Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the furnace going and she’s not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen at one and two o’clock in the morning and I’m up and gone hours before he’s awake. You can get nothing out of him — he never says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see him down-town late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They’re thick as thieves together. I guess she’s a bad egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot every one. It’s a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me today. He was well-liked by every one but a terror when he drank. My heart bled for her. She’s a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present. God knows what we’re coming to. Aff. Your Father, W. O. Gant.”
She saved carefully all his letters — written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.
In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.
24
With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.
“Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.” He fumbled for the notes.
Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.
Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.
“Entgegen,” said Eugene, in a small choked voice, “follows its object.”
John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.
“I’m not so sure of that,” he said.
Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.
From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.
“Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,”— Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, “giving him a good punch in the eye.”
“No-o,” said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, “not exactly. ‘Catching him squarely in the eye’ gets the idiom better, I think.”
Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.
“Let me see,” said John Dorsey, turning the pages, “what he gives on this.”
Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene’s desk. Eugene read:
“Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,
Before I bust you on the ear.”
He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:
“Du bist wie eine bum-me.”
They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Höher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.
“The mountains,” observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, “have been the traditional seat of Liberty.”
Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.
During this season of Eliza’s absence he roomed with Guy Doak.
Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida.
Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish’s belly, with somewhat unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than his upper. He was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him a good-looking boy.
He made few friends. To the boys at Leonard’s this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for girls. He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him.
Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller’s mould of infantile cynicism. He was occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels. He was wise. Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne. So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement.
Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice fellow — sharp, obstinate, unsubtle, and pleased with his wit. They lived on the first floor at Leonard’s: at night, by a roaring wood fire, they listened carefully to the great thunder of the trees, and to the stealthy creaking foot-steps of the master as he came softly down the stairs, and paused by their door. They ate at table with Margaret, John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John Dorsey, junior, nine, and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard’s Tennessee nephews — Tyson Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen, foulmouthed and sly, and Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen, with a bumpy face, brown merry eyes, and a quick temper. At table they kept up a secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden movement, fleshing a fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said the blessing, and choking with smothered laughter. At night, they tapped messages on floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering conventions in the windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds as John Dorsey stormed down on them.
Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school alive. He had less than twenty students the first year, and less than thirty the second. From an income of not more than $3,000 he had to pay Miss Amy, who had left a high school position to help him, a small salary. The old house on its fine wooded hill was full of outmoded plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it at a small rental. But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a considerable yearly restoration. The Leonards were fighting very stubbornly and courageously