Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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a day.
They shifted, veered from camp to camp, worked for a month, loafed opulently for a week, enjoying the brief bought loves of girls they met upon the ocean-beach or in a brothel.
Strapping black buck-niggers, with gorilla arms and the black paws of panthers, earned $60 a week as stevedores, and spent it on a mulatto girl in a single evening of red riot.
And more quietly, soberly, in this crowd, moved the older thriftier workmen: the true carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics — the canny Scotch–Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia coast, the careful peasantry of the Middle–West, who had come to earn, to save, to profit from the war.
Everywhere amid this swarming crowd gleamed the bright raiment of blood and glory: the sailors thronged the streets in flapping blues and spotless whites — brown, tough, and clean. The marines strode by in arrogant twos, stiff as rods in the loud pomp of chevrons and striped trousers. Commanders gray and grim, hard-handed C. P. O.‘s, and elegant young ensigns out of college, with something blonde and fluffy at their side, went by among the red cap-buttons of French matelots, or the swagger sea-wise port of the Englishmen.
Through this crowd, with matted uncut hair that fell into his eyes, that shot its spirals through the rents of his old green hat, that curled a thick scroll up his dirty neck, Eugene plunged with hot devouring eyes — soaked in his sweat by day, sharp and stale by night.
In this great camp of vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home into this world from loneliness. The hunger for voyages, the hunger that haunts Americans, who are a nomad race, was half-assuaged here in this maelstrom of the war.
He lost himself in the crowd. He lost count of the days. His little store of money melted. He moved from a cheap hotel, loud at night with the noise of harlotry, to a little attic room in a lodging-house, an oven of hot pine and tarred roof; he moved from the lodging-house to a fifty-cent cot in the Y. M. C. A., where, returning night by night, he paid his fee, and slept in a room with forty snoring sailors.
Finally, his money gone, he slept, until driven out, in all-night lunchrooms; upon the Portsmouth ferry; and over lapping water on a rotting pier.
By night he prowled about among the negroes; he listened to their rich proposed seductions; he went where the sailors went, down Church Street, where the women were. He prowled the night with young beast-lust, his thin boy-body stale with sweat, his hot eyes burning through the dark.
He grew hungry for food. His money was gone. But there was a hunger and thirst in him that could not be fed. Over the chaos of his brain hung the shadow of Laura James. Her shadow hung above the town, above all life. It had brought him here; his heart was swollen with pain and pride; he would not go to find her.
He was obsessed with the notion that he would find her in the crowd, upon the street, around the corner. He would not speak to her if he met her. He would go proudly and indifferently by. He would not see her. She would see him. She would see him at some heroic moment, just as he was receiving the love and respect of beautiful women. She would speak to him; he would not speak to her. She would be stricken; she would be beaten down; she would cry to him for love and mercy.
Thus, unclean, unkempt, clothed in rags and hunger and madness, he saw himself victorious, heroic and beautiful. He was mad with his obsession. He thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to run or remain. He brooded for hours over her address in the telephone directory; sitting by the phone, he trembled with excitement because its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture, because within a minute he could be with her, voice to voice.
He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly to it.
He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.
At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance — but the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal — everywhere there was work, abundant work — hard labor that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one week’s pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or departure.
And he had no money left.
He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company expense.
In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field, he was signed on as a laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him.
He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out the superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore a blue eyeshade, armbands, and talked with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip.
Eugene thrust out his employment slip in shaking fingers. The man looked briefly at it.
“College boy, aren’t you, son?” he said, glancing at Eugene.
“Yes, sir,” said Eugene.
“Did you ever do day labor before?” said the man.
“No, sir,” said Eugene.
“How old are you, son?” the man asked.
Eugene was silent for a moment. “I’m — nineteen,” he said at length, wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say twenty.
The superintendent grinned wearily.
“It’s hard work, son,” the man said. “You’ll be among the wops and the Swedes and the hunkies. You’ll live in the same bunkhouse, you’ll eat with them. They don’t smell nice, son.”
“I have no money,” said Eugene. “I’ll work hard. I won’t get sick. Give me the job. Please!”
“No,” said the man. “No, I won’t do that.”
Eugene turned blindly away.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” said the superintendent. “I’ll give you a job as a checker. You’ll be with the office force. That’s where you belong. You’ll live with them in their own bunk-house. They’re nice fellows,” he said elegantly, “college fellows, like yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion. “Thank you.”
“The checker we’ve got is quitting,” said the superintendent. “You’ll go to the stables with him in the morning to get your horse.”
“H-h-h-horse?” said Eugene.
“You’ll have a horse,” said the superintendent, “to ride around on.”
With strong bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with fear. He turned to go. He could not bear to talk of money.
“H-h-how much —?” he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.
“I’ll give you $80 a month to begin with,” said the manager with a touch of magnificence. “If you make good, I’ll give you a hundred.”
“And my keep?” whispered Eugene.
“Sure!” said the manager. “That’s thrown in.”
Eugene