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

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      “What about that, Tom?” he asked challengingly. He was very small and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by various schemes. He was a “kidder,” an egger-on, finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud good-humor.

      Eugene turned quietly on Tom French. “Stop it!” he said. “Don’t go on because the others are listening. I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t like it. I don’t like you. I want you to leave me alone now. Do you hear?”

      “Come on,” said Roy Duncan, rising, “leave him alone, Tom. He can’t take a joke. He takes things too seriously.”

      They left him. Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip of winter.

      Winter ended. The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw and the rain. The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of mud and slime. The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet patches. He hurtled down the campus lanes, bounding like a kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a budding twig with his teeth. He cried loudly in his throat — a whinnying squeal — the centaur-cry of man or beast, trying to unburden its overladen heart in one blast of pain and joy and passion. At other times he slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable burden of weariness and dejection.

      He lost count of the hours — he had no sense of time — no regular periods for sleep, work, or recreation, although he attended his classes faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by compulsion of dining-hall or boarding-house schedules. The food was abundant, coarse, greasily and badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the boarding-houses, fifteen. He ate at the commons for a month: his interest in food was too profound and too intelligent to stand it longer. The commons was housed in a large bleak building of white brick. It was called officially Stiggins Hall, but in the more descriptive epithet of the students — The Sty.

      He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. They lived thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. It was a town of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and a capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. At the head of the main street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered building of lichened stone, was a cheap hotel — the largest and most notorious brothel in town. There were also three denominational colleges for young women.

      The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on the street above the Governor’s Mansion. They lived in three or four rooms on the ground floor.

      It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man, from Baltimore, on his slow drift to the South. It was in Sydney that he had first started business for himself and conceived, from the loss of his first investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular spinstress who had died within two years of their marriage.

      Their father’s great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town, above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us away.

      Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.

      “This must be it,” she said. “His shop stood here. It’s gone now.”

      She was silent a moment. “Poor old Papa.” She turned her wet eyes away.

      There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was buried — buried with a dead woman below the long gray tide of the years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.

      In April the nation declared war on Germany. Before the month was out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible — those who were twenty-one — were going into service. At the gymnasium he watched the doctors examine them, envying the careless innocence with which they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain, before the doctors. They were clean-limbed, sound and white of tooth, graceful and fast in their movements. The fraternity men joined first — those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses — those temples where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for “black cows,” at the drug-store. And, with a stab of failure, with regret, with pain at his social deficiency, he had watched their hot campaigns for the favor of some desirable freshman — some one vastly more elegant than himself, some one with blood and with money. They were only the sons of the little rich men, the lords of the village and county, but as he saw them go so surely, with such laughing unconstraint, in well-cut clothes, well-groomed, well-brushed, among the crowd of humbler students, who stiffened awkwardly with peasant hostility and constraint — they were the flower of chivalry, the sons of the mansion-house. They were Sydney, Raleigh, Nash. And now, like gentlemen, they were going to war.

      The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix.

      “Look!” said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. “Look at that, will you!” He nodded toward a group of students ahead. “That little Horse’s Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus.”

      Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and bought two cheap cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father was foreman in a cotton mill.

      “They’re all Horse’s Necks,” he said. “They can go to hell before I’ll boot to get in.”

      “Yes,” said Eugene.

      But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to go to war.

      On the central campus, several students who had been approved by the examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing packed valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward the village street. From time to time they threw up an arm in farewell.

      “So long, boys! See you in Berlin.” The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.

      He read a great deal — but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe, Smollet, Stern, and Fielding — the fine salt of the English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson’s suggestion, he read Murray’s Euripides (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis — noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus fable — but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In fact, Æschylus he found sublime — and dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather — he could. He was Literature — a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero — that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet — he spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the �dipus Rex is not only one of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. СКАЧАТЬ