Thomas Wolfe, page 53
Every one said he had a bright future. He remonstrated with Eugene, with good-natured seriousness, about his habits. He ought not to throw his clothes around. He ought not to let his shirts and drawers accumulate in a dirty pile. He ought to have a regular time for doing each lesson; he ought to live by regular hours.
They lived in a private dwelling on the edge of the campus, in a large bright room decorated with a great number of college pennants, all of which belonged to Bob Sterling.
Bob Sterling had heart-disease. He stood on the landing, gasping, when he had climbed the stairs. Eugene opened the door for him. Bob Sterling’s pleasant face was dead white, spotted by pale freckles. His lips chattered and turned blue.
“What is it, Bob? How do you feel?” said Eugene.
“Come here,” said Bob Sterling with a grin. “Put your head down here.” He took Eugene’s head and placed it against his heart. The great pump beat slowly and irregularly, with a hissing respiration.
“Good God!” cried Eugene.
“Do you hear it?” said Bob Sterling, beginning to laugh. Then he went into the room, chafing his dry hands briskly.
But he fell sick and could not attend classes. He was taken to the College Infirmary, where he lay for several weeks, apparently not very ill, but with lips constantly blue, a slow pulse, and a sub-normal temperature. Nothing could be done about it.
His mother came and took him home. Eugene wrote him regularly twice a week, getting in return short but cheerful messages. Then one day he died.
Two weeks later the widow returned to gather together the boy’s belongings. Silently she collected the clothing that no one would ever wear. She was a stout woman in her forties. Eugene took all the pennants from the wall and folded them. She packed them in a valise and turned to go.
“Here’s another,” said Eugene.
She burst suddenly into tears and seized his hand.
“He was so brave,” she said, “so brave. Those last days—I had not meant to—Your letters made him so happy.”
She’s alone now, Eugene thought.
I cannot stay here, he thought, where he has been. We were here together. Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.
But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two room-mates—one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the “L” stood for Lawrence, but every one called him “Elk”) and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a “study.”
Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county affairs. Elk Duncan was tall—an inch or two over six feet—and incredibly thin, or rather narrow. He was already a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin. His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil. He always dressed very foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs. He was a student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in avoiding study.
The younger students—particularly the Freshmen—gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.
The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.
“Harold! Harold!” said Elk Duncan reprovingly. “Damn, son! You’re getting hard! If you go on like this, you’ll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest of us, please. ’Gene here’s only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I’ve always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don’t you know he’d be shocked? He’d cut off your cigarette money, son.”
“I don’t give a damn what he’d do, Elk, nor you either!” said Harold toughly, grinning. “So, what the hell!” he roared as loudly as he could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory—cries of “Go to hell!” “Cut it out!” and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant’s death-warrant.
“Then how long can he live?” asked Helen.
He shrugged his shoulders. “My dear girl!” he said. “I have no idea. The man’s a miracle. Do you know that he’s Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look. How long can he last? I’ll swear to nothing—I no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again. I doubted if he would last the winter through. But he’s back again. He may be back many times.”
“Can you help him at all? Do you think the radium does any good?”
“I can give him relief for a time. I can even check the growth of the disease for a time. Beyond that, I can do nothing. But his vitality is enormous. He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge—but which hangs, nevertheless.”
Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles sword. Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard feet. The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it had its outburst daily at Eliza’s or in her own home. Hugh Barton had purchased a house to which he had taken her.
“You’ll get no peace,” he said, “as long as you’re near them. That’s what’s wrong with you now.”
She had frequent periods of sickness. She went constantly to the doctors for treatment and advice. Sometimes she went to the hospital for several days. Her illness manifested itself in various ways—sometimes in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which was governed partly by Gant’s illness and a morbid despair over her failure to bear a child. She drank stealthily at all times—she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never enough for drunkenness. She drank vile liquids—seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a dozen abominations called “tonics” and “extracts.” Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood. This self-deception was characteristic of her. Her life expressed itself through a series of deceptions—of symbols: her dislikes, affections, grievances, brandishing every cause but the real one.
But, unless actually bedridden, she was never absent from her father for many hours. The shadow of his death lay over their lives. They shuddered below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma, deprived them of dignity and courage. They were dominated by the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law. It was as hard for them to think of Gant’s death as of God’s death: it was a great deal harder, because he was more real to them than God, he was more immortal than God, he was God.
This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and choked him with fury. He would grow enraged after reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody. They have taken his courage away! he thought. They have made a whining coward out of him! No, and if I die, no damned family about. Blowing their messy breaths in your face! Snuffling down their messy noses at you! Gathering around you till you can’t breathe. Telling you how well you’re looking with hearty smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back. O messy, messy, messy death! Shall we never be alone? Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves alone? Ah! but I shall! I shall! Alone, alone, and far away, with falling rain. Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.
“Are we to die like rats?” he said. “Are we to smother in a hole?”
“Damn!” said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon Bonaparte and I’m your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!” he called. “Help! He killed the keeper and got out.”
“’Gene!” yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk’s great names. “What do you know about history? Who signed Magna Charta, eh?”
“It wasn’t signed,” said Eugene. “The King didn’t know how to write, so they mimeographed it.”
“Correct!” roared Harold Gay. “Who was Æthelred the Unready?”
“He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed,” said Eugene.
“On his Uncle Jasper’s side,” said Elk Duncan, “he was related to Paul the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous.”
“He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused to be cowed,” said Eugene.
“Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope,” said Elk Duncan. “This caused a great schism in the Church.”
“But as usual, God was on the side of the greatest number of canons,” said Eugene. “Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its fortune in the Gold Rush of ’49.”
“You boys are too good for me!” yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly. “Come on! Who’s going to the Pic?”
The Pic was the only purchasable entertainment that the village afforded steadily. It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a howling tribe of students who rushed down aisles, paved with peanut-shells, through a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting themselves studiously for the remainder of the evening to the unhappy heads and necks of Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of applause, indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets that wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen. A weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost constantly at a battered piano. If she was idle for five minutes, the whole pack howled ironically, demanding: “Music, Myrtle! Music!”
It was necessary to speak to every one. If one spoke to every one, one was “democratic”; if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes. The appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was coarse and blunt. They were suspicious of all eminence. They had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual. A man was brilliant? Was there a bright sparkle to him? Bad, bad! He was not safe; he was not sound. The place was a democratic microcosmos—seething with political interests: national, regional, collegiate.
The campus had its candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the State. A youngster developed in college the political craft he was later to exert in Party affairs. The son of a politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman. The boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely to benefit him later. By his junior year, if he was successful, he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely weighed with cordiality:
“Ah, there, gentlemen.” “Gentlemen, how are you?” “A nice day, gentlemen.”
The vast champaign of the world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant reverberation of an idea. They could get no greater glory for themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory—the way to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever—was through the law, a string tie, and a hat. Hence politics, law schools, debating societies, and speechmaking. The applause of listening senates to command.
The yokels, of course, were in the saddle—they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues. Usually, these dignities—the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y. M. C. A.’s, and the managerships of athletic teams—were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions. Such an industrious hack was called an “all-round man.” He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects. He was a universal Two Man. He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.
In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly. He was outside the pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person. He could never be an all-round man. Obviously, he would never be governor. Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things. He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise. Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such. We are not all made for weighty business.
He was happier that he had ever been in his life, and more careless. His physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful. His escape from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending, that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial buoyance, drunken freedom. He had come to the place alone, without companions. He had no connections. He had, even now, not one close friend. And this isolation was in his favor. Every one knew him at sight: every one called him by name, and spoke to him kindly. He was not disliked. He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with enthusiastic gusto. He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes. He was closer to a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more alone. He was filled with a divine indifference for all appearance. Joy ran like a great wine through his young expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths with wild cries in his throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to focus the blind desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet all of his formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.
He began to join. He joined everything. He had never “belonged” to any group before, but now all groups were beckoning him. He had without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and the magazine. The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into a gushet. It began to sprinkle, then it rained. He was initiated into literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a social fraternity. He joined enthusiastically, submitted with fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.
But not without labor had his titles come. The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura. She haunted him. When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter. There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.
“Well!” said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, “let’s all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know! You never know!” She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes were wet. “It may be the last time we’re all together. The old trouble! The old trouble!” she said hoarsely, turning to him.
“What old trouble?” he said angrily. “Good God, why are you so mysterious?”
“My heart!” she whispered, with a brave smile. “I’ve said nothing to any one. But last week—I thought I was gone.” This was delivered in a boding whisper.
“Oh, my God!” he groaned. “You’ll be here when the rest of us are rotten.”
Helen burst into a raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face, and prodding him roughly with her big fingers.
“K-K-K-K-K-K-K! Did you ever know it to fail? Did you? If you come to her with one of your kidneys gone, she’s always got something worse the matter with her. No, sir! I’ve never known it to fail!”
“You may laugh! You may laugh!” said Eliza with a smile of watery bitterness. “But I may not be here to laugh at much longer.”
“Good heavens, mama!” the girl cried irritably. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not the sick one! Papa’s the sick one. He’s the one that needs attention. Can’t you realize that—he’s dying. He may not last the winter out. I’m the sick one! You’ll be here long after we’re both gone.”
