by Thomas Wolfe
Yet, his neck was not stiff, nor his eye hard. Neither was he very proud. For he had seen the men who lean upon their sills at evening, and those who swarmed from ratholes in the ground, and often he had wondered what their lives were like.
* * * *
Mr. Jack was a wise man, too, who knew the world, the devil, and the city well. He liked the brilliant shock and gaiety of evening and, although kind, he was not averse to a little high-toned cruelty at night. It gave a spice and zest to things, a pleasant tinge of wickedness, and after all, it broke no bones. A nice juicy young yokel, say, fresh from the rural districts, all hands and legs and awkwardness, hooked and wriggling on a cruel and cunning word—a woman’s, preferably, because they were so swift and deft in matters of this nature, although there were men as well whose skill was great—some pampered lap-dog of rich houses, to his preference, some fiesty nimble-witted little she-man whose lisping mincing tongue was always good for one or two shrewd thrusts of poison in a hayseed’s hide. Or a nice young couple, newly married, say, eager to make their way among smart people and determined to go forward with sophisticated knowingness—to ply their stage fright smoothly with strong drink, until the little woman indiscreetly showed a preference for some insolently handsome youth, who should be present to give a touch of pleasant menace to the evening, was discovered in his arms, say, in a bed room, or sat upon his lap before invited guests, or merely lolled upon him with an intoxicated ardour—why surely moments such as these, even the strained smile, the faint green pallor of the husband’s face, were innocent enough, and did no lasting harm to anyone.
Of the two enjoyments, however, Mr. Jack felt he rather liked the wincing of the solitary yokel better: there was something so much like innocence, youth, and morning in the face of a nice freshly baited country boy, as it darkened to a slow dull smouldering glow of shame, surprise, and anger, and as it sought with clumsy and inept words to retort upon the wasp which had stung it and winged away, that Mr. Jack, when he saw it, felt a sense of almost paternal tenderness for its hapless victim, a delightful sense of youth and innocence in himself. It was almost as if he were revisiting his own youth: it was far better than a trip out to the country, and the sight of dewy meadows, or the smells of hay and milk and butter.
But enough was enough. Mr. Jack was neither a cruel nor an immoderate man. He liked the great gay glitter of the night, the thrill and fever of high stakes, and the swift excitements of new pleasures. He liked the theatre and saw all the worthwhile plays, and the better, smarter, wittier revues—the ones with sharp satiric lines, good dancing, and Gershwin music. He liked the shows his wife designed because his wife designed them, he was proud of her, and he also enjoyed these evenings of ripe culture at the Guild. He also went to prize fights in his evening clothes and once when he came home he had the red blood of a champion on the white boiled bosom of his shirt. Few men could say as much.
He liked the social swim, the presence of the better sort of actors, artists, writers, and the wealthy cultivated Jews around his table, he liked the long velvet backs of lovely women, and the flash and play of jewelry about their necks, he liked a little malice and a little spicy scandal deftly hinted in a word. He liked the brilliant chambers of the night with their smooth baleful sparkle of vanity and hate. He breathed their air agreeably, without anguish or confusion. He even liked a little quiet fornication now and then, and all the other things that men are fond of. All this he had enjoyed himself, but decently and quietly, all in its proper time and place, without annoyance to other people, and he expected everyone to act as well as he.
But ripeness with this man was all, and he always knew the time to stop. His ancient and belraic spirit was tempered with an almost classic sense of moderation. He prized the virtue of decorum highly. He knew the value of the middle way. He had a kind heart and a loyal nature. His purse was open to a friend in need. He kept a lavish table and a royal cellar, and his family was the apple of his eye.
He was not a man to wear his heart upon his overcoat, nor risk his life on every corner, nor throw himself away upon a word or at any crosswind of his fancy, nor spend the heart and strength out of his life forever just on the impulse of a moment’s wild belief. This was such madness as the Gentiles knew. But, this side idolatry and madness, he would go as far for friendship’s sake as any man alive. He would go with a friend up to the edge of his own ruin and defeat, and he would ever try to hold him back from it. But once he saw a man was mad, and not to be persuaded by calm judgment, he was done with him. He would leave him where he was, although regretfully. Are matters helped if the whole crew drown together with a single drunken sailor? He thought not. He could put a world of sincere meaning in the three words: “What a pity!”
Yes, Mr. Frederick Jack was a wise and kind and temperate man, and he had found life pleasant, and won from it the secret of wise living. And the secret of wise living was founded in a graceful compromise, a tolerant acceptance. If a man wanted to live in this world without getting his pockets picked, he had better learn how to use his eyes and ears in what is going on around him. But if he also wanted to live in this world without getting hit over the head, or without all the useless pain, the grief, the terror, and the bitterness that scourges man’s sad flesh, he had better learn how not to use his eyes and ears, in what is going on around him. This sounds difficult but it had not been so for Mr. Frederick Jack. Perhaps some great inheritance of pain and suffering, the long dark ordeal of his race, had left him, as a kind of precious distillation, this gift of balanced understanding. At any rate, he had not learned it because it could not be taught. He had been born with it.
Therefore, he was not a man to rip the sheets in darkness or beat his knuckles bloody on a wall. He would not madden furiously in the envenomed passages of night, nor strangle like a mad dog of his hate and misery in the darkness, nor would he ever be carried smashed and bloody from the stews. A woman’s falseness, the lover’s madness, the pangs of misprized love were no doubt hard to bear, but love’s bitter mystery had broken no bones for Mr. Jack and, so far as he was concerned, it could not murder sleep the way an injudicious wiener schnitzel could, or some drunk young Gentile fool ringing the telephone at one A.M.
Mr. Jack’s brow was darkened as he thought of it. He muttered wordlessly. If fools are fools, let them be fools where their folly will not injure or impede the slumbers of a serious man.
Yes. Men could rob, lie, murder, swindle, trick, and cheat—the whole world knew as much. And women could be as false as hell and lie their guilt away from now to doomsday with a round rogue’s eye of innocence, ten thousand oaths, and floods of tears. And Mr. Jack also had known something of the pain, the madness, and the folly that twists the painful and indignant soul of youth—it was too bad, of course, too bad, but regardless of all this the day was day, and men must work, the night was night, and men must sleep, and it was, he felt intolerable—
Ein!—
Red of face, to tune of tumbling morning water, in big tub, he bent stiffly, with a grunt, a plump pajamaed figure, until his fingers grazed the rich cream tiling of the bathroom floor.
Intolerable!—
Zwei!—
(He straightened sharply with a grunt of satisfaction—)
—that a man with serious work to do—
Drei!
(His firm plump arms shot strongly to full stretching finger tips above his head, and came sharply down again until he held clinched fists against his breast—)
Vier!—
—should be pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night by the ravings of a manic—ja! a crazy young fool—
(His closed fists shot outward in strong driving crosswise movement, and came strongly to his sides again).
Ein!—
—It was intolerable and, by God, he’d tell her so!
(Head to waist, stiff-legged and grunting vigorously, he bent again until his fingers grazed the floor).
MORNING
• • •
• • •
At seven twenty-eight Jack awoke and began to come alive with all his might. He sat upward and yawned strongly, with a stretching and propitiating movement of thick outward-yearning arms, at the same time bending a tousled slumber-swollen face into the plump muscle-hammock of his right shoulder blade, a movement coy and cuddlesome. Eee-a-a-a-ach! He stretched deliciously out of thick rubbery sleep, happily, with regret, and for a moment he sat heavily upright rubbing at his somewhat gummed sleep-reddened eyes the firm clenched backs of his plump fingers. Then he flung back the covers with one determined motion, and swung strongly to the floor. For a moment his short well-kept toes groped blindly in fine grey carpet stuff, smooth as felt, for suave heel-less slippers of red Russian leather. Found and shod he paddled drowsily across the floor’s thick noiseless carpeting to the window and stood, yawned strongly, stretched again, as he looked out with sleepy satisfaction at the finest morning of the year.
Nine floors below him Forty-seventh Street lay gulched in steep cool morning shadow, bluish, barren, cleanly ready for the day. A truck roared past with a solid rattling heaviness. An ash can was banged strongly on the pavement with an abrupt slamming racket. Upon the street a man walked swiftly by with lean picketing footsteps, turned the corner into Madison Avenue, and was gone, heading southward towards its work, a little figure foreshortened from above and covered by its neat drab cone of grey. Below Jack the street lay, a narrow bluish lane, between sheer cliffs of solid masonry, but straight before him on the western front of that incredible gulch of steel and stone to which opulently the name Vanderbilt Avenue had been given, the morning sunlight, firm, living, golden, young, immensely strong and delicate, cut with a clean sculptural sharpness at blue walls of shade. The light lay living with a firm, rose-golden, yet unearthly glow of morning upon the soaring upper tiers and summits of immense pale structures that rose terrifically from solid sheeted basal stone and glittering brass, still sunk in the steep blue morning shadow of that incredible gulch. Sharply, and yet with its unearthly rose-golden clarity, the light cut at appalling vertices of glass, and silver-burnished steel and cliffs of harsh white-yellow brick, haggard in young light. It lay clean and fragile, without violence or heat, upon upsoaring cliffs of masonry and on vast retreating pyramids of steel and stone, fumed at their summits with bright fading flaws of smoke. It was an architecture cruel, inhuman, monstrous and Assyrian in its pride and insolence soaring to nauseous pinnacles and cut wedge-like, wall-like, knife-like at a sickening height and depth from a wrought incredible sculpture of shade and light.
The morning light lay with a flat reddened blaze upon ten thousand even equal points of glass; it lay firmly on the upper tiers of great hotels and clubs and on vast office spaces bare of life. Jack looked with pleasure straight into great offices ready for the day: firm morning light shaped clean patterns out of pale-hued desks and swivel chairs of maple, it burnished flimsy thin partition woods and thick glazed office glasses. The offices stood silent, barren, with a clean sterility, in young morning light, empty and absent with a kind of lonely expectation for the life that soon would swarm into their emptiness to fill and use them.
The proud, glittering, vertical arrogance of the city, graven superbly like a triumphant and exulting music out of light and shade, was still touched with this same premonitory solitude of life. From streets yet bare of traffic the buildings rose haggard and incredible in first light, with an almost inhuman desolation, as if all life had been driven or extinguished from the giant city, and as if these inhuman and perfect relics were all that remained of a life that had been fabulous and legendary in its monstrous arrogance. The immense and vertical shapes of the great buildings soared up perfectly into a perfect sky: their pointed spires that dwindled to glittering needles of cold silver light cut sharply the crystal weather of a blue shell-fragile sky. Morning, bright shining morning, blazed incredibly upon their shining spires: the clean soaring shapes were built into a shining air which framed them with a radiant substance of light that was itself as clean as carving and only less material than the spires that carved it.
The cross street straight below him was now empty, but already in the short steep canyon that stretched straight and hard between its sheer terrific walls the trucks were beginning to drive past his vision at the cross street openings, an even savage thunder of machinery going to its work. And lengthways in that furious gulch the glittering bright-hued cabs were drilling past projectile-like in solid beetle-bullet flight to curve, vanish, and emerge again from the arched cab driveways of the Grand Central Station.
And everywhere, through that shining living light and above the solid driving thunder of machinery, Jack could feel the huge vibrant tremor, the slow-mounting roar of furious day. He stood there by his window, a man-mite poised midmost of the shining air upon a shelf of solid masonry, the miracle of God, a proud plump atom of triumphant man’s flesh, founded upon a rock of luxury and quietude at the earth’s densest and most central web of man-swarm fury, the prince of atoms who bought the luxuries of space, silence, light and iron-walled security out of chaos with the ransom of an emperor, and who exulted in the price he paid for them, a compact tiny tissue of bright blood, a palpable warm motion who gazed upon sky-pointing towers blazing in young light, and did not feel appalled, a grain of living dust who saw the million furious accidents of shape and movement that daily passed the little window of his eye, and felt no doubt or fear or lack of confidence.
Instead, if those appalling shapes had been the monuments of his own special triumph, his sense of confidence, pride, and ownership could hardly have been greater.
My city. Mine.
They filled his heart with certitude and joy because he had learned, like many other men, to see, to marvel, to accept, and not to read, and in that insolent boast of steel and stone he saw a permanence surviving every danger, an answer, crushing and conclusive in its silence, to every doubt.
His eye swept strongly, proudly, with a bright awakened gleam of life along the gulched blue canyon of the avenue until his vision stopped, halted at the end, forced upwards implacably, awfully, along the terrific vertex of the Lincoln Building which rose, a flat frontal wall of sheer appalling height, a height incredible, immeasurable, cut steeply in blue shade.
Then, with firm fingers pressed against his slowly swelling breast, he breathed deliberately, the fresh living air of morning, laden with the sharp thrilling compost of the city, a fragrance, subtly mixed of many things, impalpable and unforgettable, touched with joy and menace. The air was laden with the smell of earth, a quality that was moist and flowerful, it was tinged faintly with the fresh wet reek of tidal waters, a faint fresh river smell, rank, a little rotten, somehow wild with jubilation and the thought of ships. That shining incense-laden air was also spiced impalpably with the sultry and fragrant excitement of strong boiling coffee, and in it was the proud tonic threat of conflict and of danger, and a leaping wine-like prophecy of power, wealth and love. Jack breathed that vital ether slowly, strongly, with the heady joy, the sense of unknown menace and delight it always brought to him. A trembling, faint and instant, passed in the earth below him. He paused, frowning, waiting till it stopped. He smiled.
Great trains pass under me. Morning, bright morning, and the dreams we knew: a boy, the station, and the city first, in morning, living morning. And now—yes, even now!—they come, they pass below me wild with joy, mad with hope, drunk with their thoughts of victory. For what? For what? Glory, huge profit and a girl!
O! Du schone schone zauberstadt!
Power. Power. Power.
* * * * *
Jack breathed the powerful tonic fragrance of shining morning and the city with strong pleasure. Then, thoroughly awake, he turned, moved briskly across his chamber to the bathroom, and let fall with a full stopped thud the heavy silver-headed waste pipe of his lavish sunken tub. He turned the hot water tap on full force and, as the tumbling water began smokily to fi
ll the tub with its thick boiling gurgle, he brushed his teeth and gargled his throat. Then, scuffing suave slippers from his feet, and gripping the thick warm tiling of the floor with strong bare toes, he straightened with a military smartness, drew deeply in a long determined breath, and vigorously began his morning exercises. With stiffened legs and straight flexed arms, he bent strongly towards the floor, grunting, as his groping finger tips just grazed the tiling. Then he swung into punctual rhythms, counting, “One—Two—Three—Four,” as his body moved, lapsing presently into a mere guttural and native mutter of “Ein—Zwei—Drei—Vier!” as he went on. At length he paused, panting, red, victorious: he turned the water off, tested it gingerly with a finger which he jerked back with a grunt of hurt surprise; he turned the cold water spigot strongly to the left and waited while cold water tumbled, surged up bubbling, seething, milky, sending waves of trembling light across the hot blue surface of the water.
He stripped off rapidly the neat pajama suit, silk-blue, that clad his sturdy figure with a loose soft warmth, and comfort. For a moment he stood in sensual contemplation of his nakedness. He felt with pleasure his firm swelling bicep muscle and observed with keen satisfaction the reflection in the mirror of his plump, hairy, well-conditioned body. Firm, well-moulded, and erect, well-fleshed and solid-looking, there was hardly a trace of unwholesome fat upon him—a little undulance, perhaps, goose-plump, across the kidneys, a suggestion of a roll of flesh about the waist, but not enough to give concern, and far, far less than he had seen on men twenty years his junior. Content, strong, deep and glowing had filled him: he turned his rapt eye away reluctantly and tried the water with a cautious toe. He found it tempered to his liking. He turned off the flow from the cold water pipe, stepped carefully into the tub, and then settled his body slowly in its blue-crystal depths with a slow grunt of apprehension.