Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (73 page)

"Make it a dope,"
said Luke.  "Colonel, yours truly!"  He lifted
the frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed
before the grinning counter.  "F-f-f-forty
years ago," he began, in a hoarse voice, "I might have
refused, but now I can't, G-G-G-God help me!  I c-c-c-c-can't!"

Gant's sickness had
returned on him with increased virulence.  His face was haggard
and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs.  It was
decided that he must go again to Baltimore.  Helen would go with
him.
 
 

"Mr. Gant,"
said Eliza persuasively, "why don't you just give up everything
and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days?  You
don't feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you,
I'd retire.  We could get $20,000 for your shop without any
trouble--If I had that much money to work with, I'd show them a thing
or two."  She nodded pertly with a smart wink.  "I
could turn it over two or three times within two years' time. 
You've got to trade quick to keep the ball a-rolling.  That's
the way it's done."

"Merciful God,"
he groaned.  "That's my last refuge on earth. Woman, have
you no mercy?  I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won't
be long now.  You can do what you please with it after I'm gone,
but give me a little peace now.  In the name of Jesus, I ask
it!"  He sniffled affectedly.

"Pshaw!" said
Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him.  "There's
nothing wrong with you.  Half of it's only imagination."

He groaned, turning his
head away.
 
 

Summer died upon the
hills.  There was a hue, barely guessed, upon the foliage, of
red rust.  The streets at night were filled with sad lispings:
all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard the
strange noise of autumn.  And all the people who had given the
town its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight. 
They had gone back into the vast South again.  The solemn
tension of the war gathered about the nation.  A twilight of
grim effort hovered around him, above him.  He felt the death of
joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory.  Out of the
huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to
articulate the engines of war--engines to mill and print out hatred
and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush
opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.

But something of true
wonder had come upon the land--the flares and rockets of the
battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well.  Young
men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy.  In some foreign
earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. 
The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces
which held no strangeness of their own.  For, it is the union of
the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.

Luke had gone away to the
training-school at Newport.  Ben went to Baltimore with Helen
and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium
treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled
their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally
brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas
that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed
down chaotically with beer and whisky.  They all drank a great
deal: Gant's excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry
frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.

"You damned old
man!" cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as
he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed.  "I could wear
you out!  You're not sick; I've wasted my life nursing you, and
you're not as sick as I am!  You'll be here long after I'm gone,
you selfish old man!  It makes me furious!"

"Why, baby!" he
roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, "God bless you, I
couldn't do without you."

"Don't 'baby' me!"
she cried.

But she held his hand
next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he
turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind
and below him.

"I was a boy here,"
he muttered.

"Don't worry,"
she said, "we're going to make you well again.  Why! You'll
be a boy again!"

Hand in hand they entered
the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy
matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of
the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely
in among the broken lives--with arms proposed in an attitude of
enormous mercy--many times bigger than Gant's largest angel--is an
image of gentle Jesus.
 
 

Eugene went to see the
Leonards several times.  Margaret looked thin and ill, but the
great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly. 
Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience,
the great health of her spirit.  All of his sin, all of his
pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that
deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul
and ragged cloak.  He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of
seamless light.

But he could confess
little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the
university, he talked of little else.  His heart was packed with
its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she
would not understand.  She was too wise for anything but faith. 
Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a
confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began
to laugh.

"Mr. Leonard!"
she called.  "Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy! 
You don't know what love is.  Get along with you. There'll be
time enough to think of that ten years from now."  She
laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.
 
"Old 'Gene with a girl!  Pity the poor
girl!  Ah, Lord, Boy! That's a long way off for you.  Thank
your stars!"

He bent his head sharply,
and closed his eyes.  O My lovely Saint! he thought.  How
close you have been to me, if any one.  How I have cut my brain
open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how
alone I am, and always have been.
 
 

He walked through the
streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and
saddened by departures.  A few people hurried past, as if driven
along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind.  He was held in the
lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never
touched her.  But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling
and passionate.  She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It
seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years
later.
 
 

The house was almost
empty.  At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the
ironed shirts and mended socks with
satisfaction.

"Now, you have
plenty of good warm clothes, son.  Try to take care of them." 
She put Gant's check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a
safety-pin.

"Keep a sharp eye on
your money, boy.  You never know who you'll run up with on a
train."

He dawdled nervously
toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.

"It does seem you
might spend one night at home with your mother," she said
querulously.  Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to
work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile.  "I tell
you what!  It looks mighty funny, doesn't it?  You can't
stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off
with the first woman that comes along.  It's all right! 
It's all right. I'm not complaining.  It seems as if all I was
fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off." 
She burst volubly into tears.  "It seems that that's the
only use you have for me.  I've hardly laid eyes on you all
summer."

"No," he said
bitterly, "you've been too busy looking after the boarders. 
Don't think, mama, that you can work on my feelings here at the last
minute," he cried, already deeply worked-on.  "It's
easy to cry.  But I was here all the time if you had had time
for me.  Oh, for God's sake!  Let's make an end to this! 
Aren't things bad enough without it?  Why must you act this way
whenever I go off?  Do you want to make me as miserable as you
can?"

"Well, I tell you,"
said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once, "if I make a
couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me waiting for
you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring.  I've
got the lot picked out.  I was thinking about it the other day,"
she went on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.

"Ah-h!" he made
a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar.  "In
God's name!  Please!"  There was a silence.

"Well," said
Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, "I want you to be a good
boy and study hard, son.  Take care of your money--I want you to
have plenty of good food and warm clothes--but you mustn't be
extravagant, boy.  This sickness of your papa's has cost a lot
of money.  Everything is going out and nothing's coming in. 
Nobody knows where the next dollar's coming from.  So you've got
to watch out."

Again silence fell. 
She had said her say; she had come as close as she could, but
suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the bitter and
lonely secrecy of his life.

"I hate to see you
go, son," she said quietly, with a deep and indefinable sadness.

He cast his arms up
suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.

"What does it
matter!  Oh God, what does it matter!"  Eliza's eyes
filled with tears of real pain.  She grasped his hand and held
it.

"Try to be happy,
son," she wept, "try to be a little more happy. Poor
child!  Poor child!  Nobody ever knew you.  Before you
were born," she shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that
was drowned and husky with her tears.  Then, huskily, clearing
her throat, she repeated, "Before you were born--"
 
 

32
 

When he returned to the
university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly
to war.  It seemed quieter, sadder?the number of students was
smaller and they were younger.  The older ones had gone to war. 
The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. 
They were careless of colleges, careers, successes--the war had
thrilled them with its triumphing Now.  Of what use To-morrow! 
Of what use all labor for To-morrow!  The big guns had blown all
spun schemes to fragments: they hailed the end of all planned work
with a fierce, a secret joy.  The business of education went on
half-heartedly, with an abstracted look: in the classroom, their eyes
were vague upon the book, but their ears cocked attentively for
alarums and excursions without.
 
 

Eugene began the year
earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been the best student
in the Altamont High School.  His name was Bob Sterling. 
Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son of a widow.  He was
of middling height, always very neatly and soberly dressed; there was
nothing conspicuous about him.  For this reason, he could laugh
good-naturedly, a little smugly, at whatever was conspicuous. 
He had a good mind--bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by
originality or inventiveness.  He had a time for everything: he
apportioned a certain time for the preparation of each lesson, and
went over it three times, mumbling rapidly to himself.  He sent
his laundry out every Monday.  When in merry company he laughed
heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always kept track of the time. 
Presently, he would look at his watch, saying: "Well, this is
all very nice, but it's getting no work done," and he would go.

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.