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

“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. “Your girl went and got married, didn’t she? She fooled you. You got left.”

“Wh-a-a-a-t!” said Eliza banteringly, “has my boy been — as the fellow says” (she sniggered behind her hand) “has my boy been a-courtin’?” She puckered her lips in playful reproach.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily. “What fellow says!”

His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister’s eye. They laughed.

“Well, ‘Gene,” said the girl seriously, “forget about it. You’re only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman.”

“Why, son,” said Eliza with a touch of malice, “that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on.”

“Oh, stop it, please.”

“Cheer up!” said Helen heartily. “Your time’s coming. You’ll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you’re a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation.”

“Why, yes,” said Eliza, “I’d make a big joke of it all. I wouldn’t let on to her that it affected me. I’d write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I’d show them! That’s what I’d —”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” he groaned, starting up. “Leave me alone, won’t you?”

He left the house.

But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:

“ . . . and I hope he’s worth having you — he can’t deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that’s something. How lucky he is! You’re right about me — I’m too young. I’d cut off my hand now for eight or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.

“Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won’t, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I’m lost now and I’ll never find the way again. In God’s name write me a line when you get this. Tell me what your name is now — you never have. Tell me where you’re going to live. Don’t let me go entirely, I beg of you, don’t leave me alone.”

He sent the letter to the address she had given him — to her father’s house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a terrible tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no word came, July ended. The summer waned. She did not write.

Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh rocked with laughter.

The boarders said: “Eugene’s lost his girl. He doesn’t know what to do, he’s lost his girl.”

“Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?”

The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.

“Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl.”

The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their full-meated mouths.

“Don’t let them kid you, big boy. What’s the matter: did some one get your girl?” asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing with hoarse compassion:

“Git another girl, ‘Gene. Why, law! I’d not let it bother me two minutes.” He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto, after speaking.

“You should worry, boy. You should WORRY!” said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. “Women are like street-cars: if you miss one, there’s another along in fifteen minutes. Ain’t that right, lady?” he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. “Oh, aren’t men the awfullest —”

Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake Clapp, a well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:

“I thought she was too old for him when I saw her. ‘Gene’s only a kid. He’s taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is. He’s going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He’s thin as a bone. He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first disease that comes along —”

Her melancholy whine continued as Jake’s stealthy thigh fumbled against her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.

In the gray darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat’s in the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.

“He’ll git over it,” said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry. “Every boy has got to go through the Calf–Love stage. When I was about ‘Gene’s age —” He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.

“He’d better watch out,” whined Florry sadly. “I know what I’m talking about. That boy’s not strong — he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does. He’s on the verge of —”

Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.

“Miss Brown” meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little apart from the others. From the dark sun-parlor at the side came swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty-eight, of Tampa, Florida. She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.

“Where are you going, ‘Gene?” she said quietly. Her eyes of light violet were a little tired. There was a faint exquisite perfume of rosewater.

“Leave me alone!” he muttered.

“You can’t go on like this,” she said in a low tone. “She’s not worth it — none of them are. Pull yourself together.”

“Leave me alone!” he said furiously. “I know what I’m doing!” He wrenched away violently, and leaped down into the yard, plunging around the house in a staggering run.

“Ben!” said Irene Mallard sharply.

Ben rose from the dark porch-swing where he had been sitting with Mrs. Pert.

“See if you can’t do something to stop him,” said Irene Mallard.

“He’s crazy,” Ben muttered. “Which way did he go?”

“By there — around the house. Go quick!”

Ben went swiftly down the shallow steps and loped back over the lawn. The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped upon a dozen rotting columns of whitewashed brick, fourteen feet high. In the dim light, by one of these slender piers, already mined with crumbling ruins of wet brick, the scarecrow crouched, toiling with the thin grapevine of his arms against the temple.