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

There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.

The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.

“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.

Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.

Eugene did not want to go to the State University.

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, “top things off” with a year or two at Oxford.

“Then,” said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, “then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he’s really ‘cultsherd.’ After that, of course,” he continued with a spacious carelessness, “he may travel for a year or so.”

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.

“You’re too young, boy,” said Margaret Leonard. “Can’t you persuade your father to wait another year? You’re only a child in years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world.” Her eyes darkened as she talked.

Gant would not be persuaded.

“He’s old enough,” he said. “When I was his age I had been earning my living for years. I’m getting old. I won’t be here much longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die.”

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels — in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and far-seeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.

“He’s ready to go,” said Gant, “and he’s going to the State University, and nowhere else. He’ll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life.” He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach. “There are very few boys who have had your chance,” said he, “and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you’ll live to see the day when you’ll thank me for sending you there. Now, I’ve given you my last word: you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.”

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Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him exhausted. He tired very quickly.

He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.

Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.

When it was at last plain that Gant’s will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:

“Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you.”

She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:

“Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago? Can you believe it?”

John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.

“What do you know about it?” he said.

When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.

“You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?”

She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.

“Eugene,” she continued, “we could not love you more if you were our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours.”

The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.

He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.

“I can’t!” he choked. “You mustn’t think —” He could not go on; his life groped blindly to confessional.

Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.

That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen’s marriage.

Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother’s voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in darkness.

The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met — a great shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them.