The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  George Webber has been to that old town a good many times since then, but never as he came there first, out of the South by darkness, out of the South with the unuttered hope, the unspoken wildness, the fever of the impossible unknown joy, burning, burning, burning through the night. They got to Richmond just at break of day. They swarmed out cheering. They swarmed out into the long-deserted stretch of Gay Street. And then they started out, the whole noisy, swarming horde of them, up that deserted street, past all the darkened stores and shops, mounting the hill, up to the capitol. The dome of the old capitol was being tinged with the first rays of morning light as they came up. The air was sharp and frosty. The trees in the park around the capitol and the hill had the thrilling, clean austerity of morning, of first light, of frost, and of November.

  It was a thrilling experience, for many of them a completely new experience, the experience of seeing a great city—for to most of them old Richmond seemed to be a great city—waking into life, to the beginning of another day. They saw the early street cars rattle past and clatter over switch points with a wonder and a joy that no one who looked at street cars ever felt before. If they had been the first street cars in the world, if they had been thrilling and enchanted vehicles newly brought from Mars, or from the highways of the moon, they could not have seemed more wonderful to them. Their paint was brighter than all other paint, the brilliance of their light was far more brilliant, the people in them reading morning papers, stranger, more exciting, than any people they had ever seen.

  They felt in touch with wonder and with life, they felt in touch with magic and with history. They saw the state house and they heard the guns. They knew that Grant was pounding at the gates of Richmond. They knew that Lee was digging in some twenty miles away at Petersburg. They knew that Lincoln had come down from Washington and was waiting for the news at City Point. They knew that Jubal Early was swinging in his saddle at the suburbs of Washington. They felt, they knew, they had their living hands and hearts upon the living presence of these things, and upon a thousand other things as well. They knew that they were at the very gateways of the fabulous and unknown North, that great trains were here to do their bidding, that they could rocket in an hour or two into the citadels of gigantic cities. They felt the pulse of sleep, the heartbeats of the sleeping men, the drowsy somnolence and the silken stir of luxury and wealth of lovely women. They felt the power, the presence, and the immanence of all holy and enchanted things, of all joy, all loveliness, and all the beauty and the wonder that the world could offer. They knew, somehow, they had their hands upon it. The triumph of some impending and glorious fulfillment, some impossible possession, some incredible achievement was thrillingly imminent. They knew that it was going to happen—soon. And yet they could not say how or why they knew it.

  They swarmed into the lunchrooms and the restaurants along Broad Street; the richer of them sought the luxury of great hotels. They devoured enormous breakfasts, smoking stacks of wheat cakes, rations of ham and eggs, cup after cup of pungent, scalding coffee. They gorged themselves, they smoked, they read the papers. The humblest lunchroom seemed to them a paradise of gourmets.

  Full morning came, and clean, cold light fell slant-wise on the street with golden sharpness. Everything in the world seemed impossibly good and happy, and all of it, they felt, was theirs. It seemed that everyone in Richmond had a smile for them. It seemed that all the people had been waiting for them through the night, had been preparing for them, were eager to give them the warmest welcome of affectionate hospitality. It seemed not only that they expected Pine Rock’s victory, but that they desired it. All of the girls, it seemed to them, were lovely, and all of them, they felt, looked fondly at them. All of the people of the town, they thought, had opened wide their hearts and homes to them. They saw a banner with their colors, and it seemed to them that the whole town was festooned in welcome to them. The hotels swarmed with them. The negro bellboys grinned and hopped to do their bidding. The clerks who waited smiled on them. They could have everything they wanted. The whole town was theirs. Or so they thought.

  The morning passed. At one-thirty they went out to the playing field. And they won the game. As Monk remembered it, it was a dull game. It was not very interesting except for the essential fact that they won it. They had expected too much. As so often happens when so much passion, fervor, hot imagination has gone into the building of a dream, the consummation was a disappointment. They had expected to win by a big score. They were really much the better team, but all their years of failure had placed before them a tremendous psychical impediment. They won the game by a single touchdown. The score was 6 to 0. They even failed to kick goal after touchdown. It was the first time during the course of the entire season that Randy’s toe had failed him.

  But it was better that the game ended as it did. It was Jim’s game. There was no doubt of that. It was completely and perfectly his own. Midway in the third quarter he did exactly what he was expected to do. Pacing out to the right, behind the interference, weaving and pawing delicately at the air, he found his opening and shook loose, around the end, for a run of 57 yards to a touchdown. They scored six points, and all of them were Jim’s.

  Later, the whole thing attained the clean, spare symmetry of a legend. They forgot all other details of the game entirely. The essential fact, the fact that would remain, the picture that would be most vivid, was that it was Jim’s game. No game that was ever played achieved a more classical and perfect unity for the projection of its great protagonist. It was even better that he scored just that one touchdown, made just that one run. If he had done more, it would have spoiled the unity and intensity of their later image. As it was, it was perfect. Their hero did precisely what they expected him to do. He did it in his own way, by the exercise of his own faultless and incomparable style, and later on that was all they could remember. The game became nothing. All they saw was Jim, pacing and weaving out around right end, his right hand pawing delicately at the air, the ball hollowed in the crook of his long left arm, and then cutting loose on his race-horse gallop.

  That was the apex of Jim Randolph’s life, the summit of his fame. Nothing that he could do after that could dim the perfect glory of that shining moment. Nothing could ever equal it. It was a triumph and a tragedy, but at that moment Jim, poor Jim, could only know the triumph of it.

  NEXT YEAR THE nation went to war in April. Before the first of May, Jim Randolph had gone to Oglethorpe. He came back to see them once or twice while he was in training. He came back once again when school took up in Autumn, a week or two before he went to France. He was a first lieutenant now. He was the finest-looking man in uniform George Webber ever saw. They took one look at him and they knew the war was won. He went overseas before Thanksgiving; before the New Year he was at the front.

  Jim did just what they knew he would do. He was in the fighting around Château-Thierry. He was made a Captain after that. He was almost killed in the battle of the Argonne Wood They heard once that he was missing. They heard later that he was dead. They heard finally that he had been seriously wounded and his chances for recovery were slight, and that if he did recover he would never be the same man again. He was in a hospital at Tours for almost a year. Later on, he was in a hospital at Newport News for several months. They did not see him again, in fact, till the Spring of 1920.

  He came back then, handsome as ever, magnificent in his Captain’s bars and uniform, walking with a cane, but looking as he always did. Nevertheless he was a very sick man. He had been wounded near the spine. He wore a leather corset. He improved, however; was even able to play a little basketball. The name and fame of him was as great as ever.

  And yet, indefinably, they knew that there was something lacking, something had gone by; they had lost something, something priceless, precious, irrecoverable. And when they looked at Jim, their look was somehow touched with sadness and regret. It would have been better for him had he died in France. He had suffered the sad fate of men who live
to see themselves become a legend. And now the legend lived. The man was just a ghost to them.

  Jim was probably a member of what the intellectuals since have called “the lost generation.” But Jim really was not destroyed by war. He was ended by it. Jim was really not a member of the generation that was lost, but of a generation that was belated. Jim’s life had begun and had been lived before the war, and it was ended with the war. At the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, Jim was out of date. He had lived too long. He belonged to another time. They all knew it, too, although none of them could speak about it then.

  The truth is that the war formed a spiritual frontier in the lives of all the students at Pine Rock in Webber’s day. It cut straight across the face of time and history, a dividing line that was as clear and certain as a wall. The life they had before the war was not the life that they were going to have after the war. The way they felt and thought and believed about things before the war was different from the way they felt and thought and believed after the war. The America that they knew before the war, the vision of America that they had before the war, was so different from the America and the vision of America they had after the war. It was all so strange, so sad, and so confusing.

  It all began so hopefully. Monk can still remember the boys stripping for the doctors in the old gymnasium. He can remember those young winds that echoed the first coming of the blade and leaf, and all his comrades jubilantly going to war. He can remember the boys coming from the dormitories with their valises in their hands, Jim Randolph coming down the steps of South, and across the campus towards him, and his cheerful:

  “So long, kid. You’ll get in too. I’ll be seeing you in France.”

  He can remember how they came back from the training camps, spotless, new-commissioned shavetails, proud and handsome with their silver bars and well-cut uniforms. He can remember all of it—the fire, the fever, the devotion and the loyalty, the joy of it, the pride of it, the jubilation and the thrill of it. The wild excitement when they knew that we were winning. The excitement—and the sorrow—when we won.

  Yes, the sorrow. Does anyone really think that they were glad? Does anyone think they wanted the war to end? He is mistaken. They loved the war, they hung on to it, and they cherished it. They said the things with lips that lips were meant to say, but in their hearts they prayed:

  “Dear God, please let the war continue. Don’t let the war be over until we younger ones get in.”

  They can deny it now. Let them deny it if they like. This is the truth.

  Monk can still remember how the news came that the war was over. He can remember swinging on the rope as the great bell itself began to ring. He can still feel the great pull of the rope and how it lifted him clear off the ground, and how the rope went slanting in its hole, and how the great bell swung and tolled the news there in the darkness far above him, and how all of the boys were running out of doors upon the campus, and how the tears rolled down his face.

  Monk was not the only one who wept that night. Later on they may have said they wept for joy, but this is not the truth. They wept because they were so sorrowful. They wept because the war was over, and because they knew that we had won, and because every victory of this sort brings so much sorrow with it. And they wept because they knew that something in the world had ended, that something else had in the world begun. They wept because they knew that something in their lives had gone forever, that something else was coming in their lives, and that their lives would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Priestly One

  Gerald Alsop, at the time Monk came to college, had become a kind of Mother Machree of the campus, the brood hen of yearling innocents, the guide and mentor of a whole flock of fledgeling lives.

  At first sight he looked enormous. A youth of nineteen or twenty at this time, he weighed close to three hundred pounds. But when one really observed him closely, one saw that this enormous weight was carried on a very small frame. In height he could not have been more than five feet six or seven. His feet, for a person of his bulk, were amazingly small, and his hands, had it not been for their soft padding, were almost the tiny hands of a child. His belly, of course, was enormous. His great fat throat went right back in fold after fold of double chins. When he laughed, his laugh came from him in a high, choking, explosive scream that set the throat and the enormous belly into jellied tremors.

  He had a very rich, a very instant sense of humor, and this humor, with the high, choking laugh and the great, shaking belly, had given him among many students a reputation for hearty good nature. But more observant people would find out that this impression of hearty and whole-souled good nature was not wholly true. If Gerald’s antagonism and prejudice were aroused, he could still scream with his great fat whah-whah of choking laughter, but this time the laugh had something else in it, for the great belly that shook with such convulsive mirth was also soured with bile. It was a strange and curiously mixed and twisted personality, a character that had much that was good, much that was high and fine, much that was warm, affectionate, and even generous in it, but also much that was vindictive and unforgiving, prejudiced and sentimental. It was, in the end, a character that had too much of the feminine in it to be wholly masculine, and this perhaps was its essential defect.

  Pine Rock—the small Baptist college of red brick, in its setiting of Catawba clay and pine—had released him. In this new and somewhat freer world, he had expanded rapidly. His quick mind and his ready wit, his great scream of belly laughter, and something comfortable about him that made him very easy company, also made him a considerable favorite. He came to college in the fall of 1914. Two years later, when Monk joined him there, he was a junior, and well-founded: the ruling member, as it were, of a coterie; the director of a clique; already priestly, paternal, and all-fatherly, the father-confessor to a group of younger boys, most of them freshmen, that he herded under his protective wing, who came to him, as just recently they must have come to mother’s knee, to pour out on his receiving breast the burden of their woe.

  Jerry—for so he was called—loved confession. It was, and would remain, the greatest single stimulus of his life. And in a way, it was the perfect role for him: nature had framed him for the receiving part. He was always fond of saying afterward that it was not until his second year at college that he really “found” himself; strictly measured, that process of finding was almost wholly included in the process of being confessed to. He was like a kind of enormous, never sated, never saturated sponge. The more he got, the more he wanted. His whole manner, figure, personality, under the inner impulsion of this need, took on a kind of receptive urgency. By his twentieth year he was a master in the art of leading on. The broad brow, the jowled face, the fat hand holding a moist cigarette, the great head occasionally turned to take a long, luxurious drag, the eyes behind their polished frames of glass a little misty, the mouth imprinted faintly by a little smile that can only be described as tender, a little whimsical, as who should say, “Ah, life. Life. How bad and mad and sad it is, but then, ah, me, how sweet!”—it was all so irresistible that the freshmen simply ran bleating to the fold. There was nothing of which they did not unbosom themselves, and if, as often happened, they had nothing in particular to unbosom themselves of, they invented something. In this process of spiritual evacuation, it is to be feared the temptations of carnal vice came first.

  It was, in fact, simply astounding how many of Jerry’s freshmen had been sorely tempted by beautiful but depraved women—if the siren was mysterious and unknown, all the better. In one variant of the story, the innocent had been on his way to college, and had stopped over for the night at a hotel in a neighboring town. On his way to his room, a door along the corridor was opened: before him stood a beautiful specimen of the female sex, without a stitch of clothing on, inviting him with sweet smiles and honeyed words into her nest of silken skin. For a moment the freshman was shaken, his senses reeled, all that he had learned, all he had been
taught to respect and keep holy, whirled around him in a dizzy rout: before he realized what he was doing, he found himself inside the accursed den of wickedness, half-fainting in the embraces of this modern whore of Babylon.

  And then—then—he saw the image of his mother’s face, or the features of the pure, sweet girl for whom he was “keeping himself.” The freshmen of Pine Rock were usually in a careful state of refrigeration—nearly all of them were “keeping themselves” for a whole regiment of pure, sweet girls, to whose virginity they would someday add the accolade of their own penil sanctification. At any rate, during Jerry’s regime at Pine Rock the number of lovely but depraved females who were cruising around through the hotel corridors of the state in a condition of original sin and utter nakedness was really astonishing. The census figures for this type of temptation were never before, or after, so high.

  The usual end was well, however: the redemptive physiognomies of the Mother or the Chosen Girl usually intervened fortuitously at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour—and all was saved. As for Jerry, his final benediction to this triumph of virtue was simply beautiful to watch and hear:

  “I knew you would! Yes, suh!” Here he would shake his head and chuckle tenderly. “You’re too fine a pusson evah to be taken in by anything like that!…And if you had, think how you’d feel now! You wouldn’t be able to hold yoah haid up and look me in the eye! You know you wouldn’t! And every time you thought of your Mothah”—(it is impossible to convey within the comparatively simple vocabulary of the English language just quite what Jerry managed to put into that one word “Mothah” however, it can be said without exaggeration that it represented the final and masterly conquest of the vocal chords, beside which such efforts, say, as those of the late Senor Caruso striking the high C seem fairly paltry by comparison)—“Every time you thought of your Mothah,—you’d have felt lowah than a snake’s belly. Yes, suh! You know you would! And if you’d gone ahead and married that girl—” he pronounced it “gul,” with a vocal unction only slightly inferior to this pronunciation of the sainted name of “Mothah”—“you’d have felt like a louse every time you’d look at her! Yes, suh, you’d have been livin’ a lie that would have wrecked yoah whole life!…Besides that, boy…you look a-heah, you scannel! You don’t know how lucky you are! You keep away hereafter from that stuff! Yes, suh! I know what I’m talkin’ about!” Here he shook his big jowled head again, and laughed with a kind of foreboding ominousness. “You might have gone and got yourself all ruined for life!”