Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (82 page)

She kissed him, and went
away without another glance at the older boy.  He did not look
at her.  They were parted by hard and bitter strife.

After a moment, when she
had gone, Ben said without anger:

"I've had nothing
out of life.  I've been a failure.  I've stayed here with
them until I'm done for.  My lungs are going: they won't even
take a chance on me for the army.  They won't even give the
Germans a chance to shoot at me.  I've never made good at
anything. By God!" he said, in a mounting blaze of passion. 
"What's it all about?  Can you figure it out, 'Gene? 
Is it really so, or is somebody playing a joke on us?  Maybe
we're dreaming all this.  Do you think so?"

"Yes," said
Eugene, "I do.  But I wish they'd wake us up." 
He was silent, brooding over his thin bare body, bent forward on the
bed for a moment.  "Maybe," he said slowly,
"maybe--there's nothing,
nobody to
wake."

"To hell with it
all!" said Ben.  "I wish it were over."
 
 

Eugene returned to Pulpit
Hill in a fever of war excitement.  The university had been
turned into an armed camp.  Young men who were eighteen years
old were being admitted into the officers' training corps.  But
he was not yet eighteen.  His birthday was two weeks off. 
In vain he implored the tolerance of the examining board. What did
two weeks matter?  Could he get in as soon as his birthday
arrived?  They told him he could not.  What, then, could he
do? They told him that he must wait until there was another draft. 
How long would that be?  Only two or three months, they assured
him. His wilted hope revived.  He chafed impatiently.  All
was not lost.

By Christmas, with fair
luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki: by Spring, if God
was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice, mustard gas,
spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and
gangrene, might be his.  Over the rim of the earth he heard the
glorious stamp of the feet, the fierce sweet song of the horns. 
With a tender smile of love for his dear self, he saw himself wearing
the eagles of a colonel on his gallant young shoulders.  He saw
himself as Ace Gant, the falcon of the skies, with 63 Huns to his
credit by his nineteenth year.  He saw himself walking up the
Champs-Elysé with a handsome powdering of gray hair above his
temples, a left forearm of the finest cork, and the luscious young
widow of a French marshal at his side.  For the first time he
saw the romantic charm of mutilation.  The perfect and
unblemished heroes of his childhood now seemed cheap to him--fit only
to illustrate advertisements for collars and toothpaste. He longed
for that subtle distinction, that air of having lived and suffered
that could only be attained by a wooden leg, a rebuilt nose, or the
seared scar of a bullet across his temple.

Meanwhile, he fed
voraciously, and drank gallons of water in an effort to increase his
poundage.  He weighed himself a half-dozen times a day.  He
even made some effort at systematic exercise: swinging his arms,
bending from his hips, and so on.

And he talked about his
problem with the professors.  Gravely, earnestly, he wrestled
with his soul, mouthing with gusto the inspiring jargon of the
crusade.  For the present, said the professors, was his Place
not Here?  Did his Conscience tell him that he Had to go? 
If it did, they said gravely, they would say nothing more.  But
had he considered the Larger Issues?

"Is not," said
the Acting Dean persuasively, "is not this your Sector?  Is
your own Front Line not here on the campus?  Is it not here that
you must Go Over The Top?  Oh, I know," he went on with a
smile of quiet pain, "I know it would be easier to go.  I
have had to fight that battle myself.  But we are all part of
the Army now; we are all enlisted in the Service of Liberty.  We
are all Mobilized for Truth.  And each must Do His Bit where it
will count for most."

"Yes," said
Eugene, with a pale tortured face, "I know.  I know it's
wrong.  But oh, sir,--when I think of those murderous beasts,
when I think of how they have menaced All that we Hold Dear, when I
think of Little Belgium, and then of My Own Mother, My Own Sister--"
He turned away, clenching his hands, madly in love with himself.

"Yes, yes,"
said the Acting Dean gently, "for boys with a spirit  like
yours it's not easy."

"Oh, sir, it's
hard!" cried Eugene passionately.  "I tell you it's
hard."

"We must endure,"
said the Dean quietly.  "We must be tempered in the fire. 
The Future of Mankind hangs in the balance."

Deeply stirred they stood
together for a moment, drenched in the radiant beauty of their heroic
souls.
 
 

Eugene was managing
editor of the college paper.  But, since the editor was enlisted
in the corps, the entire work of publication fell to the boy. 
Every one was in the army.  With the exception of a few dozen
ratty Freshmen, a few cripples, and himself, every one, it seemed,
was in the army.  All of his fraternity brothers, all of his
college mates, who had not previously enlisted, and many young men
who had never before thought of college, were in the army. "Pap"
Rheinhart, George Graves, Julius Arthur--who had experienced brief
and somewhat unfortunate careers at other universities, and a host of
young Altamonters who had never known a campus before, were all
enlisted now in the Student's Army.

During the first days, in
the confusion of the new order, Eugene saw a great deal of them. 
Then, as the cogs of the machine began to grind more smoothly, and
the university was converted into a big army post, with its punctual
monotony of drilling, eating, studying, inspection, sleeping, he
found himself detached, alone, occupying a position of unique and
isolated authority.
 
He Carried
On.  He Held High the Torch.  He Did His Bit.  He was
editor, reporter, censor, factotum of the paper.  He wrote the
news.  He wrote the editorials.  He seared them with
flaming words. He extolled the crusade.  He was possessed of the
inspiration for murder.

He came and he went as he
chose.  When the barracks went dark at night, he prowled the
campus, contemptuous of the electric flash and the muttered apologies
of the officious shave-tails.  He roomed in the village with a
tall cadaver, a gaunt medical student with hollow cheeks and a
pigeon-breast, named Heston.  Three or four times a week he was
driven over the rutted highway to Exeter where, in a little print
shop, he drank the good warm smell of ink and steel.
 
Later, he prowled up the dreary main street of the
town as the lights went up, ate at the Greek's, flirted with a few
stray furtive women until the place went dead at ten o'clock, and
came back through the dark countryside in a public-service car beside
a drunken old walrus who drove like a demon, and whose name was
"Soak" Young.

October began, and a
season of small cold rain.  The earth was a sodden reek of mud
and rotten leaves.  The trees dripped wearily and incessantly. 
His eighteenth birthday came, and he turned again, with a quivering
tension, toward the war.

He got a brief sick
letter from his father; a few pages, practical, concrete with her
blunt pungent expression, from Eliza:

"Daisy has been here
with all her tribe.  She went home two days ago, leaving
Caroline and Richard.  They have all been down sick with the
flu.  We've had a siege of it here.  Every one has had it,
and you never know who's going to be next.  It seems to get the
big strong ones first.  Mr. Hanby, the Methodist minister, died
last week.  Pneumonia set in.  He was a fine healthy man in
the prime of life.  The doctors said he was gone from the
start.  Helen has been laid up for several days.  Says it's
her old kidney trouble.  They had McGuire in Thursday night. 
But they can't fool me, no matter what they say.  Son, I hope
you will never surrender to that awful craving.  It has been the
curse of my life.  Your papa seems to go along about the same as
usual.  He eats well, and gets lots of sleep.  I can't
notice any change in him from a year ago.  He may be here long
after some of the rest of us are under the sod.  Ben is still
here.  He mopes around the house all day and complains of having
no appetite.  I think he needs to get to work again doing
something that will take his mind off himself.  There are only a
few people left in the house.  Mrs. Pert and Miss Newton hang on
as usual.  The Crosbys have gone back to Miami.  If it gets
much colder here I'll just pack up and go too.  I guess I must
be getting old.  I can't stand the cold the way I could when I
was young.  I want you to buy yourself a good warm overcoat
before the winter sets in.  You must also eat plenty of good
substantial food. Don't squander your money but . . ."

He heard nothing more for
several weeks.  Then, one drizzling evening at six o'clock, when
he returned to the room that he occupied with Heston, he found a
telegram.  It read:  "Come home at once.  Ben has
pneumonia.  Mother."
 
 

35
 

There was no train until
the next day.  Heston quieted him during the evening with a
stiff drink of gin manufactured from alcohol taken from the medical
laboratory.  Eugene was silent and babbled incoherently by
starts: he asked the medical student a hundred questions about the
progress and action of the disease.

"If it were double
pneumonia she would have said so.  Doesn't it seem that way to
you?  Hey?" he demanded feverishly.

"I should think so,"
said Heston.  He was a kind and quiet boy.

Eugene went to Exeter the
next morning to catch the train.  All through a dreary gray
afternoon it pounded across the sodden State. Then, there was a
change and a terrible wait of several hours at a junction. 
Finally, as dark came, he was being borne again toward the hills.

Within his berth he lay
with hot sleepless eyes, staring out at the black mass of the earth,
the bulk of the hills.  Finally, in the hours after midnight, he
dropped into a nervous doze.  He was wakened by the clatter of
the trucks as they began to enter the Altamont yards.  Dazed,
half-dressed, he was roused by the grinding halt, and a moment later
was looking out through the curtains into the grave faces of Luke and
Hugh Barton.

"Ben's very sick,"
said Hugh Barton.

Eugene pulled on his
shoes and dropped to the floor, stuffing his collar and tie into a
coat pocket.

"Let's go," he
said.  "I'm ready."

They went softly down the
aisle, amid the long dark snores of the sleepers.  As they
walked through the empty station toward Hugh Barton's car, Eugene
said to the sailor:

"When did you get
home, Luke?"

"I came in last
night," he said.  "I've been here only a few hours."

It was half-past three in
the morning.  The ugly station settlement lay fixed and
horrible, like something in a dream.  His strange and sudden
return to it heightened his feeling of unreality.  In one of the
cars lined at the station curbing, the driver lay huddled below his
blanket.  In the Greek's lunchroom a man sat sprawled faced
downward on the counter.  The lights were dull and weary: a few
burned with slow lust in the cheap station-hotels.

Hugh Barton, who had
always been a cautious driver, shot away with a savage grinding of
gears. They roared townward through the rickety slums at fifty miles
an hour.

"I'm afraid
B-B-B-Ben is one sick boy," Luke began.

"How did it happen?"
Eugene asked.  "Tell me."

He had taken influenza,
they told Eugene, from one of Daisy's children.  He had moped
about, ill and feverish, for a day or two, without going to bed.

"In that G-g-g-god
dam cold barn," Luke burst out.  "If that boy dies
it's because he c-c-c-couldn't keep warm."

"Never mind about
that now," Eugene cried irritably, "go on."

Finally he had gone to
bed, and Mrs. Pert had nursed him for a day or two.

"She was the only
one who d-d-d-did a damn thing for him," said the sailor. 
Eliza, at length, had called in Cardiac.

"The d-d-damned old
quack," Luke stuttered.

"Never mind! 
Never mind!" Eugene yelled.  "Why dig it up now? 
Get on with it!"

After a day or two, he
had grown apparently convalescent, and Cardiac told him he might get
up if he liked.  He got up and moped about the house for a day,
in a cursing rage, but the next day he lay a-bed, with a high fever. 
Coker at length had been called in, two days before--

"That's what they
should have done at the start," growled Hugh Barton over his
wheel.

"Never mind!"
screamed Eugene.  "Get on with it."

And Ben had been
desperately ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, for over a day. 
The sad prophetic story, a brief and terrible summary of the waste,
the tardiness, and the ruin of their lives, silenced them for a
moment with its inexorable sense of tragedy.  They had nothing
to say.

The powerful car roared
up into the chill dead Square.  The feeling of unreality grew
upon the boy.  He sought for his life, for the bright lost
years, in this mean cramped huddle of brick and stone. Ben and I,
here by the City Hall, the Bank, the grocery-store (he thought). 
Why here?  In Gath or Ispahan.  In Corinth or Byzantium.
Not here.  It is not real.