Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
first and nearest sales made, in the town, he would make the long circle on the hills and in the woods along the outskirts, visiting the tubercular sanitariums, selling the magazines easily and quickly —“like hot cakes” as Luke had it — to doctors and nurses, to white unshaven, sensitive-faced Jews, to the wisp of a rake, spitting his rotten lungs into a cup, to good-looking young women who coughed slightly from time to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm soft hands touch his slightly as they paid him.
Once, at a hillside sanitarium, two young New York Jews had taken him to the room of one of them, closed the door behind him, and assaulted him, tumbling him on the bed, while one drew forth a pocket knife and informed him he was going to perform a caponizing operation on him. They were two young men bored with the hills, the town, the deadly regime of their treatment, and it occurred to him years later that they had concocted the business, days ahead, in their dull lives, living for the excitement and terror they would arouse in him. His response was more violent than they had bargained for: he went mad with fear, screamed, and fought insanely. They were weak as cats, he squirmed out of their grasp and off the bed cuffing and clawing tigerishly, striking and kicking them with blind and mounting rage. He was released by a nurse who unlocked the door and led him out into the sunlight, the two young consumptives, exhausted and frightened, remaining in their room. He was nauseated by fear and by the impacts of his fists on their leprous bodies.
But the little mound of nickels and dimes and quarters chinked pleasantly in his pockets: leg-weary and exhausted he would stand before a gleaming fountain burying his hot face in an iced drink. Sometimes conscience-tortured, he would steal an hour away from the weary streets and go into the library for a period of enchantment and oblivion: he was often discovered by his watchful and bustling brother, who drove him out to his labor again, taunting and spurring him into activity.
“Wake up! You’re not in Fairyland. Go after them.”
Eugene’s face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle — his shame, his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was “afraid of a little honest work,” and reminded of the rich benefits he had received from his big-hearted parents.
He turned desperately to Ben. Sometimes Ben, loping along the streets of the town, met him, hot, tired, dirty, wearing his loaded canvas bag, scowled fiercely at him, upbraided him for his unkempt appearance, and took him into a lunch-room for something to eat — rich foaming milk, fat steaming kidney-beans, thick apple-pie.
Both Ben and Eugene were by nature aristocrats. Eugene had just begun to feel his social status — or rather his lack of one; Ben had felt it for years. The feeling at bottom might have resolved itself simply into a desire for the companionship of elegant and lovely women: neither was able, nor would have dared, to confess this, and Eugene was unable to confess that he was susceptible to the social snub, or the pain of caste inferiority: any suggestion that the companionship of elegant people was preferable to the fellowship of a world of Tarkintons, and its blousy daughters, would have been hailed with heavy ridicule by the family, as another indication of false and undemocratic pride. He would have been called “Mr. Vanderbilt” or “the Prince of Wales.”
Ben, however, was not to be intimidated by their cant, or deceived by their twaddle. He saw them with bitter clarity, answered their pretensions with soft mocking laughter, and a brief nod upwards and to the side of the companion to whom he communicated all his contemptuous observation — his dark satiric angel: “Oh, my God! Listen to that, won’t you?”
There was behind his scowling quiet eyes, something strange and fierce and unequivocal that frightened them: besides, he had secured for himself the kind of freedom they valued most — the economic freedom — and he spoke as he felt, answering their virtuous reproof with fierce quiet scorn.
One day, he stood, smelling of nicotine, before the fire, scowling darkly at Eugene who, grubby and tousled, had slung his heavy bag over his shoulder, and was preparing to depart.
“Come here, you little bum,” he said. “When did you wash your hands last?” Scowling fiercely, he made a sudden motion as if to strike the boy, but he finished instead by retying, with his hard delicate hands, his tie.
“In God’s name, mama,” he burst out irritably to Eliza, “haven’t you got a clean shirt to give him? You know, he ought to have one every month or so.”
“What do you mean? What do you mean?” said Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from a basket of socks she was darning. “I gave him that one last Tuesday.”
“You little thug!” he growled, looking at Eugene with a fierce pain in his eyes. “Mama, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you send him to the barber’s to get that lousy hair cut off? By God, I’ll pay for it, if you don’t want to spend the money.”
She pursed her lips angrily and continued to darn. Eugene looked at him dumbly, gratefully. After Eugene had gone, the quiet one smoked moodily for a time, drawing the fragrant smoke in long gulps down into his thin lungs. Eliza, recollective and hurt at what had been said, worked on.
“What are you trying to do with your kid, mama?” he said in a hard quiet voice, after a silence. “Do you want to make a tramp out of him?”
“What do you mean? What do you mean?”
“Do you think it’s right to send him out on the streets with every little thug in town?”
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she said impatiently. “It’s no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one thinks so.”
“Oh, my God,” he said to the dark angel. “Listen to that!”
Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.
“Pride goeth before a fall,” she said after a moment. “Pride goeth before a fall.”
“I can’t see that that makes much difference to us,” said he. “We’ve got no place to fall to.”
“I consider myself as good as any one,” she said, with dignity. “I hold my head up with any one I meet.”
“Oh, my God,” Ben said to his angel. “You don’t meet any one. I don’t notice any of your fine brothers or their wives coming to see you.”
This was true, and it hurt. She pursed her lips.
“No, mama,” he continued after a moment’s pause, “you and the Old Man have never given a damn what we’ve done so long as you thought you might save a nickel by it.”
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she answered. “You talk as if you thought we were Rich Folks. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Oh, my God,” he laughed bitterly. “You and the Old Man like to make out you’re paupers, but you’ve a sock full of money.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said angrily.
“No,” he said, with his frequent negative beginning, after a moody silence, “there are people in this town without a fifth what we’ve got who get twice as much out of it. The rest of us have never had anything, but I don’t want to see the kid made into a little tramp.”
There was a long silence. She darned bitterly, pursing her lips frequently, hovering between quiet and tears.
“I never thought,” she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous with a bitter hurt smile, “that I should live to hear such talk from a son of mine. You had better watch out,” she hinted darkly, “a day of reckoning cometh. As sure as you live, as sure as you live. You will be repaid threefold for your unnatural,” her voice sank to a tearful whisper, “your UNNATURAL conduct!” She wept easily.
“Oh, my God,” answered Ben, turning his lean, gray, bitter, bumpy face up toward his listening angel. “Listen to that, won’t you?”