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

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      “Aw!” he said.

      They left the little boat, and ground away toward the beach in a street-car. The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of the summer. The foliage was coated with dust: they rattled past cheap summer houses, baked and blistered, stogged drearily in the sand. They were small, flimsy, a multitudinous vermin — all with their little wooden sign of lodging. “The Ishkabibble,” “Seaview,” “Rest Haven,” “Atlantic Inn,”— Eugene looked at them, reading with weariness the bleached and jaded humor of their names.

      “There are a lot of boarding-houses in the world,” said he.

      A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through the long parched leaves of stunted palms. Before them rose the huge rusted spokes of a Ferris Wheel. St. Louis. They had reached the beach.

      Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car.

      “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” he cried, and streaked for the bathhouse.

      “Kings! I’ve got kings, son,” yelled Max Isaacs. He held up his crossed fingers. The beach was bare: two or three concessions stood idly open for business. The sky curved over them, a cloudless blue burnished bowl. The sea offshore was glazed emerald: the waves rode heavily in, thickening murkily as they turned with sunlight and sediment to a beachy yellow.

      They walked slowly down the beach toward the bathhouse. The tranquil, incessant thunder of the sea made in them a lonely music. Seawards, their eyes probed through the seething glare.

      “I’m going to join the navy, ‘Gene,” said Max Isaacs. “Come on and go with me.”

      “I’m not old enough,” said Eugene. “You’re not, either.”

      “I’ll be sixteen in November,” said Max Isaacs defensively.

      ‘That’s not old enough.”

      “I’m going to lie to get in,” said Max Isaacs. “They won’t bother you. You can get in. Come on.”

      “No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.”

      “Why not?” said Max Isaacs. “What are you going to do?”

      “I’m going to college,” said Eugene. “I’m going to get an education and study law.”

      “You’ll have lots of time,” said Max Isaacs. “You can go to college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good training. You go everywhere.”

      “No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.”

      But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end.

      Mrs. Bowden’s niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh.

      Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk.

      Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears.

      Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water. She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin, drinking her breath. She gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water, and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty kisses.

      Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth.

      “I like you! I like you a lot!” he said.

      “What did they tell you about me?” she said. “Did they talk about me?”

      “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I like you.”

      “You won’t remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls. You’ll forget about me. Some day you’ll see me, and you won’t even know me. You won’t recognize me. You’ll pass without speaking.”

      “No,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live.”

      Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed him. They were hill-born.

      He returned in late September.

      In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened.

      Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.

      “I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife! . . . Do you see its shadow? . . . There! There! There!”

      With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.

      “Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you’ve come at last to take the old man with you? . . . There he stands — the Grim Reaper — as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!”

      Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.

      “Don’t worry,” said the nurse encouragingly, “the mortality’s only four per cent. It used to be thirty. He’s reduced it.”

      Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter’s vital grasp.

      “Don’t worry, old boy!” she said, “you’re going to be as good as you ever were, after this.”

      She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.

      But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly.

      “All right!” he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. “Close the wound.”

      Gant was dying of cancer.

      Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.

      “There,” he said pointing, “is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter’s hotel stood about there,” he pointed.

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