Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
to do?”
“I’m going to college,” said Eugene. “I’m going to get an education and study law.”
“You’ll have lots of time,” said Max Isaacs. “You can go to college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good training. You go everywhere.”
“No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.”
But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end.
Mrs. Bowden’s niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh.
Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk.
Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears.
Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water. She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin, drinking her breath. She gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water, and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty kisses.
Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth.
“I like you! I like you a lot!” he said.
“What did they tell you about me?” she said. “Did they talk about me?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I like you.”
“You won’t remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls. You’ll forget about me. Some day you’ll see me, and you won’t even know me. You won’t recognize me. You’ll pass without speaking.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live.”
Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed him. They were hill-born.
He returned in late September.
In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened.
Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.
“I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife! . . . Do you see its shadow? . . . There! There! There!”
With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.
“Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you’ve come at last to take the old man with you? . . . There he stands — the Grim Reaper — as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!”
Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.
“Don’t worry,” said the nurse encouragingly, “the mortality’s only four per cent. It used to be thirty. He’s reduced it.”
Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter’s vital grasp.
“Don’t worry, old boy!” she said, “you’re going to be as good as you ever were, after this.”
She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.
But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly.
“All right!” he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. “Close the wound.”
Gant was dying of cancer.
Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.
“There,” he said pointing, “is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter’s hotel stood about there,” he pointed.
“Dig down!” said Helen, grinning.
Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate. His life seemed strange to him.
“We’ll go to see all those places when you get out of here. They’re going to let you out of here, day after tomorrow. Did you know that? Did you know you’re almost well?” she cried with a big smile.
“I’m going to be a well man after this,” said Gant. “I feel twenty years younger!”
“Poor old papa!” she said. “Poor old papa!”
Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his head against her.
27
My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once — at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land.
Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson’s, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters: “My Shakespeare, rise!” The large plump face —“as damned silly a head as ever I looked at”— stared baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his table.
He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand.
“My Shakespeare, rise!”
With red resentful face, he rose.
“Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?” or, “Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?” said Ben, scowling at him.
“My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?” said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: “That’s a shame! We oughtn’t to treat the poor kid like that.” Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing absently — penitently, laughing.
But —“his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it whole. He was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every shore of thought. He was all things in one: lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman. Men of science have been amazed by the depth of his learning. In The Merchant of Venice, he deals with the most technical questions of law with the skill of an attorney. In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a remedy