Look Homeward, Angel

by Thomas Wolfe

  "I'm not old enough," said Eugene. "You're not, either."

  "I'll be sixteen in November," said Max Isaacs defensively.

  'That's not old enough."

  "I'm going to lie to get in," said Max Isaacs. "They won't bother you. You can get in. Come on."

  "No," said Eugene. "I can't."

  "Why not?" said Max Isaacs. "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to college," said Eugene. "I'm going to get an education and study law."

  "You'll have lots of time," said Max Isaacs. "You can go to college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good training. You go everywhere."

  "No," said Eugene. "I can't."

  But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end.

  Mrs. Bowden's niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh.

  Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk.

  Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears.

  Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water. She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin, drinking her breath. She gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water, and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty kisses.

  Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth.

  "I like you! I like you a lot!" he said.

  "What did they tell you about me?" she said. "Did they talk about me?"

  "I don't care," he said. "I don't care about that. I like you."

  "You won't remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls. You'll forget about me. Some day you'll see me, and you won't even know me. You won't recognize me. You'll pass without speaking."

  "No," he said. "I'll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live."

  Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed him. They were hill-born.

  He returned in late September.

  In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened.

  Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.

  "I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife! . . . Do you see its shadow? . . . There! There! There!"

  With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.

  "Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you've come at last to take the old man with you? . . . There he stands--the Grim Reaper--as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!"

  Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.

  "Don't worry," said the nurse encouragingly, "the mortality's only four per cent. It used to be thirty. He's reduced it."

  Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter's vital grasp.

  "Don't worry, old boy!" she said, "you're going to be as good as you ever were, after this."

  She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.

  But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly.

  "All right!" he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. "Close the wound."

  Gant was dying of cancer.

  Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.

  "There," he said pointing, "is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter's hotel stood about there," he pointed.

  "Dig down!" said Helen, grinning.

  Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate. His life seemed strange to him.

  "We'll go to see all those places when you get out of here. They're going to let you out of here, day after to-morrow. Did you know that? Did you know you're almost well?" she cried with a big smile.

  "I'm going to be a well man after this," said Gant. "I feel twenty years younger!"

  "Poor old papa!" she said. "Poor old papa!"

  Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his head against her.

  27

  My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once--at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: "This above all: to thine own self be true." The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land.

  Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson's, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters: "My Shakespeare, rise!" The large plump face--"as damned silly a head as ever I looked at"--stared baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his table.

  He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand.

  "My Shakespeare, rise!"

  With red resentful face, he rose.

  "Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?" or, "Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?" said Ben, scowling at him.

  "My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?" said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: "That's a shame! We oughtn't to treat the poor kid like that." Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing absently--penitently, laughing.

  But--"his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it whole. He was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every shore of thought. He was all things in one: lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman. Men of science have been amazed by the depth of his learning. In The Merchant of Venice, he deals with the most technical questions of law with the skill of an attorney. In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a remedy for Lear's insanity. 'Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care.' Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of modern science by almost three centuries. In his sympathetic and well-rounded sense of characterization, he laughs with, not at, his characters."

  Eugene won the medal--bronze or of some other material even more enduring. The Bard's profile murkily indented. W. S. 1616-1916. A long and useful life.

  The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple. Its author--Dr. George B. Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper with the Ben Greet players--had
seen to that. All the words had been written by Dr. George B. Rockham, and all the words, accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B. Rockham. Dr. George B. Rockham was the Voice of History. The innocent children of Altamont's schools were the mute illustrations of that voice.

  Eugene was Prince Hal. The day before the pageant his costume arrived from Philadelphia. At John Dorsey Leonard's direction he put it on. Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the school veranda, fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a six-inch hiatus of raw thigh.

  John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.

  "Here, boy," he said. "Let me see!"

  He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result save to open up large runs in them. Then John Dorsey Leonard began to laugh. He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a high whine, full of spittle, presently emerged.

  "O-oh my Lord!" he gasped. "Egscuse me!" he panted, seeing the boy's angry face. "It's the funniest thing I ever--" at this moment his voice died of paralysis.

  "I'll fix you," said Miss Amy. "I've got just the thing for you."

  She gave him a full baggy clown's suit, of green linen. It was a relic of a Hallowe'en party; its wide folds were gartered about his ankles.

  He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.

  "That's not right, is it?" he asked. "He never wore anything like this, did he?"

  Miss Amy looked. Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto laughter.

  "Yes, that's right! That's fine!" she yelled. "He was like that, anyway. No one will ever notice, boy." She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair which widened with a protesting creak.

  "Oh, Lord!" she groaned, wet-cheeked. "I don't believe I ever saw--"

  The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor House. Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green hollow--a natural amphitheatre. His audience sat on the turf of the encircling banks. As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B. Rockham disposed of each character neatly in descriptive pentameter verse. He was dressed in the fashion of the Restoration--a period he coveted because it understood the charms of muscular calves. His heavy legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles.

  Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of trees. It was rich young May. "Doc" Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him. His small tough face grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of wadding. Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow left a dropsical depression.

  He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene:

  "Hal," said he, "you're a hell of a looking prince."

  "You're no beauty, Jack," said Eugene.

  Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword with a flourish.

  "I challenge you, Hal," said he.

  In the young shimmering light their tin swords clashed rapidly. Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and saddle sprawled, all of the Bard's personé Julius Arthur thrust swiftly, was warded, then, with loose grin, buried his brand suddenly in "Doc" Hines' receiving paunch. The company of the immortal shrieked happily.

  Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed angrily among them.

  "Sh!" she hissed loudly. "Sh-h!" She was very angry. She had spent the afternoon hissing loudly.

  Swinging gently in her side-saddle, Rosalind, on horseback, a ripe little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at him. Looking, he forgot.

  Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened slowly, broke off in minute fragments, and disappeared into the hidden gulch of Dr. George Rockham's receiving voice. With fat hammy sonority he welcomed them.

  But he had not come to Shakespeare. The pageant had opened with the Voices of Past and Present--voices a trifle out of harmony with the tenor of event--but necessary to the commercial success of the enterprise. These voices now moved voicelessly past?four frightened sales-ladies from Schwartzberg's, clad decently in cheese-cloth and sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their concern. Or, as the doctor's more eloquent iambics had it:

  "Fair Commerce, sister of the arts, thou, too,

  Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage."

  They came and passed: Ginsberg's--"the glass of fashion and the mould of form"; Bradley the Grocer--"when first Pomona held her fruity horn"; The Buick Agency--"the chariots of Oxus and of Ind."

  Came, passed--like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

  Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the marshalled legions of Altamont's Sunday schools, each in white arrayed and clutching grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God's small angels, and surely there for God knows what far-off event, began to move into the hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet and palms.

  "One, two, THREE, four. One, two, THREE, four. Quickly, children!"

  A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple doctrine of "It's the Old-time Religion"; the Methodists, with "I'll Be Waiting at the River"; the Presbyterians, with "Rock of Ages," the Episcopalians, with "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"; and rising to lyrical climactic passion, the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of "Onward, Christian Soldiers."

  They passed without laughter. There was a pause.

  "Well, thank God for that!" said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet. The Bard's strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line.

  "Sh-h! Sh-h!" hissed Miss Ida Nelson.

  "What the hell does she think she is?" said Julius Arthur, "a steam valve?"

  Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola.

  "Wow!" said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. "Look who's here!"

  She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never told her love.

  Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor's stealthy sign. Carefully, in slow twos, she fed them down to him.

  The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves.

  "Tell him who you are, Villa," said Doc Hines. "You look like Jack Johnson."

  The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively, from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last stronghold of philosophy, the author of this chronicle looked down on everything.

  "Here we go, Hal," said Doc Hines, nudging Eugene.

  "Give 'em hell, son," said Julius Arthur. "You're dressed for the part."

  "He looks it, you mean," said Ralph Rolls. "Boy, you'll knock 'em dead," he added with an indecent laugh.

  They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low but growing titter of amazement from the audience. Before them, the doctor had just disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful obeisance. He was now engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy, till his ordeal should finish. In a moment, he strode away, and the doctor turned to Falstaff, reading the man by his padded belly, briskly, with relief:

  "Now, Tragedy, begone, and to our dell

  Bring antic Jollity with cap and bells:

  Falstaff, thou prince of jesters, lewd old man

  Who surfeited a royal prince with mirth,

  And swayed a kingdom with his wanton quips--"

  Embarrassed by the growing undertone of laughter, Doc Hines squinted around with a tough grin, gave a comical hitch to his padded figure, and whispered a hoarse aside to Eugene: "Hear that, Hal? I'm hell on wheels, ain't I?"

  Eugene saw him depart in a green blur, and presently became aware that an unnatural silence had descended upon Doctor George B. Rockham. The Voice
of History was, for the moment, mute. Its long jaw, in fact, had fallen ajar.

  Dr. George B. Rockham looked wildly about him for succor. He rolled his eyes entreatingly upwards at Miss Ida Nelson. She turned her head away.

  "Who are you?" he said hoarsely, holding a hairy hand carefully beside his mouth.

  "Prince Hal," said Eugene, likewise hoarsely and behind his hand.

  Dr. George B. Rockham staggered a little. Their speech had reached the stalls. But firmly, before the tethered chafing laughter, he began:

  "Friend to the weak and comrade of the wild,

  By folly sired to wisdom, dauntless Hal--"

  Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose flood by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earth-shaking, thunder-cuffing, drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say. Laughter! Laughter! Laughter!

  Helen was married in the month of June--a month sacred, it is said, to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god's blessing is probably not infallible.

  She had returned to Altamont in May, from her last singing engagement. She had been in Atlanta for the week of opera, and had come back by way of Henderson, where she had visited Daisy and Mrs. Selborne. There she had found her mate.

  He was not a stranger to her. She had known him years before in Altamont, where he had lived for a short time as district agent for the great and humane corporation that employed him--the Federal Cash Register Company. Since that time he had gone to various parts of the country at his master's bidding, carrying with him his great message of prosperity and thrift. At the present time, he lived with his sister and his aged mother, whose ponderous infirmity of limb had not impaired her appetite, in a South Carolina town. He was devoted and generous to them both. And the Federal Cash Register Company, touched by his devotion to duty, rewarded him with a good salary. His name was Barton. The Bartons lived well.