Look Homeward, Angel

by Thomas Wolfe

  He muttered his disgust. Not the same! Not the same! Nothing the same! In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man . . . until not a single commissioned officer was left . . . 36 came back . . . since 1789 . . . it must go on! . . . 19, sir--all under one hundred and seventeen . . . must . . . go . . . on!

  His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently. The horses trotted out of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked rumble of rubber tires.

  George Graves and Eugene entered Wood's pharmacy and stood up to the counter. The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew a sopping rag across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab.

  "What's yours?" he said irritably.

  "I want a chock-lut milk," said Eugene.

  "Make it two," added George Graves.

  O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delvé earth!

  25

  Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it appeared, hung in the balance.

  The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was full. His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinstress with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of English in a New York City public school. Day by day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of blood and desolation mount through the world. Miss Crane's thin red nostrils quivered with indignation. Her old gray eyes were sharp with anger. The idea! The idea!

  For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired love for Albion's Isle than American ladies who teach its noble tongue.

  Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his ribs. The air was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly throbbing of great guns.

  "We must be fair!" said Margaret Leonard. "We must be fair!" But her eyes darkened when she read the news of England's entry, and her throat was trembling like a bird's. When she looked up her eyes were wet.

  "Ah, Lord!" she said. "You'll see things now."

  "Little Bobs!" roared Sheba.

  "God bless him! Did you see where he's going to take the field?"

  John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high drooling laughter.

  "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.

  "Come on!" said Max Isaacs, whom he still occasionally saw. "We're going to have a good time, son."

  "Yeah, man!" said Malvin Bowden, whose mother was conducting the tour. "You can still git beer in Charleston," he added with a dissipated leer.

  "You can go swimmin' in the ocean at the Isle of Palms," said Max Isaacs. Then, reverently, he added: "You can go to the Navy Yard an' see the ships."

  He was waiting until he should be old enough to join the navy. He read the posters greedily. He knew all the navy men at the enlistment office. He had read all the booklets--he was deep in naval lore. He knew to a dollar the earnings of firemen, second class, of radio men, and of all kinds of C. P. O's.

  His father was a plumber. He did not want to be a plumber. He wanted to join the navy and see the world. In the navy, a man was given good pay and a good education. He learned a trade. He got good food and good clothing. It was all given to him free, for nothing.

  "H'm!" said Eliza, with a bantering smile. "Why, say, boy, what do you want to do that for? You're my baby!"

  It had been years since he was. She smiled tremulously.

  "Yes'm," said Eugene. "Can I go? It's only for five days. I've got the money." He thrust his hand into his pocket, feeli
ng.

  "I tell you what!" said Eliza, working her lips, smiling. "You may wish you had that money before this winter's over. You're going to need new shoes and a warm overcoat when the cold weather comes. You must be mighty rich. I wish I could afford to go running off on a trip like that."

  "Oh, my God!" said Ben, with a short laugh. He tossed his cigarette into one of the first fires of the year.

  "I want to tell you, son," said Eliza, becoming grave, "you've got to learn the value of a dollar or you'll never have a roof to call your own. I want you to have a good time, boy, but you mustn't squander your money."

  "Yes'm," said Eugene.

  "For heaven's sake!" Ben cried. "It's the kid's own money. Let him do what he likes with it. If he wants to throw it out the damned window, it's his own business."

  She clasped her hands thoughtfully upon her waist and stared away, pursing her lips.

  "Well, I reckon it'll be all right," she said. "Mrs. Bowden will take care of you."

  It was his first journey to a strange place alone. Eliza packed an old valise carefully, and stowed away a box of sandwiches and eggs. He went away at night. As he stood by his valise, washed, brushed, excited, she wept a little. He was again, she felt, a little farther off. The hunger for voyages was in his face.

  "Be a good boy," she said. "Don't get into any trouble down there." She thought carefully a moment, looking away. Then she went down in her stocking, and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

  "Don't waste your money," she said. "Here's a little extra. You may need it."

  "Come here, you little thug!" said Ben. Scowling, his quick hands worked busily at the boy's stringy tie. He jerked down his vest, slipping a wadded ten-dollar bill into Eugene's pocket. "Behave yourself," he said, "or I'll beat you to death."

  Max Isaacs whistled from the street. He went out to join them.

  There were six in Mrs. Bowden's party: Max Isaacs, Malvin Bowden, Eugene, two girls named Josie and Louise, and Mrs. Bowden. Josie was Mrs. Bowden's niece and lived with her. She was a tall beanpole of a girl with a prognathous mouth and stick-out grinning teeth. She was twenty. The other girl, Louise, was a waitress. She was small, plump, a warm brunette. Mrs. Bowden was a little sallow woman with ratty brown hair. She had brown worn-out eyes. She was a dressmaker. Her husband, a carpenter, had died in the Spring. There was a little insurance money. That was how she came