Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

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      “She was a man’s wife!” he said loudly. “That’s who she was.”

      Awful stillness.

      “Why — here — who told you that?” said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth. “Who told you, boy?”

      “What was she, then?” said Tom Davis pointedly.

      “Why — not exactly,” Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

      “She was a Bad Woman,” said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added: “She was a Little Chippie.”

      “Pap” Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

      “What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak. Fury boiled up in him. He sprang from his chair. “What did you say, boy?”

      But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face. Too far beyond. He sat down again, shaken.

      — Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth —

      “Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam

       Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es.”

      “You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene,” said Mr. Leonard gently.

      “See here!” he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book. “This is getting no work done. Come on, now!” he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual hands. “You rascals you!” he said, noting Tom Davis’ grin. “I know what you’re after — you want to take up the whole period.”

      Tom Davis’ hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.

      “All right, Tom,” said Mr. Leonard briskly, “page 43, section 6, line 15. Begin at that point.”

      At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis’ laughter filled the room.

      Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction. He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years of repetition. In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he had ever met it before). There were two final years of precious Greek: they read the Anabasis.

      “What’s the good of all this stuff?” said Tom Davis argumentatively.

      Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here. He understood the value of the classics.

      “It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind.”

      “What good’s it going to do him when he goes to work?” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “It’s not going to teach him how to grow more corn.”

      “Well — I’m not so sure of that,” said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh. “I think it does.”

      “Pap” Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head. He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.

      He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly. His father was wealthy. He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town. They were unpretending people — German stock.

      “Pshaw, Mr. Leonard,” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?”

      “Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus,” said Tom Davis with sounding laughter. Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation. The joke was his own.

      “It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts,” he said.

      “According to what you say,” said Tom Davis, “a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn’t.”

      “Yes, sir,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, “you know, I believe he does.” He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering giggle.

      He was on trodden ground. They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.

      He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as γυνάικος, but his opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp — Greek was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic. The smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below, touched the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos. He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a genuine belief.

      καὶ κατὰ γην καὶ κατὰ θάλατταν.

      The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey’s sister Amy. She was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who weighed 185 pounds. She had very thick black hair, straight and oily, and very black eyes, giving a heavy sensuousness to her face. Her thick forearms were fleeced with light down. She was not fat, but she corsetted tightly, her powerful arms and heavy shoulders bulging through the cool white of her shirtwaists. In warm weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were stained below the arm-pits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the winter, as she warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the exciting odor of chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal. Eugene, passing down the wind-swept back porch one day in winter, looked in on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out. She sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her stockings. Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders, her big body steaming cleanly like a beast.

      She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her brother’s. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

      She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly with contempt. Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely.

      Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year — cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine — sickness made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted pictures — impressionist blobs — sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble СКАЧАТЬ