Thomas Wolfe, page 52
“Have you a son?”
“Yes. He’s eighteen years old. He’s almost as tall as you are and twice as broad. All the girls are mad about him.”
He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.
“That’s enough, now,” said “Miss Brown” with authority. “Go to your room and get some sleep.”
But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him “son.”
“Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,
Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o——”
Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and reversed the well-worn record. Then as with stately emphasis, the opening measure of “Katinka” paced out, she waited for him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up like wings to his embrace. She was teaching him to dance. Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in the arms of a young man dancing. Now, clumsily, he moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four! Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his awkward pressure, as bodiless as a fume of smoke. Her left hand rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a bird: her cool fingers were threaded into his hot sawing palm.
She had thick hair of an oaken color, evenly parted in the middle; her skin was pearl-pale, and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full, and sensuous—her face was like that of one of the pre-Raphaelite women. She carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with the slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise and tenderness. She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness and seduction, the world and heaven. He held her with reverent care, as one who would not come too near, who would not break a sacred image. Her exquisite and subtle perfume stole through him like a strange whisper, pagan and divine. He was afraid to touch her—and his hot palm sweated to her fingers.
Sometimes she coughed gently, smiling, holding a small crumpled handkerchief, edged with blue, before her mouth.
She had come to the hills not because of her own health, but because of her mother’s, a woman of sixty-five, rustily dressed, with the petulant hang-dog face of age and sickness. The old woman suffered from asthma and heart-disease. They had come from Florida. Irene Mallard was a very capable business woman; she was the chief bookkeeper of one of the Altamont banks. Every evening Randolph Gudger, the bank president, telephoned her.
Irene Mallard pressed her palm across the mouthpiece of the telephone, smiling at Eugene ironically, and rolling her eyes entreatingly aloft.
Sometimes Randolph Gudger drove by and asked her to go with him. The boy went sulkily away until the rich man should leave: the banker looked bitterly after him.
“He wants me to marry him, ’Gene,” said Irene Mallard. “What am I going to do?”
“He’s old enough to be your grandfather,” said Eugene. “He has no hair on the top of his head; his teeth are false, and I don’t know what-all!” he said resentfully.
“He’s a rich man, ’Gene,” said Irene, smiling. “Don’t forget that.”
“Go on, then! Go on!” he cried furiously. “Yes—go ahead. Marry him. It’s the right thing for you. Sell yourself. He’s an old man!” he said melodramatically. Randolph Gudger was almost forty-five.
But they danced there slowly in a gray light of dusk that was like pain and beauty; like the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost merman, swam, remembering exile. And as they danced she, whom he dared not touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear, pressing with slender fingers his hot hand. And she, whom he would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token of the world’s remedy—the refuge from the one lost face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura—a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight. The great pageantry of pain and pride and death hung through the dusk its awful vision, touching his sorrow with a lonely joy. He had lost; but all pilgrimage across the world was loss: a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking away, the thousand phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high impassionate grief of stars.
It was dark. Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.
“Sit down here a moment, ’Gene. I want to talk to you.” Her voice was serious, low-pitched. He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.
“I’ve been watching you these last few days,” said Irene Mallard. “I know what’s been going on.”
“What do you mean?” he said thickly, with thudding pulses.
“You know what I mean,” said Irene Mallard sternly. “Now you’re too fine a boy, ’Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman. Any one can see what she is. Mother and I have both talked about it. A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you. You’ve got to stop it.”
“How did you know about it?” he muttered. He was frightened and ashamed. She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until he grew quieter. But he drew no closer to her: he halted, afraid, before her loveliness. As with Laura James, she seemed too high for his passion. He was afraid of her flesh; he was not afraid of “Miss Brown’s.” But now he was tired of the woman and didn’t know how he could pay her. She had all his medals.
All through the waning summer he walked with Irene Mallard. They walked at night through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired leaves. They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later “Pap” Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came to their little table, sitting and drinking with them. He had spent the years since Leonard’s at a military school, trying to straighten the wry twist of his neck. But he remained the same as ever—quizzical, dry, and humorous. Eugene looked at that good shy face, remembering the lost years, the lost faces. And there was sorrow in his heart for what would come no more. August ended.
September came, full of departing wings. The world was full of departures. It had heard the drums. The young men were going to the war. Ben had been rejected again in the draft. Now he was preparing to drift off in search of employment in other towns. Luke had given up his employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had enlisted in the Navy. He had come home on a short leave before his departure for the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island. The street roared as he came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride, in flapping blues, his face all on the grin, thick curls of his unruly hair coiling below the band of his hat. He was the cartoon of a gob.
“Luke!” shouted Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from the street to Wood’s pharmacy, “by God, son, you’ve done your bit. I’m going to set you up. What are you going to have?”
“Make it a dope,” said Luke. “Colonel, yours truly!” He lifted the frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed before the grinning counter. “F-f-f-forty years ago,” he began, in a hoarse voice, “I might have refused, but now I can’t, G-G-G-God help me! I c-c-c-c-can’t!”
Gant’s sickness had returned on him with increased virulence. His face was haggard and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs. It was decided that he must go again to Baltimore. Helen would go with him.
“Mr. Gant,” said Eliza persuasively, “why don’t you just give up everything and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days? You don’t feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you, I’d retire. We could get $20,000 for your shop without any trouble—If I had that much money to work with, I’d show them a thing or two.” She nodded pertly with a smart wink. “I could turn it over two or three times within two years’ time. You’ve got to trade quick to keep the ball a-rolling. That’s the way it’s done.”
“Merciful God!” he groaned. “That’s my last refuge on earth. Woman, have you no mercy? I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won’t be long now. You can do what you please with it after I’m gone, but give me a little peace now. In the name of Jesus, I ask it!” He sniffled affectedly.
“Pshaw!” said Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Half of it’s only imagination.”
He groaned, turning his head away.
Summer died upon the hills. There was a hue, barely guessed, upon the foliage, of red rust. The streets at night were filled with sad lispings: all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard the strange noise of autumn. And all the people who had given the town its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight. They had gone back into the vast South again. The solemn tension of the war gathered about the nation. A twilight of grim effort hovered around him, above him. He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory. Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war—engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.
But something of true wonder had come upon the land—the flares and rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well. Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own. For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.
Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great deal: Gant’s excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.
“You damned old man!” cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. “I could wear you out! You’re not sick; I’ve wasted my life nursing you, and you’re not as sick as I am! You’ll be here long after I’m gone, you selfish old man! It makes me furious!”
“Why, baby!” he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, “God bless you, I couldn’t do without you.”
“Don’t ‘baby’ me!” she cried.
But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.
“I was a boy here,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re going to make you well again. Why! You’ll be a boy again!”
Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely in among the broken lives—with arms proposed in an attitude of enormous mercy—many times bigger than Gant’s largest angel—is an image of gentle Jesus.
Eugene went to see the Leonards several times. Margaret looked thin and ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly. Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience, the great health of her spirit. All of his sin, all of his pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and ragged cloak. He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless light.
But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the university, he talked of little else. His heart was packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she would not understand. She was too wise for anything but faith. Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began to laugh.
“Mr. Leonard!” she called. “Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy! You don’t know what love is. Get along with you. There’ll be time enough to think of that ten years from now.” She laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.
“Old ’Gene with a girl! Pity the poor girl! Ah, Lord, Boy! That’s a long way off for you. Thank your stars!”
He bent his head sharply, and closed his eyes. O My lovely Saint! he thought. How close you have been to me, if any one. How I have cut my brain open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how alone I am, and always have been.
He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and saddened by departures. A few people hurried past, as if driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind. He was held in the lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched her. But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate. She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.
The house was almost empty. At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with satisfaction.
“Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son. Try to take care of them.” She put Gant’s check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a safety-pin.
“Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy. You never know who you’ll run up with on a train.”
He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.
“It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother,” she said querulously. Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile. “I tell you what! It looks mighty funny, doesn’t it? You can’t stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along. It’s all right! It’s all right. I’m not complaining. It seems as if all I was fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off.” She burst volubly into tears. “It seems that that’s the only use you have for me. I’ve hardly laid eyes on you all summer.”
“No,” he said bitterly, “you’ve been too busy looking after the boarders. Don’t think, mama, that you can work on my feelings here at the last minute,” he cried, already deeply worked-on. “It’s easy to cry. But I was here all the time if you had had time for me. Oh, for God’s sake! Let’s make an end to this! Aren’t things bad enough without it? Why must you act this way whenever I go off? Do you want to make me as miserable as you can?”
“Well, I tell you,” said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once, “if I make a couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me waiting for you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring. I’ve got the lot picked out. I was thinking about it the other day,” she went on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.
“Ah-h!” he made a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar. “In God’s name! Please!” There was a silence.
“Well,” said Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, “I want you to be a good boy and study hard, son. Take care of your money—I want you to have plenty of good food and warm clothes—but you mustn’t be extravagant, boy. This sickness of your papa’s has cost a lot of money. Everything is going out and nothing’s coming in. Nobody knows where the next dollar’s coming from. So you’ve got to watch out.”
Again silence fell. She had said her say; she had come as close as she could, but suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the bitter and lonely secrecy of his life.
“I hate to see you go, son,” she said quietly, with a deep and indefinable sadness.
He cast his arms up suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.
“What does it matter! Oh God, what does it matter!”
Eliza’s eyes filled with tears of real pain. She grasped his hand and held it.
“Try to be happy, son,” she wept, “try to be a little more happy. Poor child! Poor child! Nobody ever knew you. Before you were born,” she shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that was drowned and husky with her tears. Then, huskily, clearing her throat, she repeated, “Before you were born——”
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32
When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder—the number of students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones had gone to war. The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. They were careless of colleges, careers, successes—the war had thrilled them with its triumphing Now. Of what use To-morrow! Of what use all labor for To-morrow! The big guns had blown all spun schemes to fragments: they hailed the end of all planned work with a fierce, a secret joy. The business of education went on half-heartedly, with an abstracted look: in the classroom, their eyes were vague upon the book, but their ears cocked attentively for alarums and excursions without.
Eugene began the year earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been the best student in the Altamont High School. His name was Bob Sterling. Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son of a widow. He was of middling height, always very neatly and soberly dressed; there was nothing conspicuous about him. For this reason, he could laugh good-naturedly, a little smugly, at whatever was conspicuous. He had a good mind—bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by originality or inventiveness. He had a time for everything: he apportioned a certain time for the preparation of each lesson, and went over it three times, mumbling rapidly to himself. He sent his laundry out every Monday. When in merry company he laughed heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always kept track of the time. Presently, he would look at his watch, saying: “Well, this is all very nice, but it’s getting no work done,” and he would go.
