Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

“All right! Yes!” the boy yelled. “I’ll try it.”

He bought at once a copy of the translation used by the class. Thereafter, when he read, faltering prettily here and there over a phrase, until his instructor should come to his aid, the satanic professor listened gravely and attentively, nodding his head in approval from time to time, and saying, with great satisfaction, when he had finished: “Good, Mr. Gant. Very good. That shows what a little real work will do.”

And privately, he would say: “You see the difference, don’t you? I knew at once when you stopped using that pony. Your translation is not so smooth, but it’s your own now. You’re doing good work, my boy, and you’re getting something out of it. It’s worth it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Eugene gratefully, “it certainly is —”

By far the most distinguished of his teachers this first year was Mr. Edward Pettigrew (“Buck”) Benson, the Greek professor. Buck Benson was a little man in the middle-forties, a bachelor, somewhat dandified, but old-fashioned, in his dress. He wore wing collars, large plump cravats, and suede-topped shoes. His hair was thick, heavily grayed, beautifully kept. His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce, with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings around the mouth. It was an altogether handsome ugliness.

His voice was low, lazy, pleasant, with an indolent drawl, but without changing its pace or its inflection he could flay a victim with as cruel a tongue as ever wagged, and in the next moment wipe out hostility, restore affection, heal all wounds by the same agency. His charm was enormous. Among the students he was the subject for comical speculation — in their myths, they made of him a passionate and sophisticated lover, and his midget cycle-car, which bounded like an overgrown toy around the campus, the scene of many romantic seductions.

He was a good Grecian — an elegant indolent scholar. Under his instruction Eugene began to read Homer. The boy knew little grammar — he had learned little at Leonard’s — but, since he had had the bad judgment to begin Greek under some one other than Buck Benson, Buck Benson thought he knew even less than he did. He studied desperately, but the bitter dyspeptic gaze of the elegant little man frightened him into halting, timorous, clumsy performances. And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and tremulous voice, Buck Benson’s manner would become more and more weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl:

“Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the window.”

But, on the examination, he gave an excellent performance, and translated from sight beautifully. He was saved. Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy astonishment, and gave him a fair grade. Thereafter, they slipped quickly into an easier relation: by Spring, he was reading Euripides with some confidence.

But that which remained most vividly, later, in the drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast sea-surge of Homer which beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as did the sea-sound in Gant’s parlor shells, when first he heard it to the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the lost last weary son of Hellas.

Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo — above the whistle’s shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter’s tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall. What dissonance can quench it? What jangling violence can disturb or conquer it — entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like “the apple tree, the singing, and the gold”?

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Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging four or five times. He finished the year living alone in a big bare carpetless room — an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the students, with very few exceptions, lived two or three to a room. In that room began a physical isolation, hard enough to bear at first, which later became indispensable to him, mind and body.

He had come to Pulpit Hill with Hugh Barton, who met him at Exeter and drove him over in the big roadster. After his registration, he had secured lodging quickly at the house of an Altamont widow whose son was a student. Hugh Barton looked relieved and departed, hoping to reach home and his bride by nightfall.

With fine enthusiasm, but poor judgment, Eugene paid the widow two months in advance. Her name was Bradley: she was a flabby petulant woman with a white face and heart-disease. But her food was excellent. Mrs. Bradley’s student son answered to his initial letters —“G. T.” G. T. Bradley, a member of the sophomore class, was a surly scowling youth of nineteen — a mixture, in equal parts, of servility and insolence. His chief, but thwarted, ambition was to be elected to membership in a fraternity. Having failed to win recognition by the exercise of his natural talents, he was driven by an extraordinary obsession that fame and glory would come to him if he were known as the slave-driver of a number of Freshmen.

But these tactics, tried on Eugene, produced at once defiance and resentment. Their hostility was bitter: G. T. set himself to thwart and ruin the beginnings of the boy’s university life. He trapped him into public blunders, and solicited audiences to witness his humiliation; he wheedled his confidence and betrayed it. But there is a final mockery, an ultimate treachery that betrays us into shame; our capacity for villainy, like all our other capacities, is so small. The day came when Eugene was free from bondage. He was free to leave the widow’s house of sorrow. G. T. approached him, scowling, diffidently.

“I hear you’re leaving us, ‘Gene,” he said.

“Yes,” said Eugene.

“Is it because of the way I’ve acted?”

“Yes,” said Eugene.

“You take things too seriously, ‘Gene,” he said.

“Yes,” said Eugene.

“I don’t want you to go having hard feelings, ‘Gene. Let’s shake hands and be friends.”

He thrust his hand out stiffly. Eugene looked at the hard weak face, the furtive, unhappy eyes casting about for something they might call their own. The thick black hair was plastered stiff with grease; he saw white points of dandruff at the roots. There was an odor of talcum powder. He had been borne and nourished in the body of his white-faced mother — for what? To lap the scornful stroking fingers of position; to fawn miserably before an emblem. Eugene had a moment of nausea.

“Let’s shake hands, ‘Gene,” said the boy once more, waggling his out-thrust fingers.

“No,” said Eugene.

“You don’t hate me, do you?” whined G. T.

“No,” said Eugene.

He had a moment of pity, of sickness. He forgave because it was necessary to forget.

Eugene lived in a small world, but its ruins for him were actual. His misfortunes were trifling, but their effect upon his spirit was deep and calamitous. He withdrew deeply and scornfully into his cell. He was friendless, whipped with scorn and pride. He set his face blindly against all the common united life around him.

It was during this bitter and desperate autumn that Eugene first met Jim Trivett.

Jim Trivett, the son of a rich tobacco farmer in the eastern part of the State, was a good tempered young tough of twenty years. He was a strong, rather foul-looking boy, with a coarse protruding mouth, full-meated and slightly ajar, constantly rayed with a faint loose smile and blotted at the comer with a brown smear of tobacco juice. He had bad teeth. His hair was light-brown, dry, and unruly: it stuck out in large untidy mats. He was dressed in the last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion of the time: skin-tight trousers that ended an inch above his oxford shoes exposing an inch of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in across his kidneys, large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he wore a big sweater with high-school numerals.