Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (61 page)

"Yes, sir," said Eugene.

That, it seemed to him, was the Oxford Plan. 
Oh, yes--he had been there, three years, in fact.  His mild eye
kindled.  To loaf along the High on a warm Spring day, stopping
to examine in the bookseller's windows the treasures that might be
had for so little. Then to Buol's or to a friend's room for tea, or
for a walk in the meadows or Magdalen gardens, or to look down into
the quad, at the gay pageant of youth below.  Ah--Ah!  A
great place?  Well?he'd hardly say that.  It all depended
what one meant by a great place. Half the looseness in
thought--unfortunately, he fancied, more prevalent among American
than among English youth--came from an indefinite exuberance of
ill-defined speech.

"Yes, sir," said Eugene.

A great place?  Well, he'd scarcely say that. 
The expression was typically American.  Butter-lipped, he turned
on the boy a smile of soft unfriendliness:

"It kills," he observed, "a man's
useless enthusiasms."

Eugene whitened a little.

"That's fine," he said.

Now--let him see.  Did he like plays--the modern
drama?  Excellent. They were doing some very interesting things
in the modern drama. Barrie--oh, a charming fellow!  What was
that?  Shaw!

"Yes, sir," said Eugene.  "I've
read all the others.  There's a new book out."

"Oh, but really!  My dear boy!" said
Mr. Torrington with gentle amazement.  He shrugged his shoulders
and became politely indifferent.  Very well, if he liked. 
Of course, he thought it rather a pity to waste one's time so when
they were really doing some first-rate things.  That was JUST
the trouble, however.  The appeal of a man like that was mainly
to the unformed taste, the uncritical judgment.  He had a flashy
attraction for the immature. Oh, yes!  Undoubtedly an amusing
fellow.  Clever--yes, but hardly significant.  And--didn't
he think--a trifle noisy?  Or had he noticed that? 
Yes--there was to be sure an amusing Celtic strain, not without
charm, but unsound.  He was not in line with the best modern
thought.

"I'll take the Barrie," said Eugene.

Yes, he rather thought that would be better.

"Well, good day.  Mr.--Mr.--?--?" he
smiled, fumbling again with his cards.

"Gant."

Oh yes, to be sure,--Gant.  He held out his
plump limp hand.  He did hope Mr. Gant would call on him. 
Perhaps he'd be able to advise him on some of the little problems
that, he knew, were constantly cropping up during the first year. 
Above all, he mustn't get discouraged.

"Yes, sir," said Eugene, backing feverishly
to the door.  When he felt the open space behind him, he fell
through it, and vanished.

Anyway, he thought grimly, I've read all the damned
Barries.  I'll write the damned report for him, and damned well
read what I damnwell please.

God save our King and Queen!
 
 

He had courses besides in Chemistry, Mathematics,
Greek, and Latin.

He worked hard and with interest at his Latin. 
His instructor was a tall shaven man, with a yellow saturnine face. 
He parted his scant hair cleverly in such a way as to suggest horns. 
His lips were always twisted in a satanic smile, his eyes gleamed
sideward with heavy malicious humor.  Eugene had great hopes of
him.  When the boy arrived, panting and breakfastless, a moment
after the class had settled to order, the satanic professor would
greet him with elaborate irony:  "Ah there, Brother Gant! 
Just in time for church again.  Have you slept well?"

The class roared its appreciation of these
subtleties.  And later, in an expectant pause, he would deepen
his arched brows portentously, stare up mockingly under his bushy
eyebrows at his expectant audience, and say, in a deep sardonic
voice:

"And now, I am going to request Brother Gant to
favor us with one of his polished and scholarly translations."

These heavy jibes were hard to bear because, of all
the class, two dozen or more, Brother Gant was the only one to
prepare his work without the aid of a printed translation.  He
worked hard on Livy and Tacitus, going over the lesson several times
until he had dug out a smooth and competent reading of his own. 
This he was stupid enough to deliver in downright fashion, without
hesitation, or a skilfully affected doubt here and there.  For
his pains and honesty he was handsomely rewarded by the Amateur
Diabolist.  The lean smile would deepen as the boy read, the man
would lift his eyes significantly to the grinning class, and when it
was over, he would say:

"Bravo, Brother Gant!  Excellent! 
Splendid!  You are riding a good pony--but a little too
smoothly, my boy.  You ride a little too well."

The class sniggered heavily.

When he could stand it no longer, he sought the man
out one day after the class.

"See here, sir!  See here!" he began
in a voice choking with fury and exasperation.  "Sir--I
assure you--" he thought of all the grinning apes in the class,
palming off profitably their stolen translations, and he could not go
on.

The Devil's Disciple was not a bad man; he was only,
like most men who pride themselves on their astuteness, a foolish
one.

"Nonsense, Mr. Gant," said he kindly. 
"You don't think you can fool me on a translation, do you? 
It's all right with me, you know," he continued, grinning. 
"If you'd rather ride a pony than do your own work, I'll give
you a passing grade--so long as you do it well."

"But--" Eugene began explosively.

"But I think it's a pity, Mr. Gant," said
the professor, gravely, "that you're willing to slide along this
way.  See here, my boy, you're capable of doing first-rate
work.  I can see that.  Why don't you make an effort? 
Why don't you buckle down and really study, after this?"

Eugene stared at the man, with tears of anger in his
eyes.  He sputtered but could not speak.  But suddenly, as
he looked down into the knowing leer, the perfect and preposterous
injustice of the thing--like a caricature--overcame him: he burst
into an explosive laugh of rage and amusement which the teacher, no
doubt, accepted as confession.

"Well, what do you say?" he asked. 
"Will you try?"

"All right!  Yes!" the boy yelled. 
"I'll try it."

He bought at once a copy of the translation used by
the class. Thereafter, when he read, faltering prettily here and
there over a phrase, until his instructor should come to his aid, the
satanic professor listened gravely and attentively, nodding his head
in approval from time to time, and saying, with great satisfaction,
when he had finished:  "Good, Mr. Gant.  Very good. 
That shows what a little real work will do."

And privately, he would say:  "You see the
difference, don't you? I knew at once when you stopped using that
pony.  Your translation is not so smooth, but it's your own
now.  You're doing good work, my boy, and you're getting
something out of it.  It's worth it, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Eugene gratefully, "it
certainly is--"

By far the most distinguished of his teachers this
first year was Mr. Edward Pettigrew ("Buck") Benson, the
Greek professor.  Buck Benson was a little man in the
middle-forties, a bachelor, somewhat dandified, but old-fashioned, in
his dress.  He wore wing collars, large plump cravats, and
suede-topped shoes.  His hair was thick, heavily grayed,
beautifully kept.  His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce,
with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings
around the mouth.  It was an altogether handsome ugliness.

His voice was low, lazy, pleasant, with an indolent
drawl, but without changing its pace or its inflection he could flay
a victim with as cruel a tongue as ever wagged, and in the next
moment wipe out hostility, restore affection, heal all wounds by the
same agency.  His charm was enormous.  Among the students
he was the subject for comical speculation--in their myths, they made
of him a passionate and sophisticated lover, and his midget
cycle-car, which bounded like an overgrown toy around the campus, the
scene of many romantic seductions.

He was a good Grecian--an elegant indolent scholar. 
Under his instruction Eugene began to read Homer.  The boy knew
little grammar--he had learned little at Leonard's--but, since he had
had the bad judgment to begin Greek under some one other than Buck
Benson, Buck Benson thought he knew even less than he did.  He
studied desperately, but the bitter dyspeptic gaze of the elegant
little man frightened him into halting, timorous, clumsy
performances.  And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and
tremulous voice, Buck Benson's manner would become more and more
weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl:

"Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could
throw you out the window."

But, on the examination, he gave an excellent
performance, and translated from sight beautifully.  He was
saved.  Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy
astonishment, and gave him a fair grade.  Thereafter, they
slipped quickly into an easier relation: by Spring, he was reading
Euripides with some confidence.

But that which remained most vividly, later, in the
drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast
sea-surge of Homerwhich beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as
did the sea-sound in Gant's parlor shells, when first he heard it to
the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the
lost last weary son of Hellas.

Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo--above the
whistle's shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter's
tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall.  What
dissonance can quench it?  What jangling violence can disturb or
conquer it--entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like
"the apple tree, the singing, and the gold"?
 
 

29
 

Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed
his lodging four or five times.  He finished the year living
alone in a big bare carpetless room--an existence rare at Pulpit
Hill, where the  students, with very few exceptions, lived two
or three to a room. In that room began a physical isolation, hard
enough to bear at first, which later became indispensable to him,
mind and body.

He had come to Pulpit Hill with Hugh Barton, who met
him at Exeter and drove him over in the big roadster.  After his
registration, he had secured lodging quickly at the house of an
Altamont widow whose son was a student.  Hugh Barton looked
relieved and departed, hoping to reach home and his bride by
nightfall.

With fine enthusiasm, but poor judgment, Eugene paid
the widow two months in advance.  Her name was Bradley: she was
a flabby petulant woman with a white face and heart-disease. 
But her food was excellent.  Mrs. Bradley's student son answered
to his initial letters--"G. T."  G. T. Bradley, a
member of the sophomore class, was a surly scowling youth of
nineteen--a mixture, in equal parts, of servility and insolence. 
His chief, but thwarted, ambition was to be elected to membership in
a fraternity.  Having failed to win recognition by the exercise
of his natural talents, he was driven by an extraordinary obsession
that fame and glory would come to him if he were known as the
slave-driver of a number of Freshmen.

But these tactics, tried on Eugene, produced at once
defiance and resentment.  Their hostility was bitter: G. T. set
himself to thwart and ruin the beginnings of the boy's university
life.  He trapped him into public blunders, and solicited
audiences to witness his humiliation; he wheedled his confidence and
betrayed it.  But there is a final mockery, an ultimate
treachery that betrays us into shame; our capacity for villainy, like
all our other capacities, is so small.  The day came when Eugene
was free from bondage.  He was free to leave the widow's house
of sorrow. G. T. approached him, scowling, diffidently.

"I hear you're leaving us, 'Gene," he said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"Is it because of the way I've acted?"

"Yes," said Eugene.

"You take things too seriously, 'Gene," he
said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"I don't want you to go having hard feelings,
'Gene.  Let's shake hands and be friends."

He thrust his hand out stiffly.  Eugene looked
at the hard weak face, the furtive, unhappy eyes casting about for
something they might call their own.  The thick black hair was
plastered stiff with grease; he saw white points of dandriff at the
roots.  There was an odor of talcum powder.  He had been
borne and nourished in the body of his white-faced mother--for what? 
To lap the scornful stroking fingers of position; to fawn miserably
before an emblem. Eugene had a moment of nausea.

"Let's shake hands, 'Gene," said the boy
once more, waggling his out-thrust fingers.

"No," said Eugene.

"You don't hate me, do you?" whined G. T.

"No," said Eugene.

He had a moment of pity, of sickness.  He
forgave because it was necessary to forget.

Eugene lived in a small world, but its ruins for him
were actual. His misfortunes were trifling, but their effect upon his
spirit was deep and calamitous.  He withdrew deeply and
scornfully into his cell.  He was friendless, whipped with scorn
and pride.  He set his face blindly against all the common
united life around him.