Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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wind, through its dark halls, bathing all things quietly with peace and weariness. The boarders had fled like silly sheep to the two houses across the street: they had eaten there, they were clustered there upon the porches, whispering. And their going brought him peace and freedom, as if his limbs had been freed from a shackling weight. Eliza, amid the slow smoke of the kitchen, wept more quietly over the waste of supper; he saw the black mournful calm of the negress’s face. He walked slowly up the dark hall, with a handkerchief tied loosely round his wound. He felt suddenly the peace that comes with despair. The sword that pierces very deep had fared through the folds of his poor armor of pride. The steel had sheared his side, had bitten to his heart. But under his armor he had found himself. No more than himself could be known. No more than himself could be given. What he was — he was: evasion and pretense could not add to his sum. With all his heart he was glad.
By the door, in the darkness, he found Laura James.
“I thought you had gone with the others,” he said.
“No,” said Laura James, “how is your father?”
“He’s all right now. He’s gone to sleep,” he answered. “Have you had anything to eat?”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t want it.”
“I’ll bring you something from the kitchen,” he said. “There’s plenty there.” In a moment he added: “I’m sorry, Laura.”
“What are you sorry for?” she asked.
He leaned against the wall limply, drained of his strength at her touch.
“Eugene. My dear,” she said. She pulled his drooping face down to her lips and kissed him. “My sweet, my darling, don’t look like that.”
All his resistance melted from him. He seized her small hands, crushing them in his hot fingers, and devouring them with kisses.
“My dear Laura! My dear Laura!” he said in a choking voice. “My sweet, my beautiful Laura! My lovely Laura. I love you. I love you.” The words rushed from his heart, incoherent, unashamed, foaming through the broken levees of pride and silence. They clung together in the dark, with their wet faces pressed mouth to mouth. Her perfume went drunkenly to his brain; her touch upon him shot through his limbs a glow of magic; he felt the pressure of her narrow breasts, eager and lithe, against him with a sense of fear — as if he had dishonored her — with a sickening remembrance of his defilement.
He held between his hands her elegant small head, so gloriously wound with its thick bracelet of fine blonde hair, and spoke the words he had never spoken — the words of confession, filled with love and humility.
“Don’t go! Don’t go! Please don’t go!” he begged. “Don’t leave, dear. Please!”
“Hush!” she whispered. “I won’t go! I love you, my dear.”
She saw his hand, wrapped in its bloody bandage; she nursed it gently with soft little cries of tenderness. She fetched a bottle of iodine from her room and painted the stinging cut with a brush. She wrapped it with clean strips of fine white cloth, torn from an old waist, scented with a faint and subtle perfume.
Then they sat upon the wooden swing. The house seemed to sleep in darkness. Helen and Eliza came presently from its very quiet depth.
“How’s your hand, ‘Gene?” Helen asked.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Let me see! O-ho, you’ve got a nurse now, haven’t you?” she said, with a good laugh.
“What’s that? What’s that? Hurt his hand? How’d you do that? Why, here — say — I’ve got the very thing for it, son,” said Eliza, trying to bustle off in all directions.
“Oh, it’s all right now, mama. It’s been fixed,” he said wearily, reflecting that she had the very thing always too late. He looked at Helen grinning:
“God bless our Happy Home!” he said.
“Poor old Laura!” she laughed, and hugged the girl roughly with one hand. “It’s too bad you have to be dragged into it.”
“That’s all right,” said Laura. “I feel like one of the family now anyhow.”
“He needn’t think he can carry on like this,” said Eliza resentfully. “I’m not going to put up with it any longer.”
“Oh forget about it!” said Helen wearily. “Good heavens, mama. Papa’s a sick man. Can’t you realize that?”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza scornfully. “I don’t believe there’s a thing in the world wrong with him but that vile licker. All his trouble comes from that.”
“Oh — how ridiculous! How ridiculous! You can’t tell me!” Helen exclaimed angrily.
“Let’s talk about the weather,” said Eugene.
Then they all sat quietly, letting the darkness soak into them. Finally Helen and Eliza went back into the house: Eliza went unwillingly, at the girl’s insistence, casting back the doubtful glimmer of her face upon the boy and girl.
The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the hills. There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in a constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious certitude. The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like silence on the earth, it dripped through the leafy web of the young maples, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.
Eugene and Laura sat with joined hands in the slowly creaking swing. Her touch shot through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live firm cup of her breast. He jerked his hand away, as if he had been stung, muttering an apology. Whenever she touched him, his flesh got numb and weak. She was a virgin, crisp like celery — his heart shrank away from the pollution of his touch upon her. It seemed to him that he was much the older, although he was sixteen, and she twenty-one. He felt the age of his loneliness and his dark perception. He felt the gray wisdom of sin — a waste desert, but seen and known. When he held her hand, he felt as if he had already seduced her. She lifted her lovely face to him, pert and ugly as a boy’s; it was inhabited by a true and steadfast decency, and his eyes were wet. All the young beauty in the world dwelt for him in that face that had kept wonder, that had kept innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and foulness of the world. He came to her, like a creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face. For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there — what then, what then?
“Eugene,” she said presently, “how old are you?”
His vision thickened with his pulse. In a moment he answered with terrible difficulty.
“I’m — just sixteen.”
“Oh, you child!” she cried. “I thought you were more than that!”
“I’m — old for my age,” he muttered. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one,” she said. “Isn’t it a pity?”
“There’s not much difference,” he said. “I can’t see that it matters.”
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “It does! It matters so much!”
And he knew that it did — how much he did not know. But he had his moment. He was not afraid of pain, he was not afraid of loss. He cared nothing for the practical need of the world. He dared to say the strange and marvellous thing that had bloomed so darkly in him.
“Laura,” he said, hearing his low voice sound over the great plain of the moon, “let’s always love each other as we do now. Let’s