Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.
“All right, son. Two dopes and a mint Limeade. Make it snappy.”
“Do you work around here, boy?”
The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.
Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low — an excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.
But — at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both Baptists.
Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We’ll be waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had seen.
Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck’s serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky. Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide.
Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.
For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford’s Reo. They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie.
“Do you know how to dance, George?” Eugene asked. His heart was full of bitter pride and fear.
“Yes,” said George Graves absently, “a little bit. I don’t like it.” He lifted his brooding eyes.
“Say, ‘Gene,” he said, “how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is worth?”
He answered Eugene’s laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin.
“Come on,” said Eugene. “I’ll match you for a drink.”
They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening afternoon traffic.
“It’s getting worse all the time,” said George Graves. “The people who laid the town out didn’t have any vision. What’s it going to be like, ten years from now?”
“They could widen the streets, couldn’t they?” said Eugene.
“No. Not now. You’d have to move all the buildings back. Wonder how much it would cost?” said George Graves thoughtfully.
“And if we don’t,” Professor L. B. Dunn’s precise voice sounded its cold warning, “their next move will be directed against us. You may yet live to see the day when the iron heel of militarism is on your neck, and the armed forces of the Kaiser do the goose-step up and down this street. When that day comes —”
“I don’t put any stock in those stories,” said Mr. Bob Webster rudely and irreverently. He was a small man, with a gray, mean face, violent and bitter. A chronic intestinal sourness seemed to have left its print upon his features. “In my opinion, it’s all propaganda. Those Germans are too damn good for them, that’s all. They’re beginning to call for calf-rope.”
“When that day comes,” Professor Dunn implacably continued, “remember what I told you. The German government has imperialistic designs upon the whole of the world. It is looking to the day when it shall have all mankind under the yoke of Krupp and Kultur. The fate of civilization is hanging in the balance. Mankind is at the crossroads. I pray God it shall not be said that we were found wanting. I pray God that this free people may never suffer as little Belgium suffered, that our wives and daughters may not be led off into slavery or shame, our children maimed and slaughtered.”
“It’s not our fight,” said Mr. Bob Webster. “I don’t want to send my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners. If they come over here, I’ll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among themselves. Isn’t that right, Judge?” he said, turning toward the party of the third part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal Circuit, who had fortunately been a close friend of Grover Cleveland. Ancestral voices prophesying war.
“Did you know the Wheeler boys?” Eugene asked George Graves. “Paul and Clifton?”
“Yes,” said George Graves. “They went away and joined the French army. They’re in the Foreign Legion.”
“They’re in the aviation part of it,” said Eugene. “The Lafayette Eskydrill. Clifton Wheeler has shot down more than six Germans.”
“The boys around here didn’t like him,” said George Graves. “They thought he was a sissy.”
Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word.
“How old was he?” he asked.
“He was a grown man,” said George. “Twenty-two or three.”
Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. (Ich bin ja noch ein Kind.)
“— But fortunately,” continued Judge Walter C. Jeter deliberately, “we have a man in the White House on whose far-seeing statesmanship we can safely rely. Let us trust to the wisdom of his leadership, obeying, in word and spirit, the principles of strict neutrality, accepting only as a last resort a course that would lead this great nation again into the suffering and tragedy of war, which,” his voice sank to a whisper, “God forbid!”
Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne himself gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the Pettigrew Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria, behind an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. There was a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. The old negro snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps, growling softly.
Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which his freckled hand gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very parfit gentil knight.
He muttered.
“Suh?” said the negro, pulling in on his reins, and turning around.
“Go on! Go on, you scoundrel!” said Colonel Pettigrew.
“Yes, suh,” said the negro. They