Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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body, his heart numbed deliciously against the pressure of her narrow breasts. She was as lithe and yielding to his sustaining hand as a willow rod — she was bird-swift, more elusive in repose than the dancing water-motes upon her face. He held her tightly lest she grow into the tree again, or be gone amid the wood like smoke.
Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
31
One day, when June was coming to its end, Laura James said to him:
“I shall have to go home next week.” Then, seeing his stricken face, she added, “but only for a few days — not more than a week.”
“But why? The summer’s only started. You will burn up down there.”
“Yes. It’s silly, I know. But my people expect me for the Fourth of July. You know, we have an enormous family — hundred of aunts, cousins, and inlaws. We have a family reunion every year — a great barbecue and picnic. I hate it. But they’d never forgive me if I didn’t come.”
Frightened, he looked at her for a moment.
“Laura! You’re coming back, aren’t you?” he said quietly.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Be quiet.”
He was trembling violently; he was afraid to question her more closely.
“Be quiet,” she whispered, “quiet!” She put her arms around him.
He went with her to the station on a hot mid-afternoon. There was a smell of melted tar in the streets. She held his hand beside her in the rattling trolley, squeezing his fingers to give him comfort, and whispering from time to time:
“In a week! Only a week, dear.”
“I don’t see the need,” he muttered. “It’s over 400 miles. Just for a few days.”
He passed the old one-legged gateman on the station platform very easily, carrying her baggage. Then he sat beside her in the close green heat of the pullman until the train should go. A little electric fan droned uselessly above the aisle; a prim young lady whom he knew, arranged herself amid the bright new leather of her bags. She returned his greeting elegantly, with a shade of refined hauteur, then looked out the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed at her raptly from the platform. Several prosperous merchants went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan’s drone.
“Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?”
“Hello, Jim. No, I’m running up to Richmond for a few days.” But even the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that hot chariot to the East.
“‘Board!”
He got up trembling.
“In a few days, dear.” She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved palms.
“You will write as soon as you get there? Please!”
“Yes. To-morrow — at once.”
He bent down suddenly and whispered, “Laura — you will come back. You will come back!”
She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more; she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.
“My dear, my dear! Don’t forget me ever!”
“Never. Come back. Come back.”
The salt print of her kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.
“Come back again!”
But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.
Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious little American flags, this:
“My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I couldn’t sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little Richmond is too ghastly for words — everything burned up and every one gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for a week!” (Good! he thought. If the weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.) “It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air. Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?” (Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.) “Will you promise to look after your hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again but, don’t worry, I’ll have my own way in the end. I always do. I don’t know any one at home any more — all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married already. That leaves only the kids.” (He winced. As old as I am, maybe older.) “Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are.
LAURA.”
He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.
There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:
“July 4.
“Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I’ve been engaged to him almost a year. We’re going off quietly to Norfolk tomorrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn’t tell you! I tried to, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn’t been so young, but what’s the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don’t forget me. Good-by and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you.”
When he had finished the letter, he reread it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun’s vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day’s distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.
And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew’s great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above