by Thomas Wolfe
"Harold! Harold!" said Elk Duncan reprovingly. "Damn, son! You're getting hard! If you go on like this, you'll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest of us, please. 'Gene here's only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I've always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don't you know he'd be shocked? He'd cut off your cigarette money, son."
"I don't give a damn what he'd do, Elk, nor you either!" said Harold toughly, grinning. "So, what the hell!" he roared as loudly as he could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory--cries of "Go to hell!" "Cut it out!" and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant's death-warrant.
"Then how long can he live?" asked Helen.
He shrugged his shoulders. "My dear girl!" he said. "I have no idea. The man's a miracle. Do you know that he's Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look. How long can he last? I'll swear to nothing--I no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again. I doubted if he would last the winter through. But he's back again. He may be back many times."
"Can you help him at all? Do you think the radium does any good?"
"I can give him relief for a time. I can even check the growth of the disease for a time. Beyond that, I can do nothing. But his vitality is enormous. He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge--but which hangs, nevertheless."
Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles sword. Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard feet. The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it had its outburst daily at Eliza's or in her own home. Hugh Barton had purchased a house to which he had taken her.
"You'll get no peace," he said, "as long as you're near them. That's what's wrong with you now."
She had frequent periods of sickness. She went constantly to the doctors for treatment and advice. Sometimes she went to the hospital for several days. Her illness manifested itself in various ways--sometimes in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which was governed partly by Gant's illness and a morbid despair over her failure to bear a child. She drank stealthily at all times--she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never enough for drunkenness. She drank vile liquids--seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a dozen abominations called "tonics" and "extracts." Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood. This self-deception was characteristic of her. Her life expressed itself through a series of deceptions--of symbols: her dislikes, affections, grievances, brandishing every cause but the real one.
But, unless actually bedridden, she was never absent from her father for many hours. The shadow of his death lay over their lives. They shuddered below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma, deprived them of dignity and courage. They were dominated by the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law. It was as hard for them to think of Gant's death as of God's death: it was a great deal harder, because he was more real to them than God, he was more immortal than God, he was God.
This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and choked him with fury. He would grow enraged after reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody. They have taken his courage away! he thought. They have made a whining coward out of him! No, and if I die, no damned family about. Blowing their messy breaths in your face! Snuffling down their messy noses at you! Gathering around you till you can't breathe. Telling you how well you're looking with hearty smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back. O messy, messy, messy death! Shall we never be alone? Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves alone? Ah! but I shall! I shall! Alone, alone, and far away, with falling rain. Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.
"Are we to die like rats?" he said. "Are we to smother in a hole?"
"Damn!" said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.
"Yes, that's right, that's right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon Bonaparte and I'm your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!" he called. "Help! He killed the keeper and got out."
"'Gene!" yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk's great names. "What do you know about history? Who signed Magna Charta, eh?"
"It wasn't signed," said Eugene. "The King didn't know how to write, so they mimeographed it."
"Correct!" roared Harold Gay. "Who was é the Unready?"
"He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed," said Eugene.
"On his Uncle Jasper's side," said Elk Duncan, "he was related to Paul the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous."
"He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused to be cowed," said Eugene.
"Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope," said Elk Duncan. "This caused a great schism in the Church."
"But as usual, God was on the side of the greatest number of canons," said Eugene. "Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its fortune in the Gold Rush of '49."
"You boys are too good for me!" yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly. "Come on! Who's going to the Pic?"
The Pic was the only purchasable entertainment that the village afforded steadily. It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a howling tribe of students who rushed down aisles, paved with peanut-shells, through a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting themselves studiously for the remainder of the evening to the unhappy heads and necks of Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of applause, indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets that wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen. A weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost constantly at a batteredpiano. If she was idle for five minutes, the whole pack howled ironically, demanding: "Music, Myrtle! Music!"
It was necessary to speak to every one. If one spoke to every one, one was "democratic"; if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes. The appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was coarse and blunt. They were suspicious of all eminence. They had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual. A man was brilliant? Was there a bright sparkle to him? Bad, bad! He was not safe; he was not sound. The place was a democratic microcosmos--seething with political interests: national, regional, collegiate.
The campus had its candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the State. A youngster developed in college the political craft he was later to exert in Party affairs. The son of a politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman. The boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely to benefit him later. By his junior year, if he was successful, he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely weighed with cordiality:
"Ah, there, gentlemen." "Gentlemen, how are you?" "A nice day, gentlemen."
The
vast champaign of the world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant reverberation of an idea. They could get no greater glory for themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory--the way to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever--was through the law, a string tie, and a hat. Hence politics, law schools, debating societies, and speechmaking. The applause of listening senates to command.
The yokels, of course, were in the saddle--they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues. Usually, these dignities?the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.'s, and the managerships of athletic teams--were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions. Such an industrious hack was called an "all-round man." He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects. He was a universal Two Man. He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.
In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly. He was outside the pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person. He could never be an all-round man. Obviously, he would never be governor. Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things. He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise. Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such. We are not all made for weighty business.
He was happier than he had ever been in his life, and more careless. His physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful. His escape from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending, that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial buoyance, drunken freedom. He had come to the place alone, without companions. He had no connections. He had, even now, not one close friend. And this isolation was in his favor. Every one knew him at sight: every one called him by name, and spoke to him kindly. He was not disliked. He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with enthusiastic gusto. He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes. He was closer to a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more alone. He was filled with a divine indifference for all appearance. Joy ran like a great wine through his young expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths with wild cries in his throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to focus the blind desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet all of his formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.
He began to join. He joined everything. He had never "belonged" to any group before, but now all groups were beckoning him. He had without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and the magazine. The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into a gushet. It began to sprinkle, then it rained. He was initiated into literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a social fraternity. He joined enthusiastically, submitted with fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.
But not without labor had his titles come. The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura. She haunted him. When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter. There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.
"Well!" said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, "let's all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know!" She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes were wet. "It may be the last time we're all together. The old trouble! The old trouble!" she said hoarsely, turning to him.
"What old trouble?" he said angrily. "Good God, why are you so mysterious?"
"My heart!" she whispered, with a brave smile. "I've said nothing to any one. But last week--I thought I was gone." This was delivered in a boding whisper.
"Oh, my God!" he groaned. "You'll be here when the rest of us are rotten."
Helen burst into a raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face, and prodding him roughly with her big fingers.
"K-K-K-K-K-K-K! Did you ever know it to fail? Did you? If you come to her with one of your kidneys gone, she's always got something worse the matter with her. No, sir! I've never known it to fail!"
"You may laugh! You may laugh!" said Eliza with a smile of watery bitterness. "But I may not be here to laugh at much longer."
"Good heavens, mama!" the girl cried irritably. "There's nothing wrong with you. You're not the sick one! Papa's the sick one. He's the one that needs attention. Can't you realize that?he's dying. He may not last the winter out. I'm the sick one! You'll be here long after we're both gone."
"You never know," said Eliza mysteriously. "You never know who'll be the first one to go. Only last week, there was Mr. Cosgrave, as fine a looking man as--"
"They're off!" Eugene screamed with a crazy laugh, stamping up and down the kitchen in a frenzy. "By God! They're off!"
At this moment, one of the aged harpies, of whom the house always sheltered two or three during the grim winter, lurched from the hall back into the door-space. She was a large raw-boned hag, a confirmed drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.
"Mrs. Gant," said she, writhing her loose gray lips horribly before she could speak. "Did I get a letter? Have you seen him?"
"Seen who? Go on!" said Eliza fretfully. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't believe you do, either."
Smiling hideously at them all, and pawing the air, the monster got under way again, disappearing like an old wagon with loose wheels. Helen began to laugh, hoarsely, as Eugene's face hung forward with mouth half-open in an expression of sullen stupefaction. Eliza laughed, too, slily, rubbing her nosewing with a finger.
"I'll vow!" she said. "I believe she's crazy. She takes dope of some sort--that's certain. It makes my flesh crawl when she comes around."
"Then why do you keep her in the house?" said Helen resentfully. "Good heavens, mama! You could get rid of her if you wanted to. Poor old 'Gene!" she said, beginning to laugh again. "You always catch it, don't you?"
"The time draws near the birth of Christ," said he, piously.
She laughed; then, with abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large chin.
His father spent most of the day staring vacantly into the parlor fire. Miss Florry Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her silence: she rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the minute, with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts. Occasionally she talked of death and disease. Gant had aged and wasted shockingly. His heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks: his face was waxen and transparent--it was like a great beak. He looked clean and fragile. The cancer, Eugene thought, flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful plant. His mind was very clear, not doting, but sad and old. He spoke little, with almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost as soon as one answered.
"How have you been, son?" he asked. "Are you getting along all right?"
"Yes. I am a reporter on the paper now; I may be managing editor next year. I have been elected to several organizations," he went on eagerly, glad of the rare chance to speak to one of them about his life. But when he looked up again, his father's stare was fixed sadly in the fire. The boy stopped in confusion, pierced with a bit
ter pain.
"That's good," said Gant, hearing him speak no more. "Be a good boy, son. We're proud of you."
Ben came home two days before Christmas: he prowled through the house like a familiar ghost. He had left the town early in the autumn, after his return from Baltimore. For three months he had wandered alone through the South, selling to the merchants in small towns space for advertisements upon laundry cards. How well this curious business succeeded he did not say: he was scrupulously neat, but threadbare and haggard, and more fiercely secretive than ever. He had found employment at length upon a newspaper in a rich tobacco town of the Piedmont. He was going there after Christmas.
He had come to them, as always, bearing gifts.
Luke came in from the naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve. They heard his sonorous tenor shouting greetings to people in the street; he entered the house upon a blast of air. Everyone began to grin.
"Well, here we are! The Admiral's back! Papa, how's the boy! Well, for God's sake!" he cried, embracing Gant, and slapping his back. "I thought I was coming to see a sick man! You're looking like the flowers that bloom in the Spring."
"Pretty well, my boy. How are you?" said Gant, with a pleased grin.
"Couldn't be better, Colonel 'Gene, how are you, Old Scout? Good!" he said, without waiting for an answer. "Well, well, if it isn't Old Baldy," he cried, pumping Ben's hand. "I didn't know whether you'd be here or not. Mama, old girl," he said, as he embraced her, "how're they going? Still hitting on all six. Fine!" he yelled, before any one could reply to anything.