by Thomas Wolfe
"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.
It was during this bitter and desperate autumn that Eugene first met Jim Trivett.
Jim Trivett, the son of a rich tobacco farmer in the eastern part of the State, was a good tempered young tough of twenty years. He was a strong, rather foul-looking boy, with a coarse protruding mouth, full-meated and slightly ajar, constantly rayed with a faint loose smile and blotted at the comer with a brown smear of tobacco juice. He had bad teeth. His hair was light-brown, dry, and unruly: it stuck out in large untidy mats. He was dressed in the last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion of the time: skin-tight trousers that ended an inch above his oxford shoes exposing an inch of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in across his kidneys, large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he wore a big sweater with high-school numerals.
Jim Trivett lived with several other students from his community in a lodging-house near Mrs. Bradley's but closer to the west gate of the university. There were four young men banded together for security and companionship in two untidy rooms heated to a baking dryness by small cast-iron stoves. They made constant preparations for study, but they never studied: one would enter sternly, announcing that he had "a hell of a day tomorrow," and begin the most minute preparations for a long contest with his books: he would sharpen his pencils carefully and deliberately, adjust his lamp, replenish the red-hot stove, move his chair, put on an eye-shade, clean his pipe, stuff it carefully with tobacco, light, relight, and empty it, then, with an expression of profound relief, hear a rapping on his door.
"Come in the house, Goddamn it!" he would roar hospitably.
"Hello, 'Gene! Pull up a chair, son, and sit down," said Tom Grant. He was a thickly built boy, gaudily dressed; he had a low forehead, black hair, and a kind, stupid, indolent temper.
"Have you been working?"
"Hell, yes!" shouted Jim Trivett. "I've been working like a son-of-a-bitch."
"God!" said Tom Grant, turning slowly to look at him. "Boy, you're going to choke to death on one of those some day." He shook his head slowly and sadly, then continued with a rough laugh: "If old man Trivett knew what you were doing with his money, damn if he wouldn't bust a gut."
"Gene!" said Jim Trivett, "what the hell do you know about this damned English, anyway?"
"What he doesn't know about it," said Tom Grant, "you could write out on the back of a postage stamp. Old man Sanford thinks you're hell, 'Gene."
"I thought you had Torrington," said Jim Trivett.
"No," said Eugene, "I wasn't English enough. Young and crude. I changed, thank God! What is it you want, Jim?" he asked.
"I've got a long paper to write. I don't know what to write about," said Jim Trivett.
"What do you want me to do? Write it for you?"
"Yes," said Jim Trivett.
"Write your own damn paper," said Eugene with mimic toughness, "I won't do it for you. I'll help you if I can."
"When are you going to let Hard Boy take you to Exeter?" said Tom Grant, winking at Jim Trivett.
Eugene flushed, making a defensive answer.
"I'm ready to go any time he is," he said uneasily.
"Look here, Legs!" said Jim Trivett, grinning loosely. "Do you really want to go with me or are you just bluffing?"
"I'll go with you! I've told you I'd go with you!" Eugene said angrily. He trembled a little.
Tom Grant grinned slyly at Jim Trivett.
"It'll make a man of you, 'Gene," he said. "Boy, it'll sure put hair on your chest." He laughed, not loudly, but uncontrollably, shaking his head as at some secret thought.
Jim Trivett's loose smile widened. He spat into the wood-box.
"Gawd!" he said. "They'll think Spring is here when they see old Legs. They'll need a stepladder to git at him."
Tom Grant was shaken with hard fat laughter.
"They sure God will!" he said.
"Well, what about it, 'Gene?" Jim Trivett demanded suddenly. "Is it a go? Saturday?"
"Suits me!" said Eugene.
When he had gone, they grinned thirstily at each other for a moment, the pleased corrupters of chastity.
"Pshaw!" said Tom Grant. "You oughtn't to do that, Hard Boy. You're lea
ding the boy astray."
"It's not going to hurt him," said Jim Trivett. "It'll be good for him."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning.
"Wait a minute!" whispered Jim Trivett. "I think this is the place."
They had turned away from the centre of the dreary tobacco town. For a quarter of an hour they had walked briskly through drab autumnal streets, descending finally a long rutted hill that led them, past a thinning squalor of cheap houses, almost to theoutskirts. It was three weeks before Christmas: the foggy air was full of chill menace. There was a brooding quietness, broken by far small sounds. They turned into a sordid little road, unpaved, littered on both sides with negro shacks and the dwellings of poor whites. It was a world of rickets. The road was unlighted. Their feet stirred dryly through fallen leaves.
They paused before a two-storey frame house. A lamp burned dimly behind lowered yellow shades, casting a murky pollen out upon the smoky air.
"Wait a minute," said Jim Trivett, in a low voice, "I'll find out."
They heard scuffling steps through the leaves. In a moment a negro man prowled up.
"Hello, John," said Jim Trivett, almost inaudibly.
"Evenin', boss!" the negro answered wearily, but in the same tone.
"We're looking for Lily Jones' house," said Jim Trivett. "Is this it?"
"Yes, suh," said the negro, "dis is it."
Eugene leaned against a tree, listening to their quiet conspiratorial talk. The night, vast and listening, gathered about him its evil attentive consciousness. His lips were cold and trembled. He thrust a cigarette between them and, shivering, turned up the thick collar of his overcoat.