Thomas Wolfe, page 59
During the first days, in the confusion of the new order, Eugene saw a great deal of them. Then, as the cogs of the machine began to grind more smoothly, and the university was converted into a big army post, with its punctual monotony of drilling, eating, studying, inspection, sleeping, he found himself detached, alone, occupying a position of unique and isolated authority.
He Carried On. He Held High the Torch. He Did His Bit. He was editor, reporter, censor, factotum of the paper. He wrote the news. He wrote the editorials. He seared them with flaming words. He extolled the crusade. He was possessed of the inspiration for murder.
He came and he went as he chose. When the barracks went dark at night, he prowled the campus, contemptuous of the electric flash and the muttered apologies of the officious shavetails. He roomed in the village with a tall cadaver, a gaunt medical student with hollow cheeks and a pigeon-breast, named Heston. Three or four times a week he was driven over the rutted highway to Exeter where, in a little print shop, he drank the good warm smell of ink and steel.
Later, he prowled up the dreary main street of the town as the lights went up, ate at the Greek’s, flirted with a few stray furtive women until the place went dead at ten o’clock, and came back through the dark countryside in a public-service car beside a drunken old walrus who drove like a demon, and whose name was “Soak” Young.
October began, and a season of small cold rain. The earth was a sodden reek of mud and rotten leaves. The trees dripped wearily and incessantly. His eighteenth birthday came, and he turned again, with a quivering tension, toward the war.
He got a brief sick letter from his father; a few pages, practical, concrete with her blunt pungent expression, from Eliza:
“Daisy has been here with all her tribe. She went home two days ago, leaving Caroline and Richard. They have all been down sick with the flu. We’ve had a siege of it here. Every one has had it, and you never know who’s going to be next. It seems to get the big strong ones first. Mr. Hanby, the Methodist minister, died last week. Pneumonia set in. He was a fine healthy man in the prime of life. The doctors said he was gone from the start. Helen has been laid up for several days. Says it’s her old kidney trouble. They had McGuire in Thursday night. But they can’t fool me, no matter what they say. Son, I hope you will never surrender to that awful craving. It has been the curse of my life. Your papa seems to go along about the same as usual. He eats well, and gets lots of sleep. I can’t notice any change in him from a year ago. He may be here long after some of the rest of us are under the sod. Ben is still here. He mopes around the house all day and complains of having no appetite. I think he needs to get to work again doing something that will take his mind off himself. There are only a few people left in the house. Mrs. Pert and Miss Newton hang on as usual. The Crosbys have gone back to Miami. If it gets much colder here I’ll just pack up and go too. I guess I must be getting old. I can’t stand the cold the way I could when I was young. I want you to buy yourself a good warm overcoat before the winter sets in. You must also eat plenty of good substantial food. Don’t squander your money but . . .”
He heard nothing more for several weeks. Then, one drizzling evening at six o’clock, when he returned to the room that he occupied with Heston, he found a telegram. It read: “Come home at once. Ben has pneumonia. Mother.”
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35
There was no train until the next day. Heston quieted him during the evening with a stiff drink of gin manufactured from alcohol taken from the medical laboratory. Eugene was silent and babbled incoherently by starts: he asked the medical student a hundred questions about the progress and action of the disease.
“If it were double pneumonia she would have said so. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? Hey?” he demanded feverishly.
“I should think so,” said Heston. He was a kind and quiet boy.
Eugene went to Exeter the next morning to catch the train. All through a dreary gray afternoon it pounded across the sodden State. Then, there was a change and a terrible wait of several hours at a junction. Finally, as dark came, he was being borne again toward the hills.
Within his berth he lay with hot sleepless eyes, staring out at the black mass of the earth, the bulk of the hills. Finally, in the hours after midnight, he dropped into a nervous doze. He was wakened by the clatter of the trucks as they began to enter the Altamont yards. Dazed, half-dressed, he was roused by the grinding halt, and a moment later was looking out through the curtains into the grave faces of Luke and Hugh Barton.
“Ben’s very sick,” said Hugh Barton.
Eugene pulled on his shoes and dropped to the floor, stuffing his collar and tie into a coat pocket.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’m ready.”
They went softly down the aisle, amid the long dark snores of the sleepers. As they walked through the empty station toward Hugh Barton’s car, Eugene said to the sailor:
“When did you get home, Luke?”
“I came in last night,” he said. “I’ve been here only a few hours.”
It was half-past three in the morning. The ugly station settlement lay fixed and horrible, like something in a dream. His strange and sudden return to it heightened his feeling of unreality. In one of the cars lined at the station curbing, the driver lay huddled below his blanket. In the Greek’s lunch-room a man sat sprawled faced downward on the counter. The lights were dull and weary: a few burned with slow lust in the cheap station-hotels.
Hugh Barton, who had always been a cautious driver, shot away with a savage grinding of gears. They roared townward through the rickety slums at fifty miles an hour.
“I’m afraid B-B-B-Ben is one sick boy,” Luke began.
“How did it happen?” Eugene asked. “Tell me.”
He had taken influenza, they told Eugene, from one of Daisy’s children. He had moped about, ill and feverish, for a day or two, without going to bed.
“In that G-g-g-god dam cold barn,” Luke burst out. “If that boy dies it’s because he c-c-c-couldn’t keep warm.”
“Never mind about that now,” Eugene cried irritably, “go on.”
Finally he had gone to bed, and Mrs. Pert had nursed him for a day or two.
“She was the only one who d-d-d-did a damn thing for him,” said the sailor. Eliza, at length, had called in Cardiac.
“The d-d-damned old quack,” Luke stuttered.
“Never mind! Never mind!” Eugene yelled. “Why dig it up now? Get on with it!”
After a day or two, he had grown apparently convalescent, and Cardiac told him he might get up if he liked. He got up and moped about the house for a day, in a cursing rage, but the next day he lay a-bed, with a high fever. Coker at length had been called in, two days before——
“That’s what they should have done at the start,” growled Hugh Barton over his wheel.
“Never mind!” screamed Eugene. “Get on with it.”
And Ben had been desperately ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, for over a day. The sad prophetic story, a brief and terrible summary of the waste, the tardiness, and the ruin of their lives, silenced them for a moment with its inexorable sense of tragedy. They had nothing to say.
The powerful car roared up into the chill dead Square. The feeling of unreality grew upon the boy. He sought for his life, for the bright lost years, in this mean cramped huddle of brick and stone. Ben and I, here by the City Hall, the Bank, the grocery-store (he thought). Why here? In Gath or Ispahan. In Corinth or Byzantium. Not here. It is not real.
A moment later, the big car sloped to a halt at the curb, in front of Dixieland. A light burned dimly in the hall, evoking for him chill memories of damp and gloom. A warmer light burned in the parlor, painting the lowered shade of the tall window a warm and mellow orange.
“Ben’s in that room upstairs,” Luke whispered, “where the light is.”
Eugene looked up with cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay-window. It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. The light in the sickroom burned grayly, bringing to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror.
The three men went softly up the walk and entered the house. There was a faint clatter from the kitchen, and voices.
“Papa’s in here,” said Luke.
Eugene entered the parlor and found Gant seated alone before a bright coal-fire. He looked up dully and vaguely as his son entered.
“Hello, papa,” said Eugene, going to him.
“Hello, son,” said Gant. He kissed the boy with his bristling cropped mustache. His thin lip began to tremble petulantly.
“Have you heard about your brother?” he snuffled. “To think that this should be put upon me, old and sick as I am. O Jesus, it’s fearful—”
Helen came in from the kitchen.
“Hello, Slats,” she said, heartily embracing him. “How are you, honey? He’s grown four inches more since he went away,” she jeered, sniggering. “Well, ’Gene, cheer up! Don’t look so blue. While there’s life there’s hope. He’s not gone yet, you know.” She burst into tears, hoarse, unstrung, hysterical.
“To think that this must come upon me,” Gant sniffled, responding mechanically to her grief, as he rocked back and forth on his cane and stared into the fire. “O boo-hoo-hoo! What have I done that God should——”
“You shut up!” she cried, turning upon him in a blaze of fury. “Shut your mouth this minute. I don’t want to hear any more from you! I’ve given my life to you! Everything’s been done for you, and you’ll be here when we’re all gone. You’re not the one who’s sick.” Her feeling toward him had, for the moment, gone rancorous and bitter.
“Where’s mama?” Eugene asked.
“She’s back in the kitchen,” Helen said. “I’d go back and say hello before you see Ben if I were you.” In a low brooding tone, she continued: “Well, forget about it. It can’t be helped now.”
He found Eliza busy over several bright bubbling pots of water on the gas-stove. She bustled awkwardly about, and looked surprised and confused when she saw him.
“Why, what on earth, boy! When’d you get in?”
He embraced her. But beneath her matter-of-factness, he saw the terror in her heart: her dull black eyes glinted with bright knives of fear.
“How’s Ben, mama?” he asked quietly.
“Why-y,” she pursed her lips reflectively, “I was just saying to Doctor Coker before you came in. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I tell you what, I don’t believe he’s half as bad off as he looks. Now, if only we can hold on till morning. I believe there’s going to be a change for the better.’”
“Mama, in heaven’s name!” Helen burst out furiously. “How can you bear to talk like that? Don’t you know that Ben’s condition is critical? Are you never going to wake up?”
Her voice had its old cracked note of hysteria.
“Now, I tell you, son,” said Eliza, with a white tremulous smile, “when you go in there to see him, don’t make out as if you knew he was sick. If I were you, I’d make a big joke of it all. I’d laugh just as big as you please and say, ‘See here, I thought I was coming to see a sick man. Why, pshaw!’ (I’d say) ‘there’s nothing wrong with you. Half of it’s only imagination!’”
“O mama! for Christ’s sake!” said Eugene frantically. “For Christ’s sake!”
He turned away, sick at heart, and caught at his throat with his fingers.
Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.
“N-n-n-now, I wouldn’t stay but a m-m-m-minute,” whispered Luke. “It m-m-might make him nervous.”
Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.
“Look who’s come to see you,” her voice came heartily. “It’s Highpockets.”
For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow skull’s-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben. And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen, that Ben was dying.
Ben’s long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And Ben’s thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, above his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.
And the sound of this gasping—loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it—gave to the scene its final note of horror.
Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a naturalist’s table, fighting, while they looked at him, to save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. It was monstrous, brutal.
As Eugene approached, Ben’s fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy’s wrists fiercely in the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child: “Why have you come? Why have you come home, ’Gene?”
The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.
“They gave us a vacation, Ben,” he said presently. “They had to close down on account of the flu.”
Then he turned away suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor lie, and unable to face the fear in Ben’s gray eyes.
“All right, ’Gene,” said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority. “Get out of here—you and Helen both. I’ve got one crazy Gant to look after already. I don’t want two more in here.” She spoke harshly, with an unpleasant laugh.
She was a thin woman of thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant’s nephew, Gilbert. She was of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar, with little pity in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness and death. These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism, saying:
“If I gave way to my feelings, where would the patient be?”
When they got out into the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen:
“Why have you got that death’s-head here? How can he get well with her around? I don’t like her!”
“Say what you like—she’s a good nurse.” Then, in a low voice, she said: “What do you think?”
He turned away, with a convulsive gesture. She burst into tears, and seized his hand.
Luke was teetering about restlessly, breathing stentorously and smoking a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the door of the sick-room. She was holding a useless kettle of hot water.
“Huh? Hah? What say?” asked Eliza, before any one had said anything. “How is he?” Her eyes darted about at them.
“Get away! Get away! Get away!” Eugene muttered savagely. His voice rose. “Can’t you get away?”
He was infuriated by the sailor’s loud nervous breathing, his large awkward feet. He was angered still more by Eliza’s useless kettle, her futile hovering, her “huh?” and “hah?”
“Can’t you see he’s fighting for his breath? Do you want to strangle him? It’s messy! Messy! Do you hear?” His voice rose again.
The ugliness and discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming family, whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding with its terrible hunger for death on Ben’s strangulation, made him mad with alternate fits of rage and pity.
Indecisively, after a moment, they went downstairs, still listening for sounds in the sick-room.
“Well, I tell you,” Eliza began hopefully. “I have a feeling, I don’t know what you’d call it—” She looked about awkwardly and found herself deserted. Then she went back to her boiling pots and pans.
Helen, with contorted face, drew him aside, and spoke to him in whispered hysteria, in the front hall.
“Did you see that sweater she’s wearing? Did you see it? It’s filthy!” Her voice sank to a brooding whisper. “Did you know that he can’t bear to look at her? She came into the room yesterday, and he grew perfectly sick. He turned his head away and said ‘O Helen, for God’s sake, take her out of here.’ You hear that, don’t you. Do you hear? He can’t stand to have her come near him. He doesn’t want her in the room.”
“Stop! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!” Eugene said, clawing at his throat.
The girl was for the moment insane with hatred and hysteria.
“It may be a terrible thing to say, but if he dies I shall hate her. Do you think I can forget the way she’s acted? Do you?” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “She’s let him die here before her very eyes. Why, only day before yesterday, when his temperature was 104, she was talking to Old Doctor Doak about a lot. Did you know that?”
