Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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In Beautiful Altamont,
America’s Switzerland.
Rates Reasonable — Both Transient and Tourist.
Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.
“You’ve got to help me drum up some trade, if we’re to live, boy,” she said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous jocularity that was coming to wound him so deeply, because he felt it was only an obvious mask for a more obvious insincerity.
He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened pachyderm in Eliza’s world — sprucing up confidently, throwing his shoulders back proudly, making people “think he was somebody” as he cordially acknowledged an introduction by producing a card setting forth the joys of life in Altamont and at Dixieland, and seized every opening in social relations for the purpose of “drumming up trade.” He hated the jargon of the profession, which she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she used constantly with such satisfaction — smacking her lips as she spoke of “transients,” or of “drumming up trade.” In him, as in Gant, there was a silent horror of selling for money the bread of one’s table, the shelter of one’s walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend from out the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave, the harlot, and the fool.
Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up Central Avenue, fringed on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for him, by the borders of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land of timeless and never-ending faery. He drank endlessly the water that came smoking from the earth, hoping somehow to wash himself clean from all pollution, beginning his everlasting fantasy of the miraculous spring, or the bath, neck-high, of curative mud, which would draw out of a man’s veins each drop of corrupted blood, dry up in him a cancerous growth, dwindle and absorb a cyst, remove all scorbutic blemishes, scoop and suck and thread away the fibrous slime of all disease, leaving him again with the perfect flesh of an animal.
And he gazed for hours into the entrances of the fashionable hotels, staring at the ladies’ legs upon the verandas, watching the great ones of the land at their recreations, thinking, with a pang of wonder, that here were the people of Chambers, of Phillips, of all the society novelists, leading their godlike lives in flesh, recording their fiction. He was deeply reverential before the grand manner of these books, particularly before the grand manner of the English books: there people loved, but not as other people, elegantly; their speech was subtle, delicate, exquisite; even in their passions there was no gross lust or strong appetite — they were incapable of the vile thoughts or the meaty desire of common people. As he looked at the comely thighs of the young women on horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split over the strong good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm sinuous vibration of the great horse-back excited them, and what their love was like. The preposterous elegance of their manner in the books awed him: he saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the accompaniment of subtle repartee. Such thoughts, when he had them, filled him with shame at his own baseness — he imagined for these people a love conducted beyond all the laws of nature, achieving the delight of animals or of common men by the electrical touch of a finger, the flicker of an eye, the intonation of a phrase — exquisitely and incorruptibly.
And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more strange now that its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought of him, paying him several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of wasters.
Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in glass wells — eels coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank: he dreamed of strange rich foods within.
And sometimes men returned in carriages from the distant river, laden with great fish, and he wondered if he would ever see that river. All that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him with desire and longing.
And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm Beach, before the hotels, for cocoanuts, which Eliza desired as souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-cool walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose sand the ladies’ silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father’s shells, which had played at his mountain heart, but which never, until now, had he seen. Through the spattered sunlight of the palms, in the smooth walks, princess and lord were wheeled: in latticed bar-rooms, droning with the buzzing fans, men drank from glacéd tall glasses.
Or again, they came to Jacksonville, lived there for several weeks near Pett and Greeley; he studied under a little crippled man from Harvard, going to lunch with his teacher at a buffet, where the man consumed beer and pretzels. Eliza protested the tuition when she left: the cripple shrugged his shoulders, took what she had to offer. Eugene twisted his neck about, and lifted his foot from the ground.
Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the mountains were his masters, the fabulous South. The picture of flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever: lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing, in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab, dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of rushing time, for which all life had been aplot, to flash upon the window and be gone.
The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange familiarity — he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them there unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition. They had existed for him anciently and forever.
Eugene was almost twelve years old.
Part Two
14
The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms. She will grow young again. Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny stems. They will fall bursted on the loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound of their dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes.
The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened, rich soaking rain falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair growing sparsely streaks the land.
My Brother Ben’s face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man’s scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long pointed nose. Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for his pointed, bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a young boy — it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.
Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben. The night is brightly pricked with cool and tender stars. The orchard stirs leafily in the short fresh wind. Ben prowls softly out of