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

At length, they came out above the cove, at a forking of the road. They turned left, to the north, toward the upper and smaller end. To the south, the cove widened out in a rich little Eden of farm and pasture. Small houses dotted the land, there were green meadows and a glint of water. Fields of young green wheat bent rhythmically under the wind; the young corn stood waist-high, with light clashing blades. The chimneys of Rheinhart’s house showed above its obscuring grove of maples; the fat dairy cows grazed slowly across the wide pastures. And further below, half tree-and-shrub-hidden, lay the rich acres of Judge Webster Tayloe. The road was thickly coated with white dust; it dipped down and ran through a little brook. They crossed over on white rocks, strewn across its bed. Several ducks, scarcely disturbed by their crossing, waddled up out of the clear water and regarded them gravely, like little children in white choir aprons. A young country fellow clattered by them in a buggy filled with empty milk-cans. He grinned with a cordial red face, saluting them with a slow gesture, and leaving behind an odor of milk and sweat and butter. A woman, in a field above them, stared curiously with shaded eyes. In another field, a man was mowing with a scythe, moving into the grass like a god upon his enemies, with a reaping hook of light.

They left the road near the head of the cove, advancing over the fields on rising ground to the wooded cup of the hills. There was a powerful masculine stench of broad dock-leaves, a hot weedy odor. They moved over a pathless field, knee-high in a dry stubbly waste, gathering on their clothes clusters of brown cockle-burrs. All the field was sown with hot odorous daisies. Then they entered the wood again, mounting until they came to an island of tender grass, by a little brook that fell down from the green hill along a rocky ferny bed in bright cascades.

“Let’s stop here,” said Eugene. The grass was thick with dandelions: their poignant and wordless odor studded the earth with yellow magic. They were like gnomes and elves, and tiny witchcraft in flower and acorn.

Laura and Eugene lay upon their backs, looking up through the high green shimmer of leaves at the Caribbean sky, with all its fleet of cloudy ships. The water of the brook made a noise like silence. The town behind the hill lay in another unthinkable world. They forgot its pain and conflict.

“What time is it?” Eugene asked. For, they had come to a place where no time was. Laura held up her exquisite wrist, and looked at her watch.

“Why!” she exclaimed, surprised. “It’s only half-past twelve!”

But he scarcely heard her.

“What do I care what time it is!” he said huskily, and he seized the lovely hand, bound with its silken watch-cord, and kissed it. Her long cool fingers closed around his own; she drew his face down to her mouth.

They lay there, locked together, upon that magic carpet, in that paradise. Her gray eyes were deeper and clearer than a pool of clear water; he kissed the little freckles on her rare skin; he gazed reverently at the snub tilt of her nose; he watched the mirrored dance of the sparkling water over her face. All of that magic world — flower and field and sky and hill, and all the sweet woodland cries, sound and sight and odor — grew into him, one voice in his heart, one tongue in his brain, harmonious, radiant, and whole — a single passionate lyrical noise.

“My dear! Darling! Do you remember last night?” he asked fondly, as if recalling some event of her childhood.

“Yes,” she gathered her arms tightly about his neck, “why do you think I could forget it?”

“Do you remember what I said — what I asked you to do?” he insisted eagerly.

“Oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?” she moaned, turning her head to the side and flinging an arm across her eyes.

“What is it? What’s the matter? Dear?”

“Eugene — my dear, you’re only a child. I’m so old — a grown woman.”

“You’re only twenty-one,” he said. “There’s only five years’ difference. That’s nothing.”

“Oh!” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s all the difference in the world.”

“When I’m twenty, you’ll be twenty-five. When I’m twenty-six, you’ll be thirty-one. When I’m forty-eight, you’ll be fifty-three. What’s that?” he said contemptuously. “Nothing.”

“Everything,” she said, “everything. If I were sixteen, and you twenty-one it would be nothing. But you’re a boy and I’m a woman. When you’re a young man I’ll be an old maid; when you grow old I shall be dying. How do you know where you’ll be, what you’ll be doing five years from now?” she continued in a moment. “You’re only a boy — you’ve just started college. You have no plans yet. You don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“Yes, I do!” he yelled furiously. “I’m going to be a lawyer. That’s what they’re sending me for. I’m going to be a lawyer, and I’m going into politics. Perhaps,” he added with gloomy pleasure, “you’ll be sorry then, after I make a name for myself.” With bitter joy he foresaw his lonely celebrity. The Governor’s Mansion. Forty rooms. Alone. Alone.

“You’re going to be a lawyer,” said Laura, “and you’re going everywhere in the world, and I’m to wait for you, and never get married. You poor kid!” She laughed softly. “You don’t know what you’re going to do.”

He turned a face of misery on her; brightness dropped from the sun.

“You don’t care?” he choked. “You don’t care?” He bent his head to hide his wet eyes.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “I do care. But people don’t live like that. It’s like a story. Don’t you know that I’m a grown woman? At my age, dear, most girls have begun to think of getting married. What — what if I had begun to think of it, too?”

“Married!” The word came from him in a huge gasp of horror as if she had mentioned the abominable, proposed the unspeakable. Then, having heard the monstrous suggestion, he immediately accepted it as a fact. He was like that.

“So! That’s it!” he said furiously. “You’re going to get married, eh? You have fellows, have you? You go out with them, do you? You’ve known it all the time, and you’ve tried to fool me.”

Nakedly, with breast bare to horror, he scourged himself, knowing in the moment that the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in the probable — the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds treason in the dark.

“You have fellows — you let them feel you. They feel your legs, they play with your breasts, they —” His voice became inaudible through strangulation.

“No. No, my dear. I haven’t said so,” she rose swiftly to a sitting position, taking his hands. “But there’s nothing unusual about getting married, you know. Most people do. Oh, my dear! Don’t look like that! Nothing has happened. Nothing! Nothing!”

He seized her fiercely, unable to speak. Then he buried his face in her neck.

“Laura! My dear! My sweet! Don’t leave me alone! I’ve been alone! I’ve always been alone!”

“It’s what you want, dear. It’s what you’ll always want. You couldn’t stand anything else. You’d get so tired of me. You’ll forget this ever happened. You’ll forget me. You’ll forget — forget.”

“Forget! I’ll never forget! I won’t live long enough.”

“And I’ll never love any one else! I’ll never leave you! I’ll wait for you forever! Oh, my child, my child!”

They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say — whatever disenchantment follows — that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This would endure.