The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  “Now I—I—like—a pipe!”—puff, puff—“You—younger—blades”—puff, puff—“can—have—your—cigarettes”—puff, puff, puff—“but as for me”—he puffed vigorously for a moment—“there’s—nothing—that—can—give—me”—puff, puff puff—“quite the comfort—of this—old—briar—pipe!”

  Oh, the gusto of it! The appeasement of it! The deep, fragrant, pungent, and soul-filling contentment of it! Could anyone think that such a man as this would fail? Or doubt that within a week half the boys would be smoking pipes?

  So Preacher would have got along anyway without Jerry Alsop’s help, and yet Jerry surely played a part in it. It was Jerry who had largely inaugurated the series of friendly meetings in students’ rooms, in which Preacher took the leading and most honored role. Preacher, in fact, was one of those men who at the time were so busily engaged in the work of “relating the Church to modern life”—in his own more pungent phrase, of “bringing God to the campus.” His methods of doing so were, as Jerry said, “perfectly delightful.”

  “Christ,” Preacher would begin in one of those charming gatherings in student rooms, which found eight or ten eager youths sprawled around the floor in various postures, a half-dozen more perched up on the rickety tiers of a double-decker cot, a few more hanging out the windows, eagerly drinking in the whole pungent brew of wit, of humor, of good-natured practicality, life, and Christianity, through shifting planes of pipe and cigarette smoke—“Christ,” Preacher would continue, puffing on his pipe in that delightfully whimsical way of his, “was a fellow who never made a Six in philosophy. He was a fellow who started out on the scrub team, and wound up playing quarterback on the Varsity. But if He’d had to go on playing with the scrubs”—this was thrown out perhaps, as a kind of sop of encouragement to certain potentially permanent scrubs who might be within the range of hearing—“if Christ had had to go on playing with the scrubs, why,” said Preacher Reed, “He would have made a go of it. You see”—here he puffed thoughtfully on his seasoned pipe for a moment—“the point is, fellows—that’s the thing I want you to understand—Christ was a fellow who always made a go of everything. Now Paul”—for a moment more Preacher puffed meditatively on his blackened briar, and then, chuckling suddenly in his delightful way, he shook his head and cried—“now Paul! Ah-hah-hah—that’s a different story! Paul was a bird of a different feather! There’s a horse of quite another color! Paul was a fellow who flunked out.”

  By this time the eager young faces were fairly hanging on these inspired words.

  “Paul was a fellow who started out on the scrub team, and should have stayed there,” said Preacher Reed. “But he couldn’t stand the gaff! He was eating his heart out all the time because he couldn’t make the Varsity—and when there was a vacancy—when they needed a new quarterback, because, you see, fellow,” said Preacher quietly, “the Old One had died”—he paused for a moment to let this subtle bit sink in—“they put Paul in his place. And he couldn’t make the grade! He simply couldn’t make the grade. And in the end—what did he do? Well, fellows, I’ll tell you,” said Preacher. “When he found he couldn’t make the grade—he invented a new game. The old one was too tough. Paul couldn’t play it—it was too much for him! And so he invented a new one he could play—and that’s where Paul flunked out. You see, fellows, Paul was a fellow who made a Six where Christ always made a One. That’s the whole difference between them,” Preacher said with the easy and informative manner of “Now it can be told,” and then was silent for a moment, sucking vigorously and reflectively on his old briar pipe.

  “In othah words, Preachah,” Jerry, who had made a One in logic and was accounted no slouch himself in the Hegelian metaphysic, now took respectful advantage of the silence that had fallen—“in othah words, Paul was a man who was defeated by his own Moment of Negation. He failed to absawb it.”

  “Exactly, Jerry!” Preacher cried out instantly and heartily, with the manner of one saying, “You take the words right out of my mouth!”—“That’s it exactly! Paul was a man who got licked by his own Moment of Negation. He couldn’t absorb it. When he found himself among the scrubs, he didn’t want to play. Instead of using his Moment of Negation—realizing that the Moment of Negation is really the greatest friend and ally that a man can have—Paul let it get him down. He flunked. Now, Christ,” Preacher went on, paused a moment to suck reflectively at his pipe, and then abruptly—“You see, fellows, that’s the Whole Thing about Jesus. Christ never flunked. He always made his One. It was first down with him every time whether he was playing with the scrubs or with the Varsity. He was just as happy playing with one side as with the other. It didn’t matter to Him where he played…and if Christ had been there,” Preacher Reed went on, “everything would have been all right, no matter where He played.”

  And again Preacher puffed vigorously on his pipe before he spoke:

  “You see, Jesus would have kept Paul from making that Six. He’d have said to him, ‘Now, see here, Paul, if you want to play quarterback on the Varsity, that’s all right with Me. It doesn’t matter to Me where I play—all I’m interested in is the Game.’” Preacher paused here just perceptibly to let this sink in. “I’d just as lief’”—Preacher was noted for his gift of homely phrase—“I’d just as lief play with the scrubs as with the Varsity. So let’s change places if you want to. The only thing, Paul, let’s have a good Game.’” Preacher puffed a moment. “Let’s play according to the rules.’” He puffed again. “You may think you can change them, Paul—but, uh-uh, no you can’t—ah-hah-hah—’” again Preacher shook his head with a sharp, short movement, with a sharp, short laugh—“you cant do it, Paul. It won’t work. You can’t change the rules. That’s not playing the Game. If the rules are changed, Paul, that’s not up to us—that’s up to Someone Else—so let’s all get together now, no matter which team we’re on, and play the game the way it should be played.’…But,” his fine lean face was grave now, he paused and sucked his pipe a moment longer—then: “that didn’t happen, did it?…Alas, alas, the real Quarterback was gone!”

  And in the awed hush that followed, he knocked his pipe out smartly on his heel, then straightened briskly, and got up, saying jauntily:

  “Well! So silent, gentlemen? Come, come! For lusty fellows of our kidney this is very sad!”

  So signified, the whole gathering would break up in general discussion, excited voices, laughter, young figures shifting through the smoke, plates of sandwiches, and lemonade. And in the center of it all stood Preacher Reed, his spare figure splendidly erect, his lean face finely and attentively aware, the clamor of the younger voices broken by his deeper resonance, his sandy and engaging warmth, the jolly brevity of his short and sudden laugh. And like moths infatuated by a shining light, all these moving and gesticulating groups would return inevitably to the magic ring of which he was himself the center.

  Monk didn’t know what it was, but they all felt happy and elated and excited and raised up and inspired, and liberal and enlightened and in touch with life and the high truth; and getting at last what they had come to college for.

  As for Jerry Alsop, he was simply content to wait and watch, his fat chuckle sounding out occasionally from one corner of the room, where he, too, would be engaged in conversation with a group of freshmen, and yet betraying just perceptibly, by the shadow of a little smile, a little moisture in the eye, an occasional quiet but observant glance out towards the center of the room, that he knew his beloved master was still there and functioning, and that this was all the glory he himself could ask.

  And as Alsop would himself say later, when the last reluctant footsteps died away, and there were the last “good nights” upon the campus, and he stood there in the now deserted room, polishing his misty glasses, and a little husky in the throat:

  “…It was puffectly delightful! Puffectly God-damned delightful! Yes, suh! That’s the only word for it!”

  And it was.

  CHAPTER 12

  The
Torch

  Alsop had taken Monk Webber under his protective wing when the younger boy had arrived at Pine Rock in his freshman year, and for a period the association between them was pretty close. The younger one had quickly become a member of the coterie of devoted freshmen who clustered about their leader like chicks around a mother hen. For some months definitely he was sealed of the tribe of Alsop.

  Evidences of what journalists call a “rift” began to appear, however, before the end of the first year—began to appear when the younger student began to look around him and ask questions of this small but new and comparatively liberal world in which, for the first time in his life, he began to feel himself untrammeled, free, the beginning of a man. The questions multiplied themselves furiously.

  MONK HAD HEARD the president of the college, the late Hunter Griswold McCoy, described by Alsop not only as “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ,” but as a thinker and philosopher of the first water, a speaker of the most eloquent persuasion, and the master of a literary style which, along with that of Woodrow Wilson, by which he was undoubtedly strongly influenced, as unsurpassed in the whole range of English literature. Now, having, as most boys of that age do have, a very active and questioning mind, he began to feel distinctly uncomfortable when Alsop said these things, to squirm uneasily in his chair, to keep silence, or to mumble respectful agreements, while all the time he asked himself rather desperately what was wrong with him. Because, the truth of the matter was that “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” bored him passionately, even at the tender age of seventeen.

  And as for that triumphant style which Alsop assured him was practically unsurpassed in the whole field of English letters, he had made repeated attempts to read it and digest it—it had been fittingly embalmed in a volume which bore the title of Democracy and Leadership—and he simply could not get through it. As for the famous Chapel talks, which were considered masterpieces of simple eloquence and gems of philosophy, he hated them. He would rather have taken a bitter laxative than sit through one of them: but sit through them he did, hundreds of times, and endured them, until he came to have a positive dislike for Hunter Griswold McCoy. His pale, pure face, somewhat gaunt and emaciated, a subtle air he conveyed always of bearing some deep, secret sorrow, and of suffering in some subtle, complicated way for humanity, began to afflict Monk with a sensation that was akin to, and in fact was scarcely distinguishable from, the less acute stages of nausea. And when Alsop assured him, and the rest of the reverent clique, that Hunter Griswold McCoy was and had always been “as pure and sweet as a fine, sweet gul—yes, suh!”—his dislike for Hunter Griswold McCoy became miserably acute. He disliked him because Hunter Griswold McCoy made him feel so unworthy, like the bird that fouls its own nest, and because he felt miserably and doggedly that there must be something monstrously wicked and base and perverse in his own life if he could not see the shining virtue of this perfect man, and because he realized that he could never be in any way like him.

  In addition to this, the glittering phrases of Hunter Griswold McCoy, which, Alsop assured him, were not only pearls of eloquence and poetry, but the very sounding board of life itself—and that whoever was fortunate enough to hear one of these Chapel talks was not only being told about truth and reality, but was given a kind of magic pass key to the whole mystery of life and the complex problem of humanity which he could use forevermore—well, Monk sat miserably in his seat in Chapel day after day and week after week, and the blunt and bitter truth was, he could make nothing out of it. If the wine of life was here, he squeezed the grape desperately, and it shattered in his fingers like a rusty pod. “Democracy and leadership,” “education for the good life,” “service,” “ideals,” all the rest of it—did not mean a damn thing to him. He could not find out, although he strained desperately to hear, what “the good life” was, except when it was connected in some very intimate and personal way with Hunter Griswold McCoy, sexual chastity, matrimony, “fine women,” drinking water, and Chapel talks. And yet he felt wretchedly that if he wanted any life at all it was assuredly “the good life”—except “the good life” for him, vaguely phrased and indefinitely etched, but flaming in his vision with all the ardor, passion, aspiration of his youth, had so much in it that Hunter Griswold McCoy had never spoken of, and that he dumbly, miserably felt, Hunter Griswold McCoy would not approve.

  The shape, the frame, the pattern, the definition of this “good life” was still painfully obscure: but he did feel, inchoately but powerfully, that it had so much flesh and blood in it. It had in it the promise of thick sirloin steaks, and golden, mealy, fried potatoes. It had in it, alas, the flesh of lavish women, the quickening enigma of a smile, the thrilling promise of a touch, the secret confirmation of the pressure of a hand. It had in it great rooms sealed to rich quietness, and the universe of mighty books. But it had in it much tobacco smoke as well—alas, alas, such sinful dreams of fleshly comforts!—and the flavors of strong wine. It had in it the magic of the Jason quest: the thought of golden artisans; almost intolerably a vision of the proud breast, the racing slant, of the great liners as they swung out into the stream at noon on Saturday in their imperial cavalcade, to slide past the chasm slant, the splintered helms and ramparts of a swarming rock, world-appointed and delivered to the sea. It had in it, at last and always, the magic vision of the city, the painted weather of a boy’s huge dreams of glory, wealth, and triumph, and a fortunate and happy life among the greatest ones on earth.

  And in the words and phrases of the perfect man, there was no word of this. Therefore, dumbly, the youth was miserable. To make the matter worse, two months before the Armistice, Hunter Griswold McCoy up and died. It was the final consummation: Alsop said immediately that it was the story of the Savior and his final martyrdom upon the Cross all over again. True, no one knew exactly just how Hunter Griswold McCoy had been martyred, except by the deadly prevalence of the influenza germ, but the whole memory of his life, the sense of inner purity shining out through his pale and martyred face through all the tedium of a thousand Chapel talks, somehow lent conviction to the final impression of martyrdom. And when Alsop announced in a choking voice that “he had laid down his life for a great Cause—to make the world safe for democracy,” and that no soldier who had died in France, stopped by a hail of bullets as he moved forth to the attack against the hordes of barbarism, had been more truly a sacrifice for the great Cause than had McCoy, no single word was raised in protest; there was no single voice to say him nay.

  And yet, the wicked truth is that our young sinner had a secret feeling of overwhelming relief when he knew that Hunter Griswold McCoy was gone, that there would be no more Chapel talks—at least, not by McCoy. And the knowledge of this wicked consciousness filled him with such an abysmal sense of his own degradation, of his own unworthiness, that like so many other guilty souls before him, he went it the whole hog. He began to hang around with a crowd of dissolute idlers that infested the college pharmacy; he began to gamble with them for black cows. One false step led to another. Before long he was smoking cigarettes with a dissipated leer. He began to stray away from the Alsopian circle: he began to stay up late at night—but not with Alsop, and not among the devoted neophytes who feasted nightly on the master’s words. On the contrary, he fell in with a crowd of lewd-tongued, lusty fellows, who stayed up to all hours and played the phonograph; and who crowned a week of shameful indolence with a week-end of disgusting debauchery in the town of Covington, a score of miles away. The upshot of the matter was that in no time at all these reprobates had taken the innocent, got him drunk, and then delivered him into the custody of a notorious strumpet named “Depot Lil.” The story not only came back to the Pine Rock campus, it roared back—it was retailed about, guffawed and bandied back and forth by these same dissolute and conniving rascals who had deliberately contrived this tragedy of ruined innocence, and who now, of such degraded texture were they, apparently thought that the story of the fall of one of Alsop’s ang
els was a matter fit for laughter by the gods.

  This was almost the end, but not quite. Alsop did not cast him out without reprieve, without “giving him another chance,” for, above all things, Alsop was tolerant—like Brutus, Alsop was an honorable man. Quietly, gravely, the master instructed his disciples not to be too hard upon their fallen brother; they were even instructed not to speak about it, to treat their erring comrade as if nothing had happened, as if he were still one of them; to let him see, by little acts of kindness, that they did not think of him as a social outcast, that he was still a member of the human race. So instructed and so inspired with Christian charity, everyone began to reek with mercy.

  As for our fallen angel, it must be admitted that when the full consciousness of his guilt swept down on him, and almost drowned him—he came crawling back to the fold. There was a three-hour conference with Alsop, all alone in Alsop’s room, from which everyone kept religiously away. At the end of that time. Alsop opened the door, polishing his misty glasses, and everyone came trouping solemnly in: and Alsop was heard to say in a quiet but throaty voice, and with a tender little chuckle:

  “Lord God! Lord God! Life is all right!”

  IT WOULD BE good to report here that the pardon was final and that the reformation was complete. Alas, this did not happen. Within a month, the reprieved—perhaps paroled is the better word—man had slid back into his former ways. He had begun to hang around the pharmacy again, to waste his time in the company of other wastrels, and to gamble for black cows. And, if he did not slide the whole way back, and there was no exact repetition of the first catastrophe, his ways were certainly now suspect. He began to show a decided preference for people who thought only of having a good time; he seemed to like their indolent ways and drawling voices, he was seen around idling in the sun on the front porch of two or three of the fraternities. And since Alsop and none of his group belonged to a fraternity, this was considered as another sign of dissolution.