great satire needs the sustenance of great fable. Swift’s power of invention is incomparable: there’s no better fabulist in the world.
He read Poe’s stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of Lord Dunsany. He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book of Tobit. He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic. He wanted old ghosts—not Indian ghosts, but ghosts in armor, the spirit of old kings, and pillioned ladies with high coned hats. Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides there in the wilderness.
Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America—more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet’s Father, in Connecticut.
“. . . . . . I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.”
He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured—the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured—this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged in the desert, half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of Akhnaton. Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned—the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.
Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter, sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by the new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more than she would confess. She missed the mountain town.
“What do you have to pay for this place?” said Eliza, looking around critically.
“Fifty dollars a month,” said Helen.
“Furnished?”
“No, we had to buy furniture.”
“I tell you what, that’s pretty high,” said Eliza, “just for down stairs. I believe rents are lower at home.”
“Yes, I know it’s high,” said Helen. “But good heavens, mama! Do you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town? We’re only two blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is no common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! No sir!” she exclaimed, laughing. “She’s a real swell—goes to all the big functions and gets in the papers all the time. You know Hugh and I have got to try to keep up appearances. He’s a young man just starting out here.”
“Yes. I know,” Eliza agreed thoughtfully. “How’s he been doing?”
“O’Toole says he’s the best agent he’s got,” said Helen. “Hugh’s all right. We could get along together anywhere, as long as there’s no damned family about. It makes me furious at times to see him slaving to feather O’Toole’s pockets. He works like a dog. You know, O’Toole gets a commission on every sale he makes. And Mrs. O’T. and those two girls ride around in a big car and never turn their hands over. They’re Catholics, you know, but they get to go everywhere.”
“I tell you what,” said Eliza with a timid half-serious smile, “it might not be a bad idea if Hugh became his own boss. There’s no use doing it all for the other fellow. Say, child!” she exclaimed, “why wouldn’t it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont agency? I don’t believe that fellow they’ve got is much account. He could get it without trying.”
There was a pause.
“We’ve been thinking of that,” the girl admitted slowly. “Hugh has written in to the main office. Anyway,” she said a moment later, “he’d be his own boss. That’s something.”
“Well,” said Eliza slowly, “I don’t know but what it’d be a good idea. If he works hard there’s no reason why he shouldn’t build a good business up. Your papa’s been complaining here lately about his trouble. He’d be glad to have you back.” She shook her head slowly for a moment. “Child! they didn’t do him a bit of good, up there. It’s all come back.”
They drove over to Pulpit Hill at Easter for a two days’ visit. Eliza took him to Exeter and bought him a suit of clothes.
“I don’t like those skimpy trousers,” she told the salesman. “I want something that makes him look more of a man.”
When he was newly dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and said:
“Spruce up, boy! Throw your shoulders back! That’s one thing about your father—he carries himself straight as an arrow. If you go all humped over like that, you’ll have lung trouble before you’re twenty-five.”
“I want you to meet my mother,” he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph Ballantyne, a smooth pink young man who had been elected president of the Freshman class.
“You’re a good smart-looking fellow,” said Eliza smiling, “I’ll make a trade with you. If you drum up some boarders for me among your friends here in this part of the State, I’ll throw in your board free. Here are some of my cards,” she added, opening her purse. “You might hand a few of them out, if you get a chance, and say a good word for Dixieland in the Land of the Sky.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, “I certainly will.”
Eugene turned a hot distressed face toward Helen. She laughed huskily, ironically, then turning to the boy, said:
“You’re welcome at any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not. We’ll always find a place for you.”
When they were alone, in answer to his stammering and confused protests, she said with an annoyed grin:
