by Frank Norris
“Come,” he said.
They stepped out from the vestibule. It was already dark. The rain was falling in gentle slants through the odorous, cool air. Across the street in the park the first leaves were beginning to fall; the lake lapped and washed quietly against the stone embankments and a belated bicyclist stole past across the asphalt, with the silent flitting of a bat, his lamp throwing a fan of orange-coloured haze into the mist of rain.
In the street in front of the house the driver, descending from the box, held open the door of the hack. Jadwin handed Laura in, gave an address to the driver, and got in himself, slamming the door after. They heard the driver mount to his seat and speak to his horses.
“Well,” said Jadwin, rubbing the fog from the window pane of the door, “look your last at the old place, Laura. You’ll never see it again.”
But she would not look.
“No, no,” she said. “I’ll look at you, dearest, at you, and our future, which is to be happier than any years we have ever known.”
Jadwin did not answer other than by taking her hand in his, and in silence they drove through the city towards the train that was to carry them to the new life. A phase of the existences of each was closed definitely. The great corner was a thing of the past; the great corner with the long train of disasters its collapse had started. The great failure had precipitated smaller failures, and the aggregate of smaller failures had pulled down one business house after another. For weeks afterward, the successive crashes were like the shock and reverberation of undermined buildings toppling to their ruin. An important bank had suspended payment, and hundreds of depositors had found their little fortunes swept away. The ramifications of the catastrophe were unbelievable. The whole tone of financial affairs seemed changed. Money was “tight” again, credit was withdrawn. The business world began to speak of hard times, once more.
But Laura would not admit her husband was in any way to blame. He had suffered, too. She repeated to herself his words, again and again:
“The wheat cornered itself. I simply stood between two sets of circumstances. The wheat cornered me, not I the wheat.”
And all those millions and millions of bushels of Wheat were gone now. The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to East? like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.
For a moment, vague, dark perplexities assailed her, questionings as to the elemental forces, the forces of demand and supply that ruled the world. This huge resistless Nourisher of the Nations — why was it that it could not reach the People, could not fulfil its destiny, unmarred by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?
She did not know. But as she searched, troubled and disturbed for an answer, she was aware of a certain familiarity in the neighbourhood the carriage was traversing. The strange sense of having lived through this scene, these circumstances, once before, took hold upon her.
She looked out quickly, on either hand, through the blurred glasses of the carriage doors. Surely, surely, this locality had once before impressed itself upon her imagination. She turned to her husband, an exclamation upon her lips; but Jadwin, by the dim light of the carriage lanterns, was studying a railroad folder.
All at once, intuitively, Laura turned in her place, and raising the flap that covered the little window at the back of the carriage, looked behind. On either side of the vista in converging lines stretched the tall office buildings, lights burning in a few of their windows, even yet. Over the end of the street the lead-coloured sky was broken by a pale faint haze of light, and silhouetted against this rose a sombre mass, unbroken by any glimmer, rearing a black and formidable facade against the blur of the sky behind it.
And this was the last impression of the part of her life that that day brought to a close; the tall gray office buildings, the murk of rain, the haze of light in the heavens, and raised against it, the pile of the Board of Trade building, black, monolithic, crouching on its foundations like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave — crouching there without a sound, without sign of life, under the night and the drifting veil of rain.
VANDOVER AND THE BRUTE
In 1914, Doubleday, Page and Company published Frank Norris’ final posthumous novel, Vandover and the Brute. The novel has a fascinating history. Norris wrote the novel while in graduate school at Harvard University in the mid-1890’s. When other novels, Moran and the Lady Letty and the more famous McTeague took precedence, Norris set Vandover and the Brute aside for revisions he never returned to. After Norris’ death in 1902, a San Francisco warehouse stored crates of his papers. One of those crates included the only copy of the manuscript of Vandover and the Brute. The warehouse caught fire during the devastating earthquake of 1906 and apparently destroyed the manuscript. Sometime later the warehouse owners discovered that someone had moved the crates of Norris’ papers to another building and mislabeled them. Vandover and the Brute had survived after all, although with Norris’ name cut out by an autograph seeker. According to an article by Dennison Hailey Clift in the March 1907 issue of The Pacific Monthly, there was no intention of publishing it:
There is one unpublished novel that Norris wrote at the time of his literary beginnings. This book is a story of a college generation, and its title is Vandover and the Brute. The manuscript is at present in New York. The realism of the work is too intense and too true to life to render its publication possible.
However, Norris’ family, including his brother, author Charles G. Norris, who penned an introduction to the novel, decided that by 1914, times were ripe. Like McTeague, Vandover and the Brute is an early example of Norris employing vivid depictions of his own life and observations to create a work of groundbreaking realism. Current Opinion published a review in its June 1914 issue entitled “Frank Norris’ Werewolf,” which provided both commentary and a rundown on the novel’s plot:
Vandover was anything but a Fortunate Youth. For one thing, he was created by the late Frank Norris, and that pioneer of American ultra-realists did not give happy lives to the children of his brain. Like a perverted sun dial, he marked only the shady hours… The story is a variation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in which also Mr. Hyde triumphs. Vandover is a rich San Francisco youth who studies at Harvard, becomes something of a dilettante and very much of a libertine, wastes his money and health in riotous living and finally becomes a day-laborer subject to attacks of lycanthropy — that is, of that mania in which the sufferer believes himself to be a wolf, kills people and drinks their blood. The “Brute” of the title is Vandover’s worse self, the self which finally kills his better nature and drives him mad. As has already been said, the book is a first draft, and Norris would have changed and improved it had it been published during his lifetime.
Although Frank Norris would certainly not have published Vandover and the Brute in its current state, as literary excavation, the novel proved valuable in demonstrating an early promise that later flowered into greatness. Current Opinion quoted a balanced assessment of both Vandover and the Brute, and Norris’ overall achievement, published in The New York Evening Post:
The unflinching moral conviction of the book lifts it to a place not far below ‘McTeague as a powerful private study, and as a demonstration of Norris’ ability, even at twenty-five, to strain out the essential subjective significance in the bare outlines of commonplace life and make it searchingly intense… The merits of this first book show the inborn genius of the most promising figure in the literary quarter-century, surpassing Stephen Crane in sturdiness and absence of nervosity; and its defects, compared with his later achievement, give us a new basis for tracing the growth of the skill and vision that were to f
ade at thirty-two.
New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914. First edition
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914. Advance Copy.
A late photograph of Norris
Chapter One
It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. With the exception of the most recent events he could remember nothing connectedly. What he at first imagined to be the story of his life, on closer inspection turned out to be but a few disconnected incidents that his memory had preserved with the greatest capriciousness, absolutely independent of their importance. One of these incidents might be a great sorrow, a tragedy, a death in his family; and another, recalled with the same vividness, the same accuracy of detail, might be a matter of the least moment.
A certain one of these wilful fillips of memory would always bring before him a particular scene during the migration of his family from Boston to their new home in San Francisco, at a time when Vandover was about eight years old.
It was in the depot of one of the larger towns in western New York. The day had been hot and after the long ride on the crowded day coach the cool shadow under the curved roof of the immense iron vaulted depot seemed very pleasant. The porter, the brakeman and Vandover’s father very carefully lifted his mother from the car. She was lying back on pillows in a long steamer chair. The three men let the chair slowly down, the brakeman went away, but the porter remained, taking off his cap and wiping his forehead with the back of his left hand, which in turn he wiped against the pink palm of his right. The other train, the train to which they were to change, had not yet arrived. It was rather still; at the far end of the depot a locomotive, sitting back on its motionless drivers like some huge sphinx crouching along the rails, was steaming quietly, drawing long breaths. The repair gang in greasy caps and spotted blue overalls were inspecting the train, pottering about the trucks, opening and closing the journal-boxes, striking clear notes on the wheels with long-handled hammers.
Vandover stood close to his father, his thin legs wide apart, holding in both his hands the satchel he had been permitted to carry. He looked about him continually, rolling his big eyes vaguely, watching now the repair-gang, now a huge white cat dozing on an empty baggage truck.
Several passengers were walking up and down the platform, staring curiously at the invalid lying back in the steamer chair.
The journey was too much for her. She was very weak and very pale, her eyelids were heavy, the skin of her forehead looked blue and tightly drawn, and tiny beads of perspiration gathered around the corners of her mouth. Vandover’s father put his hand and arm along the back of the chair and his sick wife rested against him, leaning her head on his waistcoat over the pocket where he kept his cigars and pocket-comb. They were all silent.
By and by she drew a long sigh, her face became the face of an imbecile, stupid, without expression, her eyes half-closed, her mouth half-open. Her head rolled forward as though she were nodding in her sleep, while a long drip of saliva trailed from her lower lip. Vandover’s father bent over her quickly, crying out sharply, “Hallie! — what is it?” All at once the train for which they were waiting charged into the depot, filling the place with a hideous clangor and with the smell of steam and of hot oil.
This scene of her death was the only thing that Vandover could remember of his mother.
As he looked back over his life he could recall nothing after this for nearly five years. Even after that lapse of time the only scene he could picture with any degree of clearness was one of the greatest triviality in which he saw himself, a rank thirteen-year-old boy, sitting on a bit of carpet in the back yard of the San Francisco house playing with his guinea-pigs.
In order to get at his life during his teens, Vandover would have been obliged to collect these scattered memory pictures as best he could, rearrange them in some more orderly sequence, piece out what he could imperfectly recall and fill in the many gaps by mere guesswork and conjecture.
It was the summer of 1880 that they had come to San Francisco. Once settled there, Vandover’s father began to build small residence houses and cheap flats which he rented at various prices, the cheapest at ten dollars, the more expensive at thirty-five and forty. He had closed out his business in the East, coming out to California on account of his wife’s ill health. He had made his money in Boston and had intended to retire.
But he soon found that he could not do this. At this time he was an old man, nearly sixty. He had given his entire life to his business to the exclusion of everything else, and now when his fortune had been made and when he could afford to enjoy it, discovered that he had lost the capacity for enjoying anything but the business itself. Nothing else could interest him. He was not what would be called in America a rich man, but he had made money enough to travel, to allow himself any reasonable relaxation, to cultivate a taste for art, music, literature or the drama, to indulge in any harmless fad, such as collecting etchings, china or bric-à-brac, or even to permit himself the luxury of horses. In the place of all these he found himself, at nearly sixty years of age, forced again into the sordid round of business as the only escape from the mortal ennui and weariness of the spirit that preyed upon him during every leisure hour of the day.
Early and late he went about the city, personally superintending the building of his little houses and cheap flats, sitting on saw-horses and piles of lumber, watching the carpenters at work. In the evening he came home to a late supper, completely fagged, bringing with him the smell of mortar and of pine shavings.
On the first of each month when his agents turned over the rents to him he was in great spirits. He would bring home the little canvas sack of coin with him before banking it, and call his son’s attention to the amount, never failing to stick a twenty-dollar gold-piece in each eye, monocle fashion, exclaiming, “Good for the masses,” a meaningless jest that had been one of the family’s household words for years.
His plan of building was peculiar. His credit was good, and having chosen his lot he would find out from the banks how much they would loan him upon it in case he should become the owner. If this amount suited him, he would buy the lot, making one large payment outright and giving his note for the balance. The lot once his, the banks loaned him the desired amount. With this money and with money of his own he would make the final payment on the lot and would begin the building itself, paying his labour on the nail, but getting his material, lumber, brick and fittings on time. When the building was half-way up he would negotiate a second loan from the banks in order to complete it and in order to meet the notes he had given to his contractors for material.
He believed this to be a shrewd business operation, since the rents as they returned to him were equal to the interest on a far larger sum than that which he had originally invested. He said little about the double mortgage on each piece of property “improved” after this fashion and which often represented a full two-thirds of its entire value. The interest on each loan was far more than covered by the rents; he chose his neighbourhoods with great discrimination; real estate was flourishing in the rapidly growing city, and the new houses, although built so cheaply that they were mere shells of lath and plaster, were nevertheless made gay and brave with varnish and cheap mill-work. They rented well at first, scarcely a one was ever vacant. People spoke of the Old Gentleman as one of the most successful realty owners in the city. So pleased did he become with th
e success of his new venture that in course of time all his money was reinvested after this fashion.
At the time of his father’s greatest prosperity Vandover himself began to draw toward his fifteenth year, entering upon that period of change when the first raw elements of character began to assert themselves and when, if ever, there was a crying need for the influence of his mother. Any feminine influence would have been well for him at this time: that of an older sister, even that of a hired governess. The housekeeper looked after him a little, mended his clothes, saw that he took his bath Saturday nights, and that he did not dig tunnels under the garden walks. But her influence was entirely negative and prohibitory and the two were constantly at war. Vandover grew in a haphazard way and after school hours ran about the streets almost at will.
At fifteen he put on long trousers, and the fall of the same year entered the High School. He had grown too fast and at this time was tall and very lean; his limbs were straight, angular, out of all proportion, with huge articulations at the elbows and knees. His neck was long and thin and his head large, his face was sallow and covered with pimples, his ears were big, red and stuck out stiff from either side of his head. His hair he wore “pompadour.”
Within a month after his entry of the High School he had a nickname. The boys called him “Skinny-seldom-fed,” to his infinite humiliation.
Little by little the crude virility of the young man began to develop in him. It was a distressing, uncanny period. Had Vandover been a girl he would at this time have been subject to all sorts of abnormal vagaries, such as eating his slate pencil, nibbling bits of chalk, wishing he were dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy. As it was, his voice began to change, a little golden down appeared on his cheeks and upon the nape of his neck, while his first summer vacation was altogether spoiled by a long spell of mumps.