by Thomas Wolfe
As they grew more efficient in their work they were called back, after the day's end, for work at night. This extra work, with its time-and-a-half pay, he would otherwise have been glad to get, but stumbling from exhaustion, the command to return was horrible. For several days now he had not been home to the dingy little room which he shared with Sinker Jordan. At the end of his day's work, he would climb to a little oasis in the enormous wall of sacked oats and sink into exhausted sleep, with the rattling of cranes and winches, the steady rumble of the trucks, and the remote baying of boats anchored in the stream--mixing in a strange faint symphony in his ears.
And he lay there, with the fading glimmer of the world about him, as the war mounted to its climax of blood and passion during that terrible month. He lay there, like his own ghost, thinking with pain, with grief, of all the million towns and faces he had not known. He was the atom for which all life had been a plot?Caesar had died and a nameless wife of Babylon, and somewhere here, upon this marvellous dying flesh, this myriad brain, their mark, their spirit, rested.
And he thought of the strange lost faces he had known, the lonely figures of his family, damned in chaos, each chained to a destiny of ruin and loss--Gant, a fallen Titan, staring down enormous vistas of the Past, indifferent to the world about him; Eliza, beetle-wise, involved in blind accretions; Helen, childless, pathless, furious--a great wave breaking on the barren waste; and finally, Ben--the ghost, the stranger, prowling at this moment in another town, going up and down the thousand streets of life, and finding no doors.
But the next day, on the pier, Eugene was weaker than ever. He sat sprawled upon a throne of plump oat sacks, with blurred eyes watching the loading of the bags at the spout, marking raggedly his tally upon the sheet as the stevedores plunged in and out. The terrible heat steamed through the grainy pollen of the air: he moved each limb with forethought, picking it up and placing it as if it were a detached object.
At the end of the day he was asked to return for night-work. He listened, swaying on his feet, to the far-sounding voice of the chief checker.
The supper hour came, upon the heated pier, with the sudden noise of silence. There were small completed noises up and down the enormous shed: a faint drumming of footfalls of workers walking toward the entrance, a slap of water at the ship's hull, a noise from the bridge.
Eugene went behind the oat pile and climbed blindly up until he reached his little fortress at the top. The world ebbed from his fading sense: all sound grew fainter, more far. Presently, he thought, when I have rested here, I shall get up and go down to work. It has been a hot day. I am tired. But when he tried to move he could not. His will struggled against the imponderable lead of his flesh, stirring helplessly like a man in a cage. He thought quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy. They will not find me here. I cannot move. It is over. If I had thought of this long ago, I would have been afraid. But I'm not, now. Here--upon this oat pile--doing my bit--for Democracy. I'll begin to stink. They'll find me then.
Life glimmered away out of his weary eyes. He lay, half-conscious, sprawled upon the oats. He thought of the horse.
In this way the young checker, who had loaned him money, found him. The checker knelt above him, supporting Eugene's head with one hand, and putting a bottle of raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other. When the boy had revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile and walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.
They went across the road to a little grocery-store. The checker ordered a bottle of milk, a box of crackers, and a big block of cheese. As Eugene ate, the tears began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty gullies on his skin. They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could not restrain them.
The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare. He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.
"Why didn't you tell me, boy? I'd have let you have the money," he said.
"I--don't--know," said Eugene, between bites of cheese. "Couldn't."
With the checker's loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day. Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday. Eugene stayed on.
He was like a man who had died, and had been re-born. All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world. He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts. The world itself turned ghost. All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival. Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new. Everything was old. Everything was dying. A vast aerial music, forever far- faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. He had known birth. He had known pain and love. He had known hunger. Almost he had known death.
At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight.
And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic--it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow--his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger.
His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat's; his eyes
bright and fierce.
O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores. You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor. You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman's hair floating like green moss above your belly. And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships.
There by the sea of the dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh. The child that heard Swain's cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with Jim Trivett. And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura? Dead, too? Where? How? Why? Why has the web been woven? Why do we die so many deaths? How came I here beside the sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where?
Sometimes, as he walked back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and saw himself among them. He seemed to be two people: he constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young people. He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was big enough for him.
And while he stared and saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged away, with cursing mouth.
O my sweet bitches! My fine cheap sluts! You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you will snigger at me! At me! At me! (He beat his hands against his ribs.) You will mock at me, with your drug-store pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute little side-porch chippies! What do you understand? The lust of a goat, the stink of your kind--that does for you, my girls. And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I'll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I do not belong. You see I am fin
er and greater than any one you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. That's it! The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a flower--all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. Ah me! (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.) Ah, but She will know. The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears. Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass?victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain.
Brooding thus on the vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars could be bought and clothed with his own fable. Her name was Stella Blake. She was never in a hurry.
With her lived a young corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. Sometimes he went to see her.
Twice a week the troops went through. They stood densely in brown and weary thousands on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went through their clearance papers. Then, each below the sweating torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier into the hotter prison of the ship. The great ships, with their motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid in and out in unending squadrons.
Sometimes the troops were black--labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks from Texas. They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter: they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers "boss."
"And don't you call me 'boss' again, you bastards!" screamed a young Tennessee lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he nursed his charges through hell. They grinned at him cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he stamped, raving, up and down the pier. From time to time they goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints about lost hats, bayonets, small arms, and papers. Somehow he found things for them; somehow he cursed his way through, keeping them in order. They grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss.
"And what in Jesus' name have you done now?" he yelled, as a huge black sergeant with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner's table, burst suddenly into loud roars of grief.
The fiery lieutenant rushed at the table, cursing.
The sergeant and several enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured.
"Boss," blubbered the big black sergeant, "we wants to go to France. We don't want to git lef' in dis Gawd-dam hole."
(Nor do I blame them, thought Eugene.)
"I'll kill you! So help me God, I'll kill you!" screamed the officer, hurling his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for examination behind the great wall of sacked oats. Five minutes later they emerged. The negroes were cavorting with joy: they pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand, fawning upon him, adoring him.
"You see," said the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, "that's what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers. You
can't be nice to 'em. They'd do anything for that guy."
"He would for them," said Eugene.
These negroes, he thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana, and live in Texas, are now on their way to France.
Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of false warmth. His gray jaws worked.
"I've got a job for you, Gant," he said. "Double-time pay. I want you to get in on some of the easy money."
"What is it?" said Eugene.
"They're loading this ship with big stuff," said Mr. Finch. "They're taking her into the stream to get it on. I want you to go out with her. They'll take you off in a tug to-night."
The dish-faced checker, when jubilantly he told him of his appointment, said:
"They asked me to go, but I wouldn't."
"Why not?" said Eugene.
"I don't want the money bad enough. They're loading her with T. N. T. and nitro-glycerin. The niggers play baseball with those cases. If they ever drop one, they'll bring you home in a bucket."
"It's all in the day's work," said Eugene dramatically.
This was danger, war. He was definitely in on it, risking his hide for Democracy. He was thrilled.
When the big freighter slid away from the pier, he stood in the bow with spread legs, darting his eyes about with fierce eagle glances. The iron decks blistered his feet through the thin soles of his shoes. He did not mind. He was the captain.
She anchored seaward down the Roads, and the great barges were nosed in by the tugs. All through the day, under a broiling sun, they loaded her from the rocking barges: her huge yellow booms swung up and down; by nightfall she rode deeply in the water, packed to her throat with shells and powder, and bearing on the hot plates of her deck 1200 grisly tons of field artillery.
Eugene stood with fierce appraising eyes, walking about the guns with a sense of authority, jotting down numbers, items, pieces. From time to time he thrust a handful of moist scrap-tobacco into his mouth, and chewed with an air of relish. He spat hot sizzling gobs upon the iron deck. God! thought he. This is man's work. Heave-ho, ye black devils! There's a war on! He spat.
The tug came at nightfall and took him off. He sat apart from the stevedores, trying to fancy the boat had come for him alone. The lights went twinkling up the far Virginia shores. He spat into the swirling waters.
When the trains slid in and out, the stevedores raised the wooden bridges that spanned the tracks. Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and halt, the gangs tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of their leader their song of love and labor:
"Jelly Roll! (Heh!) Je-e-elly Roll."
They were great black men, each with his kept woman. They earned fifty or sixty dollars a week.
Once or twice again, in the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk. He saw the sailor, but he no longer tried to see Laura. She seemed far and lost.
He had not written home all summer. He found a letter from Gant, written in his father's Gothic sprawl--a sick and feeble letter, written sorrowfully and far away. O lost! Eliza, in the rush and business of the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money. Get plenty of good food. Keep well. Be a goodboy.
The boy was a lean column of brown skin and bone. He had lost over thirty pounds during the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed little more than one hundred and thirty pounds.
The sailor was shocked at his emaciation, and bullied him with blustering reproof:
"Why didn't you t-t-tell me where you were, idiot? I'd have sent you money. For G-g-god's sake! Come on and eat!" They ate.
The summer waned. When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward. But, at Richmond, where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.
He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil. He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness. To go a
lone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery? Suppose--suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there? Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth?
With quick horror, he saw that such freedom lay a weary world away, and could be bought by such enduring courage as few men have.
He stayed in Richmond several days, living sumptuously in the splendid hotel, eating from silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly through the wide streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come once as a Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university's team had played Virginia there. He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her distaste because it had onions in it.
Before he went home he wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at Norfolk, a pitiable and boasting letter which rose at its end to an insane crow: "I was there all summer and I never looked you up. You were not decent enough to answer my letters; I saw no reason why I should bother with you any more. Besides, the world is full of women; I got my share and more this summer."