The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “All right!” and, with the amazing speed and grace with which he did everything, the Olympian released him, cast up his fine head quickly, and laughed a deep, soft, immensely winning laugh. “All right, freshman,” he said. “On your way. And don’t let those sophomores sell you any radiators or dormitories until you get yourself fixed up.”

  And the boy, stammering awed but grateful thanks, picked up his valise hastily and started off to do the bidding of the tall Olympian. As he went down the path he heard again the low, deep, winning laugh, and, without turning his head, he knew that Olympian was standing there, following him with his piercing, smoky eyes, with his hands arched on his hips in that gesture of instinctive and unconscious grace.

  Monk Webber would never be able to forget that incident. The memory of it burned in his brain as vividly as ever after more than twenty years. For he was that skinny, adolescent boy, and the Olympian, although he did not know it then, was the magnificent creature known to his earthly comrades as Jim Randolph.

  YEARS LATER, MONK would still affirm that James Heyward Randolph was the handsomest man he ever saw. Jim was a creature of such power and grace that the memory of him later on was like a legend. He was, alas, a legend even then.

  He was a man who had done brilliant and heroic things, and he looked the part. It seemed that he had been especially cast by nature to fulfill the most exacting requirements of the writers of romantic fiction. He was a Richard Harding Davis hero, he was the hero of a book by Robert W. Chambers, he was a Jeffery Farnol paragon, he was all the Arrow collar young men one had ever seen in pictures, all the football heroes from the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, he was all of these rolled into one, and he was something more than all of these. His beauty was conformed by a real manliness, his physical perfection by a natural and incomparable grace, the handsome perfection and regularity of his features by qualities of strength, intelligence, tenderness, and humor that all the heroes of romantic fiction can counterfeit but do not attain.

  Jim was a classic type of the tall, young American. He was perhaps a fraction under six feet and three inches tall, and he weighed 192 pounds. He moved with a grace and power that were incomparable. Whenever one saw him walking along the street, one got an overwhelming impression that he was weaving and “picking his holes” behind the interference, and that he was just about to shake loose around the ends in a touchdown gallop. He moved by a kind of superb pacing rhythm that suggested nothing on earth so much as a race horse coming from the paddocks down to the starting line. He paced upon the balls of his feet, as lightly and delicately as a cat, and there was always the suggestion that his powerful arms and hands were delicately pawing the air, a gesture not pronounced but unmistakable, and, like his walk, his carriage, everything about him, suggested a tremendous catlike power and speed—pent, trembling, geared for action, ready to be unleashed, like the leap of a panther.

  Everything about him had this fine-drawn, poised, and nervous grace of a thoroughbred animal. The predominant characteristics were leanness, grace, and speed. His head was well-shaped, rather small. He had black hair, which was closely cropped. His ears also were well-shaped and set close to the head. His eyes were grey and very deep-set, under heavy eyebrows. In moments of anger or deep feeling of any kind his eyes could darken smokily, almost into black. Ordinarily they had the luminous grey potency, the sense of tremendous latent vitality, of a cat. This well-shaped head was carried proudly upon a strong, lean neck and a pair of wide, powerful shoulders. The arms were long, lean, powerfully muscled; the hands also were large and powerful. The whole body was shaped like a wedge: the great shoulders sloped down to a narrow waist, then the figure widened out somewhat to the lean hips, then was completed with the ranging power and grace of the long legs. Jim’s speech and voice also maintained and developed the impression of catlike power. His voice was rather soft and low, very Southern, a little husky, full of latent passion, tenderness, or humor, and indicative, as only a voice can be, of the tremendous pantheresque vitality of the man.

  He was a member of a good South Carolina family, but his own branch of it had been impoverished. From his high school days the burden of self-support had rested on his own shoulders, and, as a result of this necessity, he had accumulated a variety of experience that few men knew in the course of a whole lifetime. It seemed that he had done everything and been everywhere. When Monk first knew him at college, he was already twenty-two or twenty-three years old, several years older than most of the students, and in experience twenty years older. The range and variety of his brief life had been remarkable. He had taught for a year or two in a country school. He had shipped for a year’s cruise on a freighter out of Norfolk, had been in Rio and in Buenos Aires, had gone up and down the whole Ivory Coast of Africa, had made the round of the Mediterranean ports, had known and “had” women (he was given to this kind of boasting) “on four continents and in forty-seven states of the Union.” He had peddled books in Summer through the sweltering grain states of the Middle West. He had even been a traveling salesman for a period, and in this capacity had “been in every state but one.” This was Oregon, which was, of course, the state where he had failed to “have” a woman, a deficiency which seemed to trouble him no little, and which he swore that he would remedy if the good Lord spared him just a little more.

  In addition to all this, he had played professional—or “semiprofessional”—baseball for a season or two in one of the mill towns of the South. His description of this episode was riotous. He had played under an assumed name in order to protect as best he could his amateur standing and his future as a college athlete. His employer had been the owner of a cotton mill. His salary had been $150 a month and traveling expenses. And for this stipend it had been his duty to go to the mill offices once a week and empty out the waste paper baskets. In addition to this, every two weeks the manager of the team would take him to a pool room, carefully place a ball exactly in front of the pocket and two inches away from it, and then bet his young first baseman $75 that he could not knock it in.

  EVEN AT THE time when Monk knew him first at college, Jim had become, for the youth of two states at any rate, an almost legendary figure. The event which sealed him in their hearts, which really gave him a kind of immortality among all the people who will ever go to Pine Rock College was this:

  Twenty years ago, one of the greatest sporting occasions in the South was the football game which took place annually between Pine Rock and the old college of Monroe and Madison in Virginia. They were two small colleges, but two of the oldest institutions in the South, and the game on Thanksgiving day was sanctified by almost every element of tradition and of age that could give it color. It was a good deal more than a football game, a great deal more than a contest between two powerful championship teams, for even at that time there were in the South better football teams, and games which, from the point of view of athletic prowess, were more important. But the game between Monroe and Madison and Pine Rock was like the Oxford-Cambridge race along the Thames, or like the Army-Navy game, or like the annual contest between Yale and Harvard—a kind of ceremony, a historic event whose tradition had grown through a series that had lasted even then for almost twenty years and through the associations of two old colleges whose histories were inextricably woven into the histories of their states. For this reason, not only for hundreds of students and thousands of alumni, but for hundreds of thousands of people in both states, the game upon Thanksgiving day had an interest and an importance that no other game could have.

  The greatest team Pine Rock ever knew was that team they had that year, with Raby Bennett, back, Jim Randolph hinged over with his big hands resting on his knees, and Randy Shepperton crouched behind the line calling signals for the run around end. Jim could run only to the right; no one ever knew the reason why, but it was true. They always knew where he was going, but they couldn’t stop him.

  That was the year that Pine Rock beat Monro
e and Madison for the first time in nine years. That was the year of years, the year they had been waiting for through all those years of famine, the year they had hoped for so long that they had almost ceased to hope that it would ever come, the year of wonders. And they knew when it came. They felt it in the air all Autumn. They breathed it in the smell of smoke, they felt it in the tang of frost, they heard it coming in the winds that year, they heard it coming as acorns rattled to the ground. They knew it, breathed it, talked it, hoped and feared and prayed for it. They had waited for that year through nine long seasons. And now they knew that it had come.

  That was the year they really marched on Richmond. It is hard to tell about it now. It is hard to convey to anyone the passion, the exultant hope, of that invasion. They do not have it now. They fill great towns at night before the game. They go to night clubs and to bars. They dance, they get drunk, they carouse. They take their girls to games, they wear fur coats, they wear expensive clothing, they are drunk by game time. They do not really see the game, and they do not care. They hope that their machine runs better than the other machine, scores more points, wins a victory. They hope their own hired men come out ahead, but they really do not care. They don’t know what it is to care. They have become too smart, too wise, too knowing, too assured, to care. They are not youthful and backwoodsy and naïve enough to care. They are too slick to care. It’s hard to feel a passion just from looking at machinery. It’s hard to get excited at the efforts of the hired men.

  It was not that way that year. They cared a lot—so much, in fact, they could feel it in their throats, taste it in their mouths, hear it thudding in the pulses of their blood. They cared so much that they could starve and save for it, hoard their allowances, shave their expenses to the bone, do without the suit of clothes to replace the threadbare one they owned. They were poor boys, most of them. The average expenditure among them was not more than $500 a year, and two-thirds of them worked to earn the greater part of that. Most of them had come from the country, from the little country towns up in the mountains, in the Piedmont, down in the pine lands of the coast. A lot of them were hayseeds, off the farm. And the rest of them had come from little towns. There weren’t any big towns. They didn’t have a city in the state.

  They were, in point of fact, the student body of an old, impoverished, backwoods college. And they had the finest life. It was the finest place with all its old provincialism, the bare austerity of its whitewashed dormitory rooms, its unfurnished spareness, its old brick and its campus well, its world remotion in the Piedmont uplands of an ancient state. It beat any other place “all hollow.” It beat Harvard, it beat Princeton, it beat Yale. It was a better life than Cambridge or than Oxford had to offer. It was a spare life, a hard life, an impoverished kind of life, in many ways a narrow and provincial kind of life, but it was a wonderfully true and good life, too.

  It was a life that always kept them true and constant to the living sources of reality, a life that did not shelter them or cloister them, that did not make snobs of them, that did not veil the stern and homely visage of the world with some romantic softening of luxury and retreat. They all knew where they had come from. They all knew where their money came from, too, because their money came so hard. They knew all about, not only their own lives, but about the lives of whole state. It is true they did not know much about any other life, but they knew that through and through. They knew what was going on around them. They knew the life of the whole village. They knew every woman, man, and child. They knew the histories and characters of each. They knew their traits, their faults, their meannesses and virtues; they were full of knowledge, humor, and observation. It was a good life. It was a spare one, and perhaps it was a narrow one, but they had what they had, they knew what they knew.

  And they knew that they were going to win that year. They saved up for it. They would have made that trip to Richmond if they had had to march there. It was not hard for Monk. He got to go by the exercise of a very simple economic choice. He had the choice of getting a new overcoat or of going to Richmond, and like any sensible boy he took Richmond.

  I said that he had the choice of Richmond or of a new overcoat. It would be more accurate to say he had the choice of Richmond or an overcoat. He didn’t have an overcoat. The only one that he had ever had had grown green with age, had parted at the seams a year before he came to college. But he had money for a new one now, and he was going to spend that money for the trip to Richmond.

  Somehow Jim Randolph heard about it—or perhaps he just guessed it or inferred it. The team was going up two nights before the game. The rest of them were coming up next day. They had a bonfire and a rousing rally just before the team went off, and after it was over Jim took Monk in his room and handed him his own sweater.

  “Put this on,” he said.

  Monk put it on.

  Jim stood there in the old, bare dormitory room, his strong hands arched and poised upon his hips, and watched him while he did it.

  “Now put on your coat,” he said.

  Monk put his coat on over it.

  Jim looked at him a moment, then burst out in a laugh.

  “God almighty!” he cried. “You’re a bird!”

  And a bird he was! The big sweater engulfed him, swallowed him like an enormous blanket: the sleeves came out a good four inches longer than the sleeves of his own coat, the sweater hit him midway between his buttocks and his knees and projected shockingly below the coat. It was not a good fit but it was a warm one, and Jim, after looking at him again and slowly shaking his head with the remark, “Damned if you aren’t a bird!” seized his valise and put on his hat. (He wore a black or grey felt hat with a wide brim, not quite the slouch hat of a Southern politician, for Jim was always neat and dignified in dress, but a hat that, like all his other garments, contributed to his appearance a manlike strength and maturity.) Then, turning to the boy, he said sternly:

  “All right, freshman. You wear that sweater when you go to Richmond. If I catch you up there running around in the cold with that little shavetail coat of yours, I’ll beat yo’——till you can’t sit down.” And suddenly he laughed, a quiet, husky, tender, and immensely winning laugh. “Good-bye, son,” he said. He put his big hand on Monk’s shoulder. “Go ahead and wear the sweater. Don’t mind how it looks. You keep warm. I’ll see you after the game.” Then he was gone.

  Wear it! From that time on Monk lived in it. He clung to it, he cherished it, he would have fought and bled and died for it as a veteran in Lee’s army would have fought for his commander’s battle flag. It was not only Jim’s sweater. It was Jim’s sweater initialed with the great white “P R” that had been won and consecrated upon the field of many a glorious victory. It was not only Jim’s sweater. It was Jim’s great sweater, the most famous sweater in the whole school—it seemed to Monk, the most famous sweater on earth. If the royal ermine of His Majesty the King-Emperor of Great Britain and India had been suddenly thrown around his shoulders, he could not have been more powerfully impressed by the honor of his investiture.

  And everyone else felt the same way. All the freshmen did, at any rate. There was not a boy among them who would not have cheerfully and instantly torn off his overcoat and thrust it at Monk if he thought Monk would have swapped the sweater with him.

  And that was the way he went to Richmond.

  BUT HOW TO tell the wonder and glory of that trip? George Webber has been wide and far since then. He has pounded North and South and East and West across the continent on the crack trains of the nation. He has lain on his elbow in the darkness in his berth, time and again, and watched the haunted and the ghost-wan visage of Virginia stroke by in the passages of night. So, too, he has crossed the desert, climbed through the Sierras in the radiance of blazing moons, has crossed the stormy seas a dozen times and more and known the racing slant and power of great liners, has pounded down to Paris from the Belgian frontiers at blind velocities of speed in the rocketing trains, has seen the great sweep and c
urve of lights along the borders of the Mediterranean on the coasts of Italy, has known the old, time-haunted, elfin magic of the forests of Germany, in darkness also. He has gone these ways, has seen these things and known these dark wonders, but no voyage he ever made, whether by nighttime or by day, had the thrill, the wonder, and the ecstasy of that trip when they went up to Richmond twenty years ago.

  The bonfire and the leaping flames, the students cheering, weaving, dancing, the red glow upon the old red brick, the ivy sere and withered by November, the wild, young faces of eight hundred boys, the old bell tolling in the tower. And then the train. It was a desolate little train. It seemed to be a relic of the lost Confederacy. The little, wheezing engine had a fan-shaped funnel. The old wooden coaches were encrusted with the cinders and the grime of forty years. Half of the old red seats of smelly plush were broken down. They jammed into it till the coaches bulged. They hung onto the platforms, they jammed the aisles, they crawled up on the tender, they covered the whole grimy caravan like a swarm of locusts. And finally the old bell tolled mournfully, the whistle shrieked, and, to the accompaniment of their lusty cheers, the old engine jerked, the rusty couplings clanked and jolted—they were on their way.

  Flashing away to the main line junction, fourteen miles away, the engine was derailed, but that did not faze them. They clambered out and swarmed around it, and by main strength and enthusiasm they helped the ancient engineer to crowbar, jack, and coax and lift her back onto the rusty track. They got there finally to the junction and found the train that had been chartered for them waiting. Ten dusty, grimy coaches of the Seaboard Air Line waited for them. They clambered in, found places if they could. Ten minutes later they were on the way to Richmond. All through the night they pounded up out of the South, across Virginia, and they came to Richmond with the first grey light of dawn.