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

“Your mother,” he wrote, “has gone off on another wild-goose chase to Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or starve. God knows what we’ll all come to before the end of this fearful, hellish, and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse and soup-kitchens like we had in the Cleveland administration. When the Democrats are in, you may as well begin to count your ribs. The banks have no money, people are out of work. You can mark my words everything will go to the tax-collector under the hammer before we’re done. The temperature was 7 above when I looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five cents a ton. The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus God! I passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked out on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he care if they all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as he was coming out of the Citizen’s Bank. I had known him twenty-five years. He’d never been sick a day in his life. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Old Gant will be the next. I have been eating at Mrs. Sales’ since your mother went away. You’ve never seen such a table as she keeps in your life — a profusion of fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes, peaches, and preserves, big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham and tongue, and a half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars description. How in God’s name she does it for thirty-five cents I don’t know. Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother’s away. I take him up to Sales’ with me once or twice a week and give him a square meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long legs coming. God knows where he puts it all — he can eat more than any three people I ever saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean pickings at the school. He’s got the lean and hungry Gant look. Poor child. He has no mother any more. I’ll do the best I can for him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags about him every week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere. Every one in town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who’s sure to be the next governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me to send him to the State university law school where he will make lifelong friends among the people of his own State, and then put him into politics. It’s what I should have done. I’m going to give him a good education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he’ll be a credit to the name. You haven’t seen him since he put on long pants. His mother picked out a beautiful suit at Moale’s Christmas. He went down to Daisy’s for Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store for every-day wear. He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the furnace going and she’s not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen at one and two o’clock in the morning and I’m up and gone hours before he’s awake. You can get nothing out of him — he never says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see him down-town late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They’re thick as thieves together. I guess she’s a bad egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot every one. It’s a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me today. He was well-liked by every one but a terror when he drank. My heart bled for her. She’s a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present. God knows what we’re coming to. Aff. Your Father, W. O. Gant.”

She saved carefully all his letters — written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.

Table of Contents

With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.

“Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.” He fumbled for the notes.

Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.

Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.

“Entgegen,” said Eugene, in a small choked voice, “follows its object.”

John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.

“I’m not so sure of that,” he said.

Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.

From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.

“Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,”— Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, “giving him a good punch in the eye.”

“No-o,” said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, “not exactly. ‘Catching him squarely in the eye’ gets the idiom better, I think.”

Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.

“Let me see,” said John Dorsey, turning the pages, “what he gives on this.”

Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene’s desk. Eugene read:

“Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,

Before I bust you on the ear.”

He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:

“Du bist wie eine bum-me.”

They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Höher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.

“The mountains,” observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, “have been the traditional seat of Liberty.”

Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.

During this season of Eliza’s absence he roomed with Guy Doak.