Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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through the lively crowds, looking boldly but without insolence at the women and young girls. They grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter like splendid flowers. He was eager and alone. Fear is a dragon that lives among crowds — and in armies. It lives hardly with men who are alone. He felt released — beyond the last hedge of desperation.
Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment at all the possessed and possessing world about him. Life hung for his picking fingers like a strange and bitter fruit. THEY— the great clan huddled there behind the stockade for warmth and safety — could hunt him down some day and put him to death: he thought they would.
But he was not now afraid — he was content, if only the struggle might be fruitful. He looked among the crowds printed with the mark of his danger, seeking that which he might desire and take.
He went back to the university sealed up against the taunts of the young men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about him with thronging jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he met them, with constraint.
There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested in the hard insolence of money. He was followed by his court jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.
“Hello, Gant,” said Tom French harshly. “Been to Exeter lately?” Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.
“Yes,” said Eugene, “I’ve been there lately, and I’m on my way there now. What’s it to you, French?”
Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man’s son drew back.
“We hear you’re stepping out among them, ‘Gene,” said Roy Duncan, cackling.
“Who’s we?” said Eugene. “Who’s them?”
“They say,” said Tom French, “that you’re as pure as the flowing sewer.”
“If I need cleaning,” said Eugene, “I can always use the Gold Dust Twins, can’t I? French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins — who never do any work.”
The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who had gathered about them on the seats back and front, laughed loudly.
“That’s right! That’s right! Talk to them, ‘Gene!” said Zeno Cochran, softly. He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and powerful, with the grace of a running horse. He had punted against the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl. He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the athlete.
Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:
“Nobody has anything on me. I’ve been too slick for them. Nobody knows anything about me.”
“You mean,” said Eugene, “that every one knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about you.”
The crowd laughed.
“Wow!” said Jimmy Revell.
“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