Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

      25

       Table of Contents

      Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it appeared, hung in the balance.

      The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was full. His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinstress with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of English in a New York City public school. Day by day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of blood and desolation mount through the world. Miss Crane’s thin red nostrils quivered with indignation. Her old gray eyes were sharp with anger. The idea! The idea!

      For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired love for Albion’s Isle than American ladies who teach its noble tongue.

      Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his ribs. The air was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly throbbing of great guns.

      “We must be fair!” said Margaret Leonard. “We must be fair!” But her eyes darkened when she read the news of England’s entry, and her throat was trembling like a bird’s. When she looked up her eyes were wet.

      “Ah, Lord!” she said. “You’ll see things now.”

      “Little Bobs!” roared Sheba.

      “God bless him! Did you see where he’s going to take the field?”

      John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high drooling laughter.

      “Lord a’mercy!” he gasped. “Let the rascals come now!”

      Ah, well — they came.

      All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory, to curb his prancing limbs. He devoured every scrap of news, and rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss Crane. He read every paper he could lay his hands on, exulting in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at every point. For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were going badly with the Huns. At a thousand points they fled squealing before English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere. Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were lined up at the walls of Paris. They had run in the wrong direction. The world grew dark. Desperately, he tried to understand. He could not. By the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the German army had arrived before Paris. It was something new in warfare. It was several years, in fact, before Eugene could understand that some one in the German armies had done some fighting.

      John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.

      “You wait!” he said confidently. “You just wait, my sonny. That old fellow Joffer knows what he’s about. This is just what he’s been waiting for. Now he’s got them where he wants them.”

      Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want a German army in Paris.

      Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.

      “It looks mighty serious,” she said. “I tell you!” She was silent a moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat. Then she added in a low trembling voice: “If England goes, we all go.”

      “God bless her!” Sheba yelled.

      “God bless her, ‘Gene,” she continued, tapping him on the knee. “When I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just couldn’t help myself. I didn’t care what any one thought. I knelt right down there in the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy”— her bleared eyes glistened through her tears —“God bless her, I couldn’t help it. Do you know what I did? I leaned over and kissed her earth.” Large gummy tears rolled down her red cheeks. She was weeping loudly, but she went on. “I said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by God, what’s more, it’s mine as well! God bless her! God bless her!”

      Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard’s eyes. Her face was wet. She could not speak. They were all deeply moved.

      “She won’t go,” said John Dorsey Leonard. “We’ll have a word to say to that! She won’t go! You wait!”

      In Eugene’s fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and the developing convolutions of a faery London — mighty, elfin, old, a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses, Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius burning among the swarm of quaint originality.

      As the war developed, and the literature of war-enchantment began to appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after book to read. They were the books of the young men — the young men who fought to blot out the evil of the world with their blood. In her trembling voice she read to him Rupert Brooke’s sonnet —“If I should die, think only this of me”— and she put a copy of Donald Hankey’s A Student in Arms into his hand, saying:

      “Read this, boy. It will stir you as you’ve never been stirred before. Those boys have seen the vision!”

      He read it. He read many others. He saw the vision. He became a member of this legion of chivalry — young Galahad–Eugene — a spearhead of righteousness. He had gone a-Grailing. He composed dozens of personal memoirs, into which quietly, humorously, with fine-tempered English restraint, he poured the full measure of his pure crusading heart. Sometimes, he came through to the piping times of peace minus an arm, a leg, or an eye, diminished but ennobled; sometimes his last radiant words were penned on the eve of the attack that took his life. With glistening eyes, he read his own epilogue, enjoyed his post-mortem glory, as his last words were recorded and explained by his editor. Then, witness of his own martyrdom, he dropped two smoking tears upon his young slain body. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

      Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood’s pharmacy. As he passed the idling group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them a look of sudden fierce contempt. Then he laughed quietly, savagely.

      “Oh, my God!” he said.

      At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to cross from the Post Office. She came over slowly, reeling.

      Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he crossed over, and turned angularly down Federal Street behind the Post Office. At the second entrance to the Doctors’ and Surgeons’ Building, he turned in, and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. Somewhere, with punctual developing monotony, a single drop of water was falling into the wet black basin of a sink. He paused in the wide corridor of the first floor to control the nervous thudding of his heart. Then he walked half-way down and entered the waiting-room of Dr. J. H. Coker. It was vacant.