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

He gave her his package; she stood up to receive the flame he nursed in his cupped hands. She leaned her heavy body against him as, with puckered face and closed eyes, she held her cigarette to the fire. She grasped his shaking hands to steady the light, holding them for a moment after.

“What,” said “Miss Brown,” with a cunning smile, “what if your mother should see us? You’d catch it!”

“She’ll not see us,” he said. “Besides,” he added generously, “why shouldn’t women smoke the same as men? There’s no harm in it.”

“Yes,” said “Miss Brown,” “I believe in being broad-minded about these things, too.”

But he grinned in the dark, because the woman had revealed herself with a cigarette. It was a sign — the sign of the province, the sign unmistakable of debauchery.

Then, when he laid his hands upon her, she came very passively into his embrace as he sat before her on the rail.

“Eugene! Eugene!” she said in mocking reproof.

“Where is your room?” he said.

She told him.

Later, Eliza came suddenly and silently out upon them, on one of her swift raids from the kitchen.

“Who’s there? Who’s there?” she said, peering into the gloom suspiciously. “Huh? Hah? Where’s Eugene? Has any one seen Eugene?” She knew very well he was there.

“Yes, here I am,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Oh! Who’s that with you? Hah?”

“‘Miss Brown’ is with me.”

“Won’t you come out and sit down, Mrs. Gant?” said “Miss Brown.” “You must be tired and hot.”

“Oh!” said Eliza awkwardly, “is that you, ‘Miss Brown’? I couldn’t see who it was.” She switched on the dim porch light. “It’s mighty dark out here. Some one coming up those steps might fall and break a leg. I tell you what,” she continued conversationally, “this air feels good. I wish I could let everything go and just enjoy myself.”

She continued in amiable monologue for another half hour, her eyes probing about swiftly all the time at the two dark figures before her. Then hesitantly, by awkward talkative stages, she went into the house again.

“Son,” she said before she went, troubled, “it’s getting late. You’d better go to bed. That’s where we all ought to be.”

“Miss Brown” assented gracefully and moved toward the door.

“I’m going now. I feel tired. Good-night, all.”

He sat quietly on the rail, smoking, listening to the noises in the house. It went to sleep. He went back and found Eliza preparing to retire to her little cell.

“Son!” she said, in a low voice, after shaking her puckered face reproachfully for a moment, “I tell you what — I don’t like it. It doesn’t look right — your sitting out alone with that woman. She’s old enough to be your mother.”

“She’s YOUR boarder, isn’t she?” he said roughly, “not mine. I didn’t bring her here.”

“There’s one thing sure,” said Eliza, wounded. “You don’t catch me associating with them. I hold up my head as high as any one.” She smiled at him bitterly.

“Well, good-night, mama,” he said, ashamed and hurt. “Let’s forget about them for a while. What does it matter?”

“Be a good boy,” said Eliza timidly. “I want you to be a good boy, son.”

There was a sense of guilt in her manner, a note of regret and contrition.

“Don’t worry!” he said, turning away suddenly, wrenched bitterly, as he always was, by a sense of the child-like innocence and steadfastness that lay at the bottom of her life. “It’s not your fault if I’m not. I shan’t blame you. Goodnight.”

The kitchen-light went out; he heard his mother’s door click gently. Through the dark house a shaft of air blew coolly. Slowly, with thudding heart, he began to mount the stairs.

But on that dark stair, his foot-falls numbed in the heavy carpet, he came squarely upon a woman’s body that, by its fragrance, like magnolia, he knew was that of Mrs. Selborne. They held each other sharply by the arms, discovered, with caught breath. She bent toward him: a few strands of her blonde hair brushed his face, leaving it aflame.

“Hush-h!” she whispered.

So they paused there, holding each other, breast to breast, the only time that they had ever touched. Then, with their dark wisdom of each other confirmed, they parted, each a sharer in the other’s life, to meet thereafter before the world with calm untelling eyes.

He groped softly back along the dark corridor until he came to the door of “Miss Brown’s” room. It was slightly ajar. He went in.

She took all his medals, all that he had won at Leonard’s school — the one for debating, the one for declaiming, the one in bronze for William Shakespeare. W. S. 1616–1916 — Done for a Ducat!

He had no money to give her: she did not want much — a coin or two at a time. It was, she said, not the money: it was the principle of the thing. He saw the justice of her argument.

“For,” said she, “if I wanted money, I wouldn’t fool with you. Somebody tries to get me to go out every day. One of the richest men in this town (old man Tyson) has been after me ever since I came. He’s offered me ten dollars if I’ll go out in his car with him. I don’t need your money. But you’ve got to give me something. I don’t care how little it is. I wouldn’t feel decent unless you did. I’m not one of your little Society Chippies that you see every day uptown. I’ve too much self-respect for that.”

So, in lieu of money, he gave her his medals as pledges.

“If you don’t redeem them,” said “Miss Brown,” “I’ll give them to my own son when I go home.”

“Have you a son?”

“Yes. He’s eighteen years old. He’s almost as tall as you are and twice as broad. All the girls are mad about him.”

He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.

“That’s enough, now,” said “Miss Brown” with authority. “Go to your room and get some sleep.”

But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him “son.”

“Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,

Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o —”

Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and reversed the well-worn record. Then as with stately emphasis, the opening measure of “Katinka” paced out, she waited for him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up like wings to his embrace. She was teaching him to dance. Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in the arms of a young man dancing. Now, clumsily, he moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four! Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his awkward pressure, as bodiless as a fume of smoke. Her left hand rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a bird: her cool fingers were threaded into his hot sawing palm.

She had thick hair of an oaken color, evenly parted in the middle; her skin was pearl-pale, and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full, and sensuous — her face was like that of one of the preRaphaelite women. She carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with the slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise and tenderness. She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness and seduction, the world and heaven. He held her with reverent care, as one who would not come too near, who would not break a sacred image. Her exquisite and subtle perfume stole through him like a strange whisper, pagan and divine. He was afraid to touch her — and his hot palm sweated to her fingers.