Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (54 page)

"Lord a'mercy!" he gasped.  "Let
the rascals come now!"

Ah, well--they came.

All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled
frantically from the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of
promised glory, to curb his prancing limbs.  He devoured every
scrap of news, and rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss
Crane.  He read every paper he could lay his hands on, exulting
in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at every point. 
For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were going
badly with the Huns. At a thousand points they fled squealing before
English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge
along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere. 
Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were
lined up at the walls of Paris.  They had run in the wrong
direction.  The world grew dark.  Desperately, he tried to
understand.  He could not.  By the extraordinary strategy
of always retreating, the German army had arrived before Paris. 
It was something new in warfare.  It was several years, in fact,
before Eugene could understand that some one in the German armies had
done some fighting.

John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.

"You wait!" he said confidently.  "You
just wait, my sonny.  That old fellow Joffer knows what he's
about.  This is just what he's been waiting for.  Now he's
got them where he wants them."

Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French
general might want a German army in Paris.

Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.

"It looks mighty serious," she said. 
"I tell you!"  She was silent a moment, a torrent of
passion rose up in her throat.  Then she added in a low
trembling voice:  "If England goes, we all go."

"God bless her!" Sheba yelled.

"God bless her, 'Gene," she continued,
tapping him on the knee. "When I stepped ashore on her dear old
soil that time, I just couldn't help myself.  I didn't care what
any one thought.  I knelt right down there in the dirt, and
pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy"--her bleared eyes
glistened through her tears--"God bless her, I couldn't help
it.  Do you know what I did?  I leaned over and kissed her
earth."  Large gummy tears rolled down her red cheeks. 
She was weeping loudly, but she went on.  "I said: 
This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by
God, what's more, it's mine as well!  God bless her!  God
bless her!"

Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard's eyes. 
Her face was wet.  She could not speak.  They were all
deeply moved.

"She won't go," said John Dorsey Leonard. 
"We'll have a word to say to that!  She won't go!  You
wait!"

In Eugene's fantasy there burned the fixed vision of
the great hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green
fields, and the developing convolutions of a faery London--mighty,
elfin, old, a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall,
leaning houses, Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of
genius burning among the swarm of quaint originality.

As the war developed, and the literature of
war-enchantment began to appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after
book to read.  They were the books of the young men--the young
men who fought to blot out the evil of the world with their blood. 
In her trembling voice she read to him Rupert Brooke's sonnet--"If
I should die, think only this of me"--and she put a copy of
Donald Hankey's A Student in Arms into his hand, saying:

"Read this, boy.  It will stir you as
you've never been stirred before.  Those boys have seen the
vision!"

He read it.  He read many others.  He saw
the vision.  He became a member of this legion of
chivalry--young Galahad-Eugene?a spearhead of righteousness.  He
had gone a-Grailing.  He composed dozens of personal memoirs,
into which quietly, humorously, with fine-tempered English restraint,
he poured the full measure of his pure crusading heart. 
Sometimes, he came through to the piping times of peace minus an arm,
a leg, or an eye, diminished but ennobled; sometimes his last radiant
words were penned on the eve of the attack that took his life. 
With glistening eyes, he read his own epilogue, enjoyed his
post-mortem glory, as his last words were recorded and explained by
his editor.  Then, witness of his own martyrdom, he dropped two
smoking tears upon his young slain body.  Dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori.
 
 

Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood's pharmacy. 
As he passed the idling group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them
a look of sudden fierce contempt.  Then he laughed quietly,
savagely.

"Oh, my God!" he said.

At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to
cross from the Post Office.  She came over slowly, reeling.

Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he
crossed over, and turned angularly down Federal Street behind the
Post Office. At the second entrance to the Doctors' and Surgeons'
Building, he turned in, and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. 
Somewhere, with punctual developing monotony, a single drop of water
was falling into the wet black basin of a sink.  He paused in
the wide corridor of the first floor to control the nervous thudding
of his heart.  Then he walked half-way down and entered the
waiting-room of Dr. J. H. Coker.  It was vacant.  Frowning,
he sniffed the air. The whole building was sharp with the clean
nervous odor of antiseptics.  A litter of magazines--Life,
Judge, The Literary Digest, and The American--on the black mission
table, told its story of weary and distressed fumbling.  The
inner door opened and the doctor's assistant, Miss Ray, came out. 
She had on her hat. She was ready to depart.

"Do you want to see the doctor?" she asked.

"Yes," said Ben, "is he busy?"

"Come on in, Ben," said Coker, coming to
the door.  He took his long wet cigar from his mouth, grinning
yellowly.  "That's all for to-day, Laura.  You can
go."

"Good-bye," said Miss Laura Ray, departing.

Ben went into Coker's office.  Coker closed the
door and sat down at his untidy desk.

"You'll be more comfortable if you lie down on
that table," he said grinning.

Ben gave the doctor's table a look of nausea.

"How many have died on that thing?" he
asked.  He sat down nervously in a chair by the desk, and
lighted a cigarette, holding the flame to the charred end of cigar
Coker thrust forward.

"Well, what can I do for you, son?" he
asked.

"I'm tired of pushing daisies here," said
Ben.  "I want to push them somewhere else."

"What do you mean, Ben?"

"I suppose you've heard, Coker," said Ben
quietly and insultingly, "that there's a war going on in
Europe.  That is, if you've learned to read the papers."

"No, I hadn't heard about it, son," said
Coker, puffing slowly and deeply.  "I read a paper--the one
that comes out in the morning.  I suppose they haven't got the
news yet."  He grinned maliciously. "What do you want,
Ben?"

"I'm thinking of going to Canada and enlisting,"
said Ben.  "I want you to tell me if I can get in."

Coker was silent a moment.  He took the long
chewed weed from his mouth and looked at it thoughtfully.

"What do you want to do that for, Ben?" he
said.

Ben got up suddenly, and went to the window.  He
cast his cigarette away into the court.  It struck the cement
well with a small dry plop.  When he turned around, his sallow
face had gone white and passionate.

"In Christ's name, Coker," he said, "what's
it all about?  Are you able to tell me?  What in heaven's
name are we here for?  You're a doctor--you ought to know
something."

Coker continued to look at his cigar.  It had
gone out again.

"Why?" he said deliberately.  "Why
should I know anything?"

"Where do we come from?  Where do we go
to?  What are we here for? What the hell is it all about?"
Ben cried out furiously in a rising voice.  He turned bitterly,
accusingly, on the older man.  "For God's sake, speak up,
Coker.  Don't sit there like a damned tailor's dummy.  Say
something, won't you?"

"What do you want me to say?" said Coker. 
"What am I? A mindreader?  A spiritualist?  I'm your
physician, not your priest. I've seen them born, and I've seen them
die.  What happens to them before or after, I can't say."

"Damn that!" said Ben.  "What
happens to them in between?"

"You're as great an authority on that as I am,
Ben," said Coker. "What you want, son, is not a doctor, but
a prophet."

"They come to you when they're sick, don't
they?" said Ben.  "They all want to get well, don't
they?  You do your best to cure them, don't you?"

"No," said Coker.  "Not always. 
But I'll grant that I'm supposed to.  What of it?"

"You must all think that it's about something,"
said Ben, "or you wouldn't do it!"

"A man must live, mustn't he?" said Coker
with a grin.

"That's what I'm asking you, Coker.  Why
must he?"

"Why," said Coker, "in order to work
nine hours a day in a newspaper office, sleep nine hours, and enjoy
the other six in washing, shaving, dressing, eating at the Greasy
Spoon, loafing in front of Wood's, and occasionally taking the Merry
Widow to see Francis X. Bushman.  Isn't that reason enough for
any man?  If a man's hard-working and decent, and invests his
money in the Building and Loan every week, instead of squandering it
on cigarettes, coca-cola, and Kuppenheimer clothes, he may own a
little home some day."  Coker's voice sank to a hush of
reverence. "He may even have his own car, Ben.  Think of
that!  He can get in it, and ride, and ride, and ride.  He
can ride all over these damned mountains.  He can be very, very
happy.  He can take exercise regularly in the Y. M. C. A. and
think only clean thoughts.  He can marry a good pure woman and
have any number of fine sons and daughters, all of whom may be
brought up in the Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian faiths, and
given splendid courses in Economics, Commercial Law, and the Fine
Arts, at the State university.  There's plenty to live for,
Ben.  There's something to keep you busy every moment."

"You're a great wit, Coker," Ben said,
scowling.  "You're as funny as a crutch."  He
straightened his humped shoulders self-consciously, and filled his
lungs with air.

"Well, what about it?" he asked, with a
nervous grin.  "Am I fit to go?"
 
"Let's see," said Coker deliberately,
beginning to look him over. "Feet--pigeon-toed, but good arch." 
He looked at Ben's tan leathers closely.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. 
"Do you need your toes to shoot a gun with?"

"How're your teeth, son?"

Ben drew back his thin lips and showed two rows of
hard white grinders.  At the same moment, casually, swiftly,
Coker prodded him with a strong yellow finger in the solar plexis. 
His distended chest collapsed; he bent over, laughing, and coughed
dryly.  Coker turned away to his desk and picked up his cigar.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. 
"What's the idea?"

"That's all, son.  I'm through with you,"
said Coker.

"Well, what about it?" said Ben nervously.

"What about what?"

"Am I all right?"

"Certainly you're all right," said Coker. 
He turned with burning match.  "Who said you weren't all
right?"

Ben stared at him, scowling, with fear-bright eyes.

"Quit your kidding, Coker," he said. 
"I'm three times seven, you know.  Am I fit to go?"

"What's the rush?" said Coker.  "The
war's not over yet.  We may get into it before long.  Why
not wait a bit?"

"That means I'm not fit," said Ben. 
"What's the matter with me, Coker?"

"Nothing," said Coker carefully. 
"You're a bit thin.  A little run down, aren't you, Ben? 
You need a little meat on those bones, son. You can't sit on a stool
at the Greasy Spoon, with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee
in the other, and get fat."

"Am I all right or not, Coker?"

Coker's long death's-head widened in a yellow grin.

"Yes," he said.  "You're all
right, Ben.  You're one of the most all right people I know."

Ben read the true answer in Coker's veined and weary
eyes.  His own were sick with fear.  But he said bitingly:

"Thanks, Coker.  You're a lot of help. 
I appreciate what you've done a lot.  As a doctor, you're a fine
first baseman."

Coker grinned.  Ben left the office.

As he went out on the street he met Harry Tugman
going down to the paper office.

"What's the matter, Ben?" said Harry
Tugman.  "Feeling sick?"

"Yes," said Ben, scowling at him. 
"I've just had a shot of 606."

He went up the street to meet Mrs. Pert.
 
 

26
 

In the autumn, at the beginning of his fifteenth
year--his last year at Leonard's--Eugene went to Charleston on a
short excursion. He found a substitute for his paper route.