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

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis’ laughter filled the room.

Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction. He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years of repetition. In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he had ever met it before). There were two final years of precious Greek: they read the Anabasis.

“What’s the good of all this stuff?” said Tom Davis argumentatively.

Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here. He understood the value of the classics.

“It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind.”

“What good’s it going to do him when he goes to work?” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “It’s not going to teach him how to grow more corn.”

“Well — I’m not so sure of that,” said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh. “I think it does.”

“Pap” Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head. He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.

He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly. His father was wealthy. He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town. They were unpretending people — German stock.

“Pshaw, Mr. Leonard,” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?”

“Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus,” said Tom Davis with sounding laughter. Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation. The joke was his own.

“It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts,” he said.

“According to what you say,” said Tom Davis, “a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn’t.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, “you know, I believe he does.” He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering giggle.

He was on trodden ground. They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.

He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as γυνάικος, but his opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp — Greek was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic. The smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below, touched the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos. He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a genuine belief.

καὶ κατὰ γην καὶ κατὰ θάλατταν.

The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey’s sister Amy. She was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who weighed 185 pounds. She had very thick black hair, straight and oily, and very black eyes, giving a heavy sensuousness to her face. Her thick forearms were fleeced with light down. She was not fat, but she corsetted tightly, her powerful arms and heavy shoulders bulging through the cool white of her shirtwaists. In warm weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were stained below the arm-pits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the winter, as she warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the exciting odor of chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal. Eugene, passing down the wind-swept back porch one day in winter, looked in on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out. She sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her stockings. Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders, her big body steaming cleanly like a beast.

She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her brother’s. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly with contempt. Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely.

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year — cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine — sickness made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted pictures — impressionist blobs — sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background.

Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous — the rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman’s face, sign of his marriage with ocean. How look the seas at dawn in Spring? The cold gulls sleep upon the wind. But rose the skies.

They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the road. It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees. He wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand. His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned.

He had begotten two children by Sheba — girls. They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring. The boys groped curiously.

“He must be a better man than he looks yet,” said Tom Davis. “The little ’un’s only two or three years old.”

“He’s not as old as he looks,” said Eugene. “He looks old because he’s been sick. He’s only forty-nine.”

“How do you know?” said Tom Davis.

“Miss Amy says so,” said Eugene innocently.

“Pap” Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.

“Forty-nine!” he said, “you’d better see a doctor, boy. He’s as old as God.”

“That’s what she said,” Eugene insisted doggedly.

“Why, of course she said it!” “Pap” Rheinhart replied. “You don’t think they’re going to let it out, do you? When they’re running a school here.”

“Son, you must be simple!” said Jack Candler who had not thought of it up to now.

“Hell, you’re their Pet. They know you’ll believe whatever they tell you,” said Julius Arthur. “Pap” Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure was impossible. They laughed at his faith.

“Well, if he’s so old,” said Eugene, “why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?”

“Why, because she couldn’t get any one else, of course,” said “Pap” Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.

“Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?” said Tom Davis curiously. Silently they wondered. And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their mother’s heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba’s strong voice leveling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable riddle — out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.