Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (53 page)

"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."

"It's not our fight," said Mr. Bob
Webster.  "I don't want to send my boys three thousand
miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners.  If they
come over here, I'll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until
they do they can fight it out among themselves.  Isn't that
right, Judge?" he said, turning toward the party of the third
part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal Circuit, who had
fortunately been a close friend of Grover Cleveland.  Ancestral
voices prophesying war.

"Did you know the Wheeler boys?" Eugene
asked George Graves.  "Paul and Clifton?"

"Yes," said George Graves.  "They
went away and joined the French army.  They're in the Foreign
Legion."

"They're in the aviation part of it," said
Eugene.  "The Lafayette Eskydrill.  Clifton Wheeler
has shot down more than six Germans."

"The boys around here didn't like him,"
said George Graves.  "They thought he was a sissy."

Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word.

"How old was he?" he asked.

"He was a grown man," said George. 
"Twenty-two or three."

Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. 
(Ich bin ja noch ein Kind.)

"--But fortunately," continued Judge Walter
C. Jeter deliberately, "we have a man in the White House on
whose far-seeing statesmanship we can safely rely.  Let us trust
to the wisdom of his leadership, obeying, in word and spirit, the
principles of strict neutrality, accepting only as a last resort a
course that would lead this great nation again into the suffering and
tragedy of war, which," his voice sank to a whisper, "God
forbid!"

Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne
himself gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the
Pettigrew Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria,
behind an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. 
There was a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. 
The old negro snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps,
growling softly.

Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy
rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. 
He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick,
which his freckled hand gripped upon the silver knob. 
Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to
side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. 
He was a very parfit gentil knight.

He muttered.

"Suh?" said the negro, pulling in on his
reins, and turning around.

"Go on!  Go on, you scoundrel!" said
Colonel Pettigrew.

"Yes, suh," said the negro.  They
drove on.

In the crowd of loafing youngsters that stood across
the threshold of Wood's pharmacy, Colonel Pettigrew's darting eyes
saw two of his own cadets.  They were pimply youths, with slack
jaws and a sloppy carriage.

He muttered his disgust.  Not the same! 
Not the same!  Nothing the same!  In his proud youth, in
the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head
of his own cadets.  There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. 
They stepped forward to a man . . . until not a single commissioned
officer was left . . . 36 came back . . . since 1789 . . . it must go
on! . . . 19, sir--all under one hundred and seventeen . . . must . .
. go . . . on!

His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently.  The
horses trotted out of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked
rumble of rubber tires.

George Graves and Eugene entered Wood's pharmacy and
stood up to the counter.  The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew
a sopping rag across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab.

"What's yours?" he said irritably.

"I want a chock-lut milk," said Eugene.

"Make it two," added George Graves.

O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a
long age in the deep-delvé earth!
 
 

25
 

Yes.  The enormous crime had been committed. 
And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate
neutrality.  His heart, however, was not neutral.  The fate
of civilization, it appeared, hung in the balance.

The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. 
Dixieland was full.  His closest friend at the time was a sharp
old spinstress with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a
teacher of English in a New York City public school.  Day by
day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of
blood and desolation mount through the world.  Miss Crane's thin
red nostrils quivered with indignation.  Her old gray eyes were
sharp with anger.  The idea!  The idea!

For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or
more inspired love for Albion's Isle than American ladies who teach
its noble tongue.

Eugene was also faithful.  With Miss Crane he
kept a face of mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial
tattoo against his ribs.  The air was full of fifes and flutes;
he heard the ghostly throbbing of great guns.

"We must be fair!" said Margaret Leonard. 
"We must be fair!"  But her eyes darkened when she
read the news of England's entry, and her throat was trembling like a
bird's.  When she looked up her eyes were wet.

"Ah, Lord!" she said.  "You'll
see things now."

"Little Bobs!" roared Sheba.

"God bless him!  Did you see where he's
going to take the field?"

John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent
over with high drooling laughter.