Thomas Wolfe, page 56
There was a Square on high ground; in the centre a courthouse. Cars were parked in close lines. Young men loitered in the drug-store.
How real it is, Eugene thought. It is like something we have always known about and do not need to see. The town would not have seemed strange to Thomas Aquinas,—but he to the town.
Ben prowled along, greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning his skull against their round skulls of practicality, across their counters—a phantom soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.
“This is my kid brother, Mr. Fulton.”
“Hello, son! Dogged if they don’t grow tall ’uns up there, Ben. Well, if you’re like Old Ben, young fellow, we won’t kick. We think a lot of him here.”
That’s like thinking well of Balder, in Connecticut, Eugene thought.
“I have only been here three months,” said Ben, resting in bed on his elbow and smoking a cigarette. “But I know all the leading business men already. I’m well thought of here.” He glanced at his brother quickly and grinned, with a shy charm of rare confession. But his fierce eyes were desperate and lonely. Hill-haunted? For—home? He smoked.
“You see, they think well of you, once you get away from your people. You’ll never have a chance at home, ’Gene. They’ll ruin everything for you. For heaven’s sake, get away when you can.—What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking at me like that?” he said sharply, alarmed at the set stare of the boy’s face. In a moment he said: “They’ll spoil your life. Can’t you forget about her?”
“No,” said Eugene. In a moment he added: “She’s kept coming back all Spring.”
He twisted his throat with a wild cry.
The Spring advanced with a mounting hum of war. The older students fell out quietly and drifted away to enlistments. The younger strained tensely, waiting. The war brought them no sorrow: it was a pageant which might, they felt, pluck them instantly into glory. The country flowed with milk and honey. There were strange rumors of a land of Eldorado to the north, amid the war industry of the Virginia coast. Some of the students had been there, the year before: they brought back stories of princely wages. One could earn twelve dollars a day, with no experience. One could assume the duties of a carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw, and a square. No questions were asked.
War is not death to young men; war is life. The earth had never worn raiment of such color as it did that year. The war seemed to unearth pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast unfolding and exposure of wealth and power. And somehow—this imperial wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended into a lyrical music. In Eugene’s mind, wealth and love and glory melted into a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world again. All things were possible.
He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into Virginia. There was protest, but not loud enough to impede him. Eliza’s mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.
“Can’t do without her? You can’t fool me! No, sir. I know why you want to go,” she said jocularly. “She’s a married woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know. You’ve no right to go after her.”
Then abruptly, she said:
“Well, let him go if he wants to. It looks silly to me, but he’s got to decide for himself.”
He got twenty-five dollars from his father—enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.
“Mark my words,” said Gant. “You’ll be back in a week’s time. It’s a wild-goose chase you’re going on.”
He went.
All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing moonlight.
Early in the morning he came to Richmond. He had to change trains; there was a wait. He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light. He ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men going to their work. This casual and brief contact with their lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night, thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical and unreal. The city had no existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after he left. He looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth. They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos. And the great hunger for voyages rose up in him—to come always, as now at dawn, into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.
The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper. That was strange.
Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town. Merchants lowered their awnings; he left them as their day began.
An hour later he was riding for the sea. Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura. She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her. He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and bright salt.
The train drew under the boat-shed at Newport News. The terrific locomotive, as beautiful as any ship, breathed with unlaborious fatigue at the rail-head. There, by lapping water, she came to rest, like a completed destiny.
The little boat lay waiting at the dock. Within a few minutes he had left the hot murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue water of the Roads. A great light wind swept over the water, making a singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music and a glory in his heart. He drove along the little decks at a bounding stride, lunging past the staring people, with wild noises in his throat. The lean destroyers, the bright mad camouflage of the freighters and the transports, the lazy red whirl of a propeller, half-submerged, and the light winey sparkle of the waves fused to a single radiance and filled him with glory. He cried back into the throat of the enormous wind, and his eyes were wet.
Upon the decks of the boats, clean little figures in white moved about; under the bulging counter of a huge Frenchman young naked men were swimming. They come from France, he thought, and it is strange that they should be here.
O, the wonder, the magic and the loss! His life was like a great wave breaking in the lonely sea; his hungry shoulder found no barriers—he smote his strength at nothing, and was lost and scattered like a wrack of mist. But he believed that this supreme ecstasy which mastered him and made him drunken might some day fuse its enormous light into a single articulation. He was Phaeton with the terrible horses of the sun: he believed that his life might pulse constantly at its longest stroke, achieve an eternal summit.
The hot Virginias broiled under the fierce blue oven of the sky, but in the Roads the ships rocked in the freshening breeze of war and glory.
Eugene remained in the furnace of Norfolk for four days, until his money was gone. He watched it go without fear, with a sharp quickening of his pulses, tasting the keen pleasure of his loneliness and the unknown turnings of his life. He sensed the throbbing antennae of the world: life purred like a hidden dynamo, with the vast excitement of ten thousand glorious threats. He might do all, dare all, become all. The far and the mighty was near him, around him, above him. There was no great bridge to span, no hard summit to win. From obscurity, hunger, loneliness, he might be lifted in a moment into power, glory, love. The transport loading at the docks might bear him war-ward, love-ward, fame-ward Wednesday night.
He walked by lapping water through the dark. He heard its green wet slap against the crusted pier-piles: he drank its strong cod scent, and watched the loading of great boats drenched in blazing light as they weltered slowly down into the water. And the night was loud with the rumble of huge cranes, the sudden loose rattle of the donkey-engines, the cries of the overseers, and the incessant rumbling trucks of stevedores within the pier.
His imperial country, for the first time, was gathering the huge thrust of her might. The air was charged with murderous exuberance, rioting and corrupt extravagance.
Through the hot streets of that town seethed the toughs, the crooks, the vagabonds of a nation—Chicago gunmen, bad niggers from Texas, Bowery bums, pale Jews with soft palms, from the shops of the city, Swedes from the Middle-West, Irish from New England, mountaineers from Tennessee and North Carolina, whores, in shoals and droves, from everywhere. For these the war was a fat enormous goose raining its golden eggs upon them. There was no thought or belief in any future. There was only the triumphant Now. There was no life beyond the moment. There was only an insane flux and re-flux of getting and spending.
Young men from Georgia farms came, in the evenings, from their work on piers, in camps, in shipyards, to dress up in their peacock plumage. And at night, hard and brown and lean of hand and face, they stood along the curbing in $18.00 tan leathers, $80.00 suits, and $8.00 silk shirts striped with broad alternating bands of red and blue. They were carpenters, masons, gang overseers, or said they were: they were paid ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen dollars a day.
They shifted, veered from camp to camp, worked for a month, loafed opulently for a week, enjoying the brief bought loves of girls they met upon the ocean-beach or in a brothel.
Strapping black buck-niggers, with gorilla arms and the black paws of panthers, earned $60 a week as stevedores, and spent it on a mulatto girl in a single evening of red riot.
And more quietly, soberly, in this crowd, moved the older thriftier workmen: the true carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics—the canny Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia coast, the careful peasantry of the Middle-West, who had come to earn, to save, to profit from the war.
Everywhere amid this swarming crowd gleamed the bright raimant of blood and glory: the sailors thronged the streets in flapping blues and spotless whites—brown, tough, and clean. The marines strode by in arrogant twos, stiff as rods in the loud pomp of chevrons and striped trousers. Commanders gray and grim, hard-handed C. P. O.’s, and elegant young ensigns out of college, with something blonde and fluffy at their side, went by among the red cap-buttons of French matelots, or the swagger sea-wise port of the Englishmen.
Through this crowd, with matted uncut hair that fell into his eyes, that shot its spirals through the rents of his old green hat, that curled a thick scroll up his dirty neck, Eugene plunged with hot devouring eyes—soaked in his sweat by day, sharp and stale by night.
In this great camp of vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home into this world from loneliness. The hunger for voyages, the hunger that haunts Americans, who are a nomad race, was half-assuaged here in this maelstrom of the war.
He lost himself in the crowd. He lost count of the days. His little store of money melted. He moved from a cheap hotel, loud at night with the noise of harlotry, to a little attic room in a lodging-house, an oven of hot pine and tarred roof; he moved from the lodging-house to a fifty-cent cot in the Y. M. C. A., where, returning night by night, he paid his fee, and slept in a room with forty snoring sailors.
Finally, his money gone, he slept, until driven out, in all-night lunchrooms; upon the Portsmouth ferry; and over lapping water on a rotting pier.
By night he prowled about among the negroes; he listened to their rich proposed seductions; he went where the sailors went, down Church Street, where the women were. He prowled the night with young beast-lust, his thin boy-body stale with sweat, his hot eyes burning through the dark.
He grew hungry for food. His money was gone. But there was a hunger and thirst in him that could not be fed. Over the chaos of his brain hung the shadow of Laura James. Her shadow hung above the town, above all life. It had brought him here; his heart was swollen with pain and pride; he would not go to find her.
He was obsessed with the notion that he would find her in the crowd, upon the street, around the corner. He would not speak to her if he met her. He would go proudly and indifferently by. He would not see her. She would see him. She would see him at some heroic moment, just as he was receiving the love and respect of beautiful women. She would speak to him; he would not speak to her. She would be stricken; she would be beaten down; she would cry to him for love and mercy.
Thus, unclean, unkempt, clothed in rags and hunger and madness, he saw himself victorious, heroic and beautiful. He was mad with his obsession. He thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to run or remain. He brooded for hours over her address in the telephone directory; sitting by the phone, he trembled with excitement because its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture, because within a minute he could be with her, voice to voice.
He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly to it.
He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.
At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance—but the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal—everywhere there was work, abundant work—hard labor that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one week’s pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or departure.
And he had no money left.
He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company expense.
In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field, he was signed on as a laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him.
He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out the superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore a blue eyeshade, armbands, and talked with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip.
Eugene thrust out his employment slip in shaking fingers. The man looked briefly at it.
“College boy, aren’t you, son?” he said, glancing at Eugene.
“Yes, sir,” said Eugene.
“Did you ever do day labor before?” said the man.
“No, sir,” said Eugene.
“How old are you, son?” the man asked.
Eugene was silent for a moment. “I’m—nineteen,” he said at length, wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say twenty.
The superintendent grinned wearily.
“It’s hard work, son,” the man said. “You’ll be among the wops and the Swedes and the hunkies. You’ll live in the same bunkhouse, you’ll eat with them. They don’t smell nice, son.”
“I have no money,” said Eugene. “I’ll work hard. I won’t get sick. Give me the job. Please!”
“No,” said the man. “No, I won’t do that.”
Eugene turned blindly away.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” said the superintendent. “I’ll give you a job as a checker. You’ll be with the office force. That’s where you belong. You’ll live with them in their own bunkhouse. They’re nice fellows,” he said elegantly, “college fellows, like yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion. “Thank you.”
“The checker we’ve got is quitting,” said the superintendent. “You’ll go to the stables with him in the morning to get your horse.”
“H-h-h-horse?” said Eugene.
“You’ll have a horse,” said the superintendent, “to ride around on.”
With strong bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with fear. He turned to go. He could not bear to talk of money.
“H-h-how much—?” he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.
“I’ll give you $80 a month to begin with,” said the manager with a touch of magnificence. “If you make good, I’ll give you a hundred.”
“And my keep?” whispered Eugene.
“Sure!” said the manager. “That’s thrown in.”
Eugene reeled away with his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets.
These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering—valuable here to indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.
Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, “feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,” and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms—their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen—part of the huge compost of America.
