by Thomas Wolfe
"What is it? What's the matter? Dear?"
"Eugene--my dear, you're only a child. I'm so old--a grown woman."
"You're only twenty-one," he said. "There's only five years' difference. That's nothing."
"Oh!" she said. "You don't know what you're saying. It's all the difference in the world."
"When I'm twenty, you'll be twenty-five. When I'm twenty-six, you'll be thirty-one. When I'm forty-eight, you'll be fifty-three. What's that?" he said contemptuously. "Nothing."
"Everything," she said, "everything. If I were sixteen, and you twenty-one it would be nothing. But you're a boy and I'm a woman. When you're a young man I'll be an old maid; when you grow old I shall be dying. How do you know where you'll be, what you'll be doing five years from now?" she continued in a moment. "You're only a boy--you've just started college. You have no plans yet. You don't know what you're going to do."
"Yes, I do!" he yelled furiously. "I'm going to be a lawyer. That's what they're sending me for. I'm going to be a lawyer, and I'm going into politics. Perhaps," he added with gloomy pleasure, "you'll be sorry then, after I make a name for myself." With bitter joy he foresaw his lonely celebrity. The Governor's Mansion. Forty rooms. Alone. Alone.
"You're going to be a lawyer," said Laura, "and you're going everywhere in the world, and I'm to wait for you, and never get married. You poor kid!" She laughed softly. "You don't know what you're going to do."
He turned a face of misery on her; brightness dropped from the sun.
"You don't care?" he choked. "You don't care?" He bent his head to hide his wet eyes.
"Oh, my dear," she said, "I do care. But people don't live like that. It's like a story. Don't you know that I'm a grown woman? At my age, dear, most girls have begun to think of getting married. What--what if I had begun to think of it, too?"
"Married!" The word came from him in a huge gasp of horror as if she had mentioned the abominable, proposed the unspeakable. Then, having heard the monstrous suggestion, he immediately accepted it as a fact. He was like that.
"So! That's it!" he said furiously. "You're going to get married, eh? You have fellows, have you? You go out with them, do you? You've known it all the time, and you've tried to fool me."
Nakedly, with breast bare to horror, he scourged himself, knowing in the moment that the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in the probable--the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds treason in the dark.
"You have fellows--you let them feel you. They feel your legs, they play with your breasts, they--" His voice became inaudible through strangulation.
"No. No, my dear. I haven't said so," she rose swiftly to a sitting position, taking his hands. "But there's nothing unusual about getting married, you know. Most people do. Oh, my dear! Don't look like that! Nothing has happened. Nothing! Nothing!"
He seized her fiercely, unable to speak. Then he buried his face in her neck.
"Laura! My dear! My sweet! Don't leave me alone! I've been alone! I've always been alone!"
"It's what you want, dear. It's what you'll always want. You couldn't stand anything else. You'd get so tired of me. You'll forget this ever happened. You'll forget me. You'll forget--forget."
"Forget! I'll never forget! I won't live long enough."
"And I'll never love any one else! I'll never leave you! I'll wait for you forever! Oh, my child, my child!"
They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This would endure.
He kissed her on her splendid eyes; he grew into her young Mé body, his heart numbed deliciously against the pressure of her narrow breasts. She was as lithe and yielding to his sustaining hand as a willow rod--she was bird-swift, more elusive in repose than the dancing water-motes upon her face. He held her tightly lest she grow into the tree again, or be gone amid the wood like smoke.
Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
31
One day, when June was coming to its end, Laura James said to him:
"I shall have to go home next week." Then, seeing his stricken face, she added, "but only for a few days--not more than a week."
"But why? The summer's only started. You will burn up down there."
"Yes. It's silly, I know. But my people expect me for the Fourth of July. You know, we have an enormous family--hundred of aunts, cousins, and in-laws. We have a family re-union every year?a great barbecue and picnic. I hate it. But they'd never forgive me if I didn't come."
Frightened, he looked at her for a moment.
"Laura! You're coming back, aren't you?" he said quietly.
"Yes, of course," she said. "Be quiet."
He was trembling violently; he was afraid to question her more closely.
"Be quiet," she whispered, "quiet!" She put her arms around him.
He went with her to the station on a hot mid-afternoon. There was a smell of melted tar in the streets. She held his hand beside her in the rattling trolley, squeezing his fingers to give him comfort, and whispering from time to time:
"In a week! Only a week, dear."
"I don't see the need," he muttered. "It's over 400 miles. Just for a few days."
He passed the old one-legged gateman on the station platform very easily, carrying her baggage. Then he sat beside her in the close green heat of the pullman until the train should go. A little electric fan droned uselessly above the aisle; a prim young lady whom he knew, arranged herself amid the bright new leather of her bags. She returned his greeting elegantly, with a shade of refined hauteur, then looked out the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed at her raptly from the platform. Several prosperous merchants went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan's drone.
"Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?"
"Hello, Jim. No, I'm running up to Richmond for a few days." But even the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that hot chariot to the East.
"'Board!"
He got up trembling.
"In a few days, dear." She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved palms.
"You will write as soon as you get there? Please!"
"Yes. To-morrow--at once."
He bent down suddenly and whispered, "Laura--you will come back. You will come back!"
She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more; she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.
"My dear, my dear! Don't forget me ever!"
"Never. Come back. Come back."
The salt print of her kiss was on his
mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.
"Come back again!"
But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.
Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious little American flags, this:
"My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I couldn't sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little Richmond is too ghastly for words--everything burned up and every one gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for a week!" (Good! he thought. If the weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.) "It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air. Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?" (Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.) "Will you promise to look after your hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again but, don't worry, I'll have my own way in the end. I always do. I don't know any one at home any more--all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married already. That leaves only the kids." (He winced. As old as I am, maybe older.) "Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are.
LAURA."
He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.
There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:
"July 4.
"Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I've been engaged to him almost a year. We're going off quietly to Norfolk to-morrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn't tell you! I tried to, but couldn't. I didn't want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn't been so young, but what's the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don't forget me. Good-by and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you."
When he had finished the letter, he re-read it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun's vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day's distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.
And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew's great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of death--alone, alone.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha!" Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. "Your girl went and got married, didn't she? She fooled you. You got left."
"Wh-a-a-a-t!" said Eliza banteringly, "has my boy been--as the fellow says" (she sniggered behind her hand) "has my boy been a-courtin'?" She puckered her lips in playful reproach.
"Oh, for God's sake," he muttered angrily. "What fellow says!"
His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister's eye. They laughed.
"Well, 'Gene," said the girl seriously, "forget about it. You're only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman."
"Why, son," said Eliza with a touch of malice, "that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on."
"Oh, stop it, please."
"Cheer up!" said Helen heartily. "Your time's coming. You'll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you're a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation."
"Why, yes," said Eliza, "I'd make a big joke of it all. I wouldn't let on to her that it affected me. I'd write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I'd show them! That's what I'd--"
"Oh, for God's sake!" he groaned, starting up. "Leave me alone, won't you?"
He left the house.
But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:
". . . and I hope he's worth having you--he can't deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that's something. How lucky he is! You're right about me--I'm too young. I'd cut off my hand now for eight or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.
"Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won't, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I'm lost now and I'll never find the way again. In God's name write me a line when you get this. Tell me what your name is now--you never have. Tell me where you're going to live. Don't let me go entirely, I beg of you, don't leave me alone."
He sent the letter to the address she had given him--to her father's house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a terrible tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no word came, July ended. The summer waned. She did not write.
Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh rocked with laughter.
The boarders said: "Eugene's lost his girl. He doesn't know what to do, he's lost his girl."
"Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?"
The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.
"Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl."
The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their full-meated mouths.
"Don't let them kid you, big boy. What's the matter: did some one get your girl?" asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing with hoarse compassion:
"Git another girl, 'Gene. Why, law! I'd not let it bother me two minutes." He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto, after speaking.
"You should worry, boy. You should WORRY!" said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. "
Women are like street-cars: if you miss one, there's another along in fifteen minutes. Ain't that right, lady?" he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. "Oh, aren't men the awfullest--"
Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake Clapp, a well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:
"I thought she was too old for him when I saw her. 'Gene's only a kid. He's taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is. He's going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He's thin as a bone. He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first disease that comes along--"
Her melancholy whine continued as Jake's stealthy thigh fumbled against her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.
In the gray darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat's in the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.
"He'll git over it," said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry. "Every boy has got to go through the Calf-Love stage. When I was about 'Gene's age--" He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.
"He'd better watch out," whined Florry sadly. "I know what I'm talking about. That boy's not strong--he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does. He's on the verge of--"
Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.