The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  “She does not know!” the boy’s uncle howled with his contemptuous laugh. “My dear child, I have no doubt that she has told you of her father’s wisdom, erudition, and his faultless elegance of speech…. Pah-h!” he sneered. “He was a picker-up of unconsidered trifles—a reader of miscellaneous trash—the instant dupe for every remedy, nostrum, cure-all that any traveling quack might offer to him, and the gullible believer of every superstitious prophesy, astrological omen, ghost-story, augury, or portent that he heard…. Why, my boy,” his uncle whispered, bending towards him with an air of horrified revelation, “he was a man who used big words when he had no sense of their real meaning—a fellow who would try to impress some backwoods yokel with fine phrases which he didn’t understand himself. Yes! I have heard him talk so even in the presence of people of some education and intelligence—I have seen them nudge and wink at one another over the spectacle he was making of himself—and I confess to you I had to turn my head away and blush for shame,” his uncle whispered fiercely, his eyes blazing, “for shame to think my own father could expose himself in that degrading fashion.”

  And for a moment he stared gauntly into the fading ranges of the west, and was silent. When he spoke again, his voice had grown old and weary, bitter with quiet fatality:

  “Moral virtues—purity of character—piety—fine words—no profanity—yes! I suppose my father had them all,” said Uncle Mark wearily. “No liquor in the house—yes, that was true enough—and also it is true there was no food, no human decency, no privacy. Why, my dear boy,” he whispered suddenly, turning to the boy again with that birdlike tilt of the head and that abrupt and startling transition to a shamefaced intimacy of whispered revelation—“do you know that even after I had reached the age of twenty years and we had moved to Libya Hill, we all slept together—eight of us—in the same room where my mother and my father slept?—And for three days!” he cried suddenly and savagely—“Oh! for three damnable, never-to-be-forgotten days of shame and horror that left their scar upon the lives of all of us, the body of my grandfather. Bill Joyner, lay there in the house and rotted—rotted!” his voice broke in a sob, and he struck his gaunt fist blindly, savagely into the air, “rotted in Summer heat until the stench of him had got into our breath, our blood, our lives, into bedding and food and clothes, into the very walls that sheltered us—and the memory of him became for us a stench of shame and horror that nothing could wash away, that filled our hearts with hatred and loathing for our blood and kind—while my father, Lafayette Joyner, and that damned, thick-lipped, drawling, sanctimonious, lecher of a nigger-Baptist prophet—your great-uncle, Holy Rance!” he snarled savagely, “sat there smugly with that stench of rotting death and man’s corrupt mortality thick in their nostrils—calmly discussing, if you please, the lost art of embalming as it was practiced by the ancient Egyptians—which they, they alone, of course, of all men living,” he snarled bitterly, “had rediscovered—and were prepared to practice on that rotting and putrescent corpse!”

  Then he was silent for a moment more. His face, gaunt and passionate, which in repose, after its grotesque contortions of scorn, rage, humor and disgust, was so strangely, nobly tranquil in its lonely dignity, burned with a stern and craggy impassivity in the red, wintry glow of the late sun.

  “And yet there was some strangeness in us all,” he went on in a remote, quiet, husky tone that had in it the curious and haunting quality of the distance and passion which his voice could carry as no other the boy had ever heard, “something blind and wild as nature—a sense of our inevitable destiny. Oh! call it not conceit!” his uncle cried. “Conceit is such a small thing, after all! Conceit is only mountain-high, world-wide, or ocean-deep!—This thing we had in us could match its will against the universe, the rightness of its every act against the huge single voice and bitter judgment of the world, its moral judgments against God himself.—Was it murder? Why, then, the murder was not in ourselves, but in the very flesh and blood of those we murdered. Their murder rushed out of their sinful lives to beg for bloody execution at our hands. The transgressor assaulted the very blade of our knives with his offending throat. The wicked man did willfully attack the sharp point of our bayonet with his crime-calloused heart, the offender in the sight of God rushed on us, thrust his neck into our guiltless hands and fairly broke it, in spite of all that we could do!…

  “My dear child, surely you must know by now,” his uncle cried, as he turned on him with the fixed, blazing glare of his eyes, his set grimace of scorn and fury—“surely you have learned by now that a Joyner is incapable of doing wrong. Cruelty, blind indifference to everything except oneself, brutal neglect, children criminally begotten in casual gratification of one’s own lust, children born unwanted and untended into a world of misery, poverty, and neglect where they must live or die or sicken or be strong according to their own means, in a struggle to survive as barbarously savage as the children of an Indian tribe endure—why, these are faults that might be counted crimes in other men, but in a Joyner are considered acts of virtue!—No, he can see the starved eyes of his children staring at him from the shadows as they go comfortless and famished to their beds, and then go out upon his porch to listen to the million little sounds of night, and meditate the glory of the moon as it comes up across the hill behind the river! He can breathe the sweet, wild fragrance of a Summer’s night and dreamily compose a lyric to the moon, the lilac, and his lady’s hair, while his daughter coughs her life out from the darkness of the wretched house—and find no fault or error in his life whatever!…

  “Oh, did I not live and know it all?” his uncle cried, “that agony of life and death, blind chance, survival or extinction—till the mind went mad, man’s heart and faith were broken, to see how little was the love we had, how cruel, vile, and useless was the waste!—My brother Edward died when he was four years old: there in the room with all of us he lay for a week upon his trundle bed—oh! we let him die beneath our very eyes!” his uncle cried, striking his fist into the air with a kind of agony of loss and pain—“he died beneath the very beds we slept in, for his trundle bed was pushed each night beneath the big bed where my mother and my father slept. We stood there staring at him with the eyes of dumb, bewildered, foolish oxen, while his body stiffened, his heels drew backward towards his head in the convulsions of his agony—and that damned sanctimonious, well-pleased voice drawled on and on with the conceit of its interminable assurance, ‘giving it as my theory,’” snarled the boy’s uncle—“though all things else were lacking in that house, there never was a dearth of theory—that unplumbed well of wisdom could give theories till you died. And Edward died, thank God, before the week was out,” his uncle quietly went on. “He died suddenly one night at two o’clock while the Great Theorist snored peacefully above him—while all the rest of us were sleeping! He screamed once—such a scream as had the whole blind agony of death in it—and by the time we got a candle lighted and had pulled his little bed out on the floor, that wretched and forsaken child was dead! His body was as stiff as a poker and bent back like a bow even as the Noble Theorist lifted him—he was dead before our eyes before we knew it—dead even as that poor woman who had borne him rushed screaming out of doors like a demented creature—running, stumbling, God knows where, downhill, into the dark—the wilderness—towards the river—to seek help somehow at a neighbor’s when the need for help was past. And his father was holding that dead child in his arms when she returned with that unneeded help….

  “Oh, my child,” his uncle whispered, “if you could have seen the look on that woman’s face as she came back into that room of death again—if you could have seen her look first at the child there in his arms, and then at him, and seen him shake his head at her and say, ‘I knew that he was gone before you went out of the door, but I didn’t have the heart to call you back and let you know’—oh! if you could have heard the sanctimonious, grief-loving unction of that voice, that feeding gluttony and triumphant vanity of sorrow that battened on
his own child’s life and said to me, as it had said a thousand times, more plain than any words could do: ‘I! I! I! Others will die, but I remain! Death, sorrow, human agony, and loss, all the grief, error, misery, and mischance that men can suffer occurs here for the enlargement of this death-devouring, all-consuming, time-triumphant universe of I, I, I!’—Why, damn him,” said his uncle huskily, “I had no words to nail him with a curse, no handle to take hold of my complaint—he had escaped as always like oil running through my fingers, speaking those unctuous words of piety and sorrow that none could challenge—but I hated him like hell and murder in my heart—I could have killed him where he stood!”

  BUT NOW, AS the boy and his uncle stood there on the mountain top looking into the lonely vistas of the westering sun, watching its savage stripes of gold and red as it went down in the smoky loneliness and receding vistas of the great ranges of the west, the wind would fill the boy’s heart with unwalled homelessness, a desire for houses, streets, and the familiar words again, a mighty longing for return.

  For now black night, wild night, oncoming, secret, and mysterious night, with all its lonely wilderness of storm, demented cries, and unhoused wandering was striding towards them like an enemy. And around them on the lonely mountain top they heard the whistling of the wind in coarse, sere grasses, and from the darkening mountain side below them they could hear the remote howlings of the wind as it waged its stern, incessant warfare in the stormy branches of the bare and lonely trees.

  And instantly he would see the town below now, coiling in a thousand fumes of homely smoke, now winking into a thousand points of friendly light its glorious small design, its aching, passionate assurances of walls, warmth, comfort, food, and love. It spoke to him of something deathless and invincible in the souls of men, like a small light in a most enormous dark that would not die. Then hope, hunger, longing, joy, a powerful desire to go down to the town again would fill his heart. For in the wild and stormy darkness of oncoming night there was no door, and the thought of staying there in darkness on the mountain top was not to be endured.

  Then his uncle and he would go down the mountain side, taking the shortest, steepest way they knew, rushing back down to the known limits of the town, the streets, the houses, and the lights, with a sense of furious haste, hairbreadth escape, as if the great beast of the dark was prowling on their very heels. When they got back into the town, the whole place would be alive with that foggy, smoky, immanent, and strangely exciting atmosphere of early Winter evening and the smells of supper from a hundred houses. The odors of the food were brawny, strong, and flavorsome, and proper to the Winter season, the bite and hunger of the sharp, strong air. There were the smells of frying steak, and fish, and the good fat fragrance of the frying pork chops. And there were the smells of brawny liver, frying chicken, and, most pungent and well-savored smell of all, the smell of strong, coarse hamburger and the frying onions.

  The grand and homely quality of this hamburger-onion smell had in it not only the deep glow and comfort of full-fed, hungry bellies, but somehow it made the boy think also of a tender, buxom, clean, desirable young wife, and of the glorious pleasures of the night, the bouts of lusty, loving dalliance when the lights were out, the whole house darkened, and the stormy and demented winds swooped down out of the hills to beat about the house with burly rushes. That image filled his heart with swelling joy, for it evoked again the glorious hope of the plain, priceless, and familiar happiness of a wedded love that might belong to any man alive—to butcher, baker, farmer, engineer, and clerk, as well as to poet, scholar, and philosopher.

  It was an image of a wedded love forever hungry, healthy, faithful, clean, and sweet, never false, foul, jaded, wearied out, but forever loving, lusty in the dark midwatches of the night when storm winds beat about the house. It was at once the priceless treasure and unique possession of one man, and it was, like hamburger steak and frying onions, the plain glory and impossible delight of all humanity, which every man alive, he thought, might hope to win.

  Thus the strong and homely fragrance of substantial food smells proper to the Winter evoked a thousand images of warmth, closed-in security, roaring fires, and misted windows, mellow with their cheerful light. The doors were shut, the windows were all closed, the houses were all living with that secret, golden, shut-in life of Winter, which somehow pierced the spirit of a passer-by with a wild and lonely joy, a powerful affection for man’s life, which was so small a thing against the drowning horror of the night, the storm, and everlasting darkness, and yet which had the deathless fortitude to make a wall, to build a fire, to close a door.

  The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out from the palpable and passionate integument of life and fellowship, and of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand, enter it by a door, possess it with a word—a word that, somehow, he could never speak, a door that, somehow, he would never open.

  BOOK III

  The Web and the World

  When George Webber’s father died, in 1916, the boy was left disconsolate. True, he had been separated from his father for eight years, but, as he said, he had always had the sense that he was there. Now, more strongly than before, he felt himself caught fast in all that web of lives and times long past but ever present in which his Joyner blood and kin enmeshed him, and some escape from it became the first necessity of his life.

  Fortunately, John Webber left his son a small inheritance—enough to put the boy through college, and, with careful management, to help him get his bearings afterwards. So that Autumn, with sadness and with exultation, he bade good-bye to all his Joyner relatives and set forth on his great adventure.

  And, after college, he dreamed a dream of glory in new lands, a golden future in the bright and shining city.

  CHAPTER 10

  Olympus in Catawba

  One September day in 1916, a skinny, adolescent boy, tugging at a cheap valise, and wearing a bob-tail coat and a pair of skin-tight trousers that made up in brevity and in anatomical frankness what they lacked in length, was coming up along one of the pleasant paths that bisect the lovely campus of an old college in the middle South, pausing from time to time to look about him in a rather uncertain and bewildered manner, and doubtfully to consult a piece of paper in his hand on which some instruction had evidently been written. He had just put down his valise again, and was looking at the piece of paper for the sixth or seventh time, when someone came out of the old dormitory at the head of the campus, ran down the steps, and came striding down the path where the boy was standing. The boy looked up and gulped a little as the creature of pantheresque beauty, moving with the grace, the speed, the delicacy of a great cat, bore down swiftly on him.

  At that moment the overwhelmed boy was physically incapable of speech. If his life had depended on it, he could not have produced sounds capable of human hearing or understanding; and if he had been able to, he would certainly not have had the effrontery to address them to a creature of such magnificence that he seemed to have been created on a different scale and shape for another, more Olympian, universe than any the skinny, adolescent boy had ever dreamed of. But fortunately the magnificent stranger himself now took the matter in hand. As he came up at his beautiful pacing stride, pawing the air a little, delicately, in a movement of faultless and instinctive grace, he glanced swiftly and keenly at the youth with a pair of piercing, smokily luminous grey eyes, smiled with the most heartening and engaging friendliness—a smile touched with tenderness and humor—and then, in a voice that was very soft and Southern, a little husky, but for all its agreeable and gentle warmth, vibrant with a tremendous latent vitality, said:

  “Are you looking for something? Maybe I can help you.”

  “Y-y-yes, sir,” the boy stammered in a moment, gulped again, and then, finding himself incapable of further speech, he thrust the crumpled paper
towards his questioner with trembling hand.

  The magnificent stranger took the paper, glanced at it swiftly with that peculiar, keen intensity of his smoky eyes, smiled instantly, and said:

  “Oh. McIver. You’re looking for Mclver. Freshman, are you?”

  “Y-yes, sir,” the boy whispered.

  For a moment more the magnificent young man looked keenly at the boy, his head cocked appraisingly a little to one side, a look of deepening humor and amusement in his grey eyes and in the quality of his pleasant smile. At length he laughed, frankly and openly, but with such a winning and friendly humor that even the awed youth could not be wounded by it.

  “Damned if you ain’t a bird!” the magnificent young man said, and stood there a moment longer, shrewdly, humorously appraising his companion, with his powerful hands arched lightly on his hips in a gesture which was unconsciously as graceful as everything he did. “Here,” he said quietly, “I’ll show you what to do, freshman.” He placed his powerful hands on the boy’s skinny shoulders, faced him around, and then, speaking gently, he said, “You see this path here?”

  “Y-yes. sir.”

  “You see that building down there at the end of it—that building with the white columns out in front?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well,” the young Olympian said quietly and slowly, “that’s McIver. That’s the building that you’re looking for. Now,” he continued very softly, “all you got to do is to pick up your valise, walk right along this path, go up those steps there, and go into the first door on your right. After that, they’ll do the rest. That’s where you registah.” He paused a moment to let this information sink in, then, giving the boy a little shake of the shoulders, he said gently: “Now do you think you’ve got that straight? You think you can do what I told you to do?”