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

“What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle.

“Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.”

Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously. “Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?” he said, and struck him heavily on the back. His thick stupid face composed itself.

“Have a cigarette, Willie,” he said, offering the package to Willie Goff.

“What’s yours?” said the jerker to Toby Pottle.

“Give me a dope, too.”

“I don’t want anything,” said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad.

Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie’s cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously.

They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.

Brady Chalmers took Willie’s colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it carefully and put it back.

“What are you all dressed up about, Willie?” he said. “You must be going to see your girl.”

Willie Goff grinned cunningly.

Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face.

“Come on, Willie,” he said, blandly, quietly, “you’ve got a girl, haven’t you?”

Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.

“I’ve got several,” said Willie Goff. “A fellow’s got to have a little Poon–Tang, hasn’t he?”

Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for stronger music, louder wine.

“How do you do?”

“Aha! Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. “Where were YOU that time?”

“YOU’LL never know,” she called back. It was between them — their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.

“Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort. “You too, Brady.” He followed the ladies back — tall, bold, swagger — a young alcoholic with one sound lung. He was a good golfer.

Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.

“All right, son. Two dopes and a mint Limeade. Make it snappy.”

“Do you work around here, boy?”

The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.

Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low — an excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.

But — at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both Baptists.

Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We’ll be waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had seen.

Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck’s serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky. Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide.

Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.

For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford’s Reo. They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie.

“Do you know how to dance, George?” Eugene asked. His heart was full of bitter pride and fear.

“Yes,” said George Graves absently, “a little bit. I don’t like it.” He lifted his brooding eyes.

“Say, ‘Gene,” he said, “how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is worth?”

He answered Eugene’s laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin.

“Come on,” said Eugene. “I’ll match you for a drink.”

They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening afternoon traffic.

“It’s getting worse all the time,” said George Graves. “The people who laid the town out didn’t have any vision. What’s it going to be like, ten years from now?”

“They could widen the streets, couldn’t they?” said Eugene.

“No. Not now. You’d have to move all the buildings back. Wonder how much it would cost?” said George Graves thoughtfully.

“And if we don’t,” Professor L. B. Dunn’s precise voice sounded its cold warning, “their next move will be directed against us. You may yet live to see the day when the iron heel of militarism is on your neck, and the armed forces of the Kaiser do the goose-step up and down this street. When that day comes —”

“I don’t put any stock in those stories,” said Mr. Bob Webster rudely and irreverently. He was a small man, with a gray, mean face, violent and bitter. A chronic intestinal sourness seemed to have left its print upon his features. “In my opinion, it’s all propaganda. Those Germans are too damn good for them, that’s all. They’re beginning to call for calf-rope.”

“When that day comes,” Professor Dunn implacably continued, “remember what I told you. The German government has imperialistic designs upon the whole of the world. It is looking to the day when it shall have all mankind under the yoke of Krupp and Kultur. The fate of civilization is hanging in the balance. Mankind is at the crossroads. I pray God it shall not be said that we were found wanting. I pray God that this free people may never suffer as little Belgium suffered, that our wives and daughters may not be led off into slavery or shame, our children maimed and slaughtered.”