by Thomas Wolfe
A sigh, long, lingering, full of relief and pleasure, expired slowly on his lips. He rolled down slowly in a wallow of complete immersion and came up dripping: with a thick lather of fragrant tarry soap, he soaped himself enthusiastically across his hairy chest and belly, under the armpits, over his shoulders, up his pink solid-looking neck, and into the porches of his reddened ears. He slid under again in a slow bearlike wallow and came up with a cleansed and grateful feeling, filled with the pleasant fragrance of his flesh.
He lolled back in a sensual meditation against the rich cream thickness of the tub and gazed with dreamy rapture at his navel, and at the thick wet hair which floated, waving gently, strong, oily, silken, the sea-frond forest of himself. He looked with brooding tenderness, with strong wonder, at the flower of his sex: short, strong, and wrinkled, velvet to his touch, and circumcised, it floated slowly upward like a fish at rest, gently sustained upon the floating pontoons of his ballocks, gently afloat upon the spread veined mesh of his full floating bag. He grasped it tenderly, soaping it with respectful fingers and with a look of delicate and refined concern upon his face. How are you, sir, this morning? Will that do? Reverently he released it, leaning backward, watching as it swam. A smile broke happily cross his lips: he found life good. Was there, he asked himself rhetorically, life in the old boy yet? Was there? How many men of fifty-four could say as much? Grow old? A laugh, low, deep, guttural, thick with triumph, welled up exultantly in his throat. Grow old! Yes! Grow old, by God, grow old! He almost shouted. Grow old along with me! Oh, he would show old tottering toothless fools what growing old was like.
He would keep groomed and ready for the work of love if it took the treasure of a king and all the cunning in the brain of science. A sensual fantasy, wild and jubilant, possessed him, filling his heart with triumph and exultant certainty. He would be trained and groomed more finely than an athlete for the single goal and end of his desire. He would renew the juice of youth and love within him constantly, if surgeons had to graft into his flesh the genitals of a bull, or if he had to buy the manhood of a youth of twenty-five, to do it. He would be fed and renewed forever on foods and liquors rich with all the energies of love, and he would have them at whatever cost—if hunters had to scour the jungles of the earth to find them, if divers had to go down to the seafloors of the earth to gather them—oh! if a hundred men must lose their lives or shed their blood to keep youth living in him, he would have it, he would keep it—or what was money, what was science, for?
Jack thought of women, seductive, rare and lovely women, bought with gold, and more seductive for the gold that bought them. He no longer thought or cared to think about the lavish Amazon, the blonde creature great of limb and deep of breast who, in the visions of his youth, had waited for him, singing, in an ancient house. Or, if he ever thought of her, it was without regret, without desire: she was an image crude, naive, and youthful, such as children have, as far and lost and buried as the boy who wanted her. But Jack was a modern man, and even styles in woman’s flesh had changed. He liked his women cut to fashion: he liked women with long flat hips and unsuspected depth and undulance. He liked women with firm narrow breasts, long necks, long slender legs, and straight flat bellies. He liked their faces long and pale, a little cruel and merciless, he liked thin wicked mouths of red, and long slant eyes, cat-grey, and lidded carefully. He liked ladies with spun hair of bronze-gold wire; he liked a frosted cocktail shaker in a lady’s hands, and he liked a voice hoarse-husky, city-wise, a trifle weary, and ironic, faintly insolent, that said: “Well! What happened to you, darling? I thought that you would never get here.”
And thinking so, he flopped suddenly, flatly, with the caught hooked motion of a fish, in the warm soap-lathered water.
Tonight. Tonight.
The water spangles, gold-green, stinging, flashed in a swarming web upon the ceiling.
MORNING
• • •
MRS. JACK AWAKE
• • •
Mrs. Jack awoke at eight o’clock. She awoke like a child, completely alert and alive, instantly awake all over and with all sleep shaken clearly from her mind and senses the moment that she opened her eyes. It had been so with her all her life. For a moment she lay flat on her back with eyes wide open, completely awake but staring with a blank, puzzled stare straight up at the ceiling.
Then with a vigorous and jubilant movement she flung the covers back from her small and opulent body, which was clothed with a long sleeveless garment of thin yellow silk. She bent her knees briskly, drew her feet from beneath the cover, and straightened out flat again. For a moment she surveyed her small straight feet, with a look of wonder and delight. The perfect and solid alignment of the little toes, and the healthy shining nails which, save for a slight bluish discoloration at the edge of one great toe were as perfect, healthy, and well kept as her small, strong, and capable hands filled her with pleasure.
With the same expression of childish wonder and vanity, she slowly lifted her left arm and began to revolve it deliberately before her fascinated eye. With a tender concentration she observed how the small and delicate wrist obeyed each movement with a strong suppleness, and then she gazed raptly at the strong, graceful winglike movement of the hand, at the strength, beauty, and firm competence that was legible in its brown narrow back and in the shapely fingers. And filled with delight at the strength and beauty of her hand, she lifted the other arm as well, and now turned both of them upon their graceful wrists, gazing upon both hands with a tender concentration of delight.
“What magic!” she thought. “What magic and strength is in them. God! How beautiful they are, and what things they can do! The design for all of it comes out of me in the most wonderful and exciting way,” she thought, with a sense of love and wonder. “It is all distilled and brewed inside of me—and yet nobody ever asks me how it happens! First, it is all one piece—like something solid in the head,” she thought comically, now wrinkling her low forehead with an almost animal-like expression of bewildered and painful difficulty. “Then it all breaks up into little particles and somehow arranges itself and then it starts to move!” she thought triumphantly.
“First I can feel it coming down along my neck and shoulders, and then it is moving up across my legs and belly, then it meets and joins together like a star (‘that art of three sounds not a fourth sound a star!’” she thought) in her image of beautiful faces, such images—“a thread of gold” and “a star” were constantly re [turning]. “Then it flows out into my arms until it reaches down into my finger tips—and then the hand does just what I want it to. It makes a line—and everything I want is in that line—it puts a fold into a piece of cloth, and no one else on earth could put it in that way, or make it look the same—it gives a turn to the spoon, a prod of the fork, a dash of pepper when I cook for him,” she thought, “and there’s a dish the finest chef on earth can never equal—because it’s got me in it, heart and soul and all my love,” she thought with modest joy. “Yes! And everything I’ve ever done has been the same—always the clear design, the line of life, running like a thread of gold all through my life back to the time I was a child,” she thought. And at this moment, it really seemed to her that her life, at every time and moment had always had the unity, beauty, and assurance of this “thread of gold.”
Now, having surveyed her strong and beautiful hands with an immense and tender satisfaction, the woman began deliberately an inspection of her other members. Craning her head a little to the side, she began to revolve one arm slowly, and it was evident from her dissatisfied and somewhat scornful frown that she did not regard this member with the same pride and pleasure with which she had looked at her hand. Her arm was slender, firm, and strong looking but rather short, and for this reason she did not like it. As she looked at it, she shook her head slightly with a comical gesture of depreciation as she muttered “No.” Her arm seemed stumpy, short, and ugly, and with her love of “a clear design,” for the swift, beautiful, and incisive character which had
shaped her hands, her arm seemed to her to be without any distinction whatever.
Therefore, she turned her discontented look from them, and craning her head downward and staring with a puckered glance of a child, she put her hands beneath her breasts and looked at them. They were the full loose sagging breasts of a woman of middle age who has born children, and their ends were tough, brown, and leathery looking, surrounded by brown areolas of mottled flesh. And curiously, although it was here and here only that the woman’s noble and delicate beauty had been marred by age and labor, she regarded her breasts with no sign either of approval or despair. Rather, she held them in her hands and looked at them with the intent rude and somewhat puzzled stare of a child, which was as detached in its curiosity as if they were no part of her.
At length she released them and slid her hands down gently across her waist, which was still small and delicate, and over her hips. Then she drew her hands back slowly over the smooth contours of her thighs and rubbed them with sense of approval and satisfaction on her belly. It was comely, proportionate, and yet bountiful, swelling smoothly with a velvet unction. There was a wide smooth sear upon it and for a moment her finger traced the slick smooth imprint of this sear below her gown. Then the woman put her hands down at her sides again, and for a moment more she lay motionless, toes evenly in line, limbs straight, head front, eyes staring gravely at the ceiling,—a little figure stretched out like a queen for burial, yet still warm, still palpable, immensely grave and beautiful, as she thought: “These are my hands and these are my fingers; these are my legs and hips, this is my velvet belly, and these are my fine feet and my perfect toes:—this is my body.”
And suddenly, as if the grave and final estimate of these possessions filled her with an immense joy and satisfaction, she flung the covers jubilantly aside, sat up with a shining face, and swung her body strongly to the floor. She thrust her small feet vigorously into a pair of slippers, stood up, thrust her arms out and brought the hands down again behind her head, yawned and then thrust her bare arms into the sleeves of a yellow quilted dressing gown which was lying across the foot of the bed.
The woman had a rosy, jolly, and delicate face of noble beauty, which was like no one else on earth. The face was small, firm and almost heartshaped, and in it was evident that same strange union of the child and of the woman, which was also visible in her body. The moment anyone met her or saw her for the first time he must instantly have felt: “This woman looks exactly the way she did when she was a child. She has not changed at all.” Yet her face also bore the markings of age and maturity of a middle-aged woman: it was when she was talking to someone and when her face was lighted by a merry and eager animation that the child’s face was most clearly visible.
When she was at work, her face was likely to have the serious and rather worn concentration of a mature and expert craftsman engaged in an absorbing and exacting labor, and it was at such a time that she looked oldest: It was then that one noticed the somewhat fatigued and minutely wrinkled spaces around her eyes, and some strands of coarse grey that were beginning to sprinkle her dull dark-brown hair.
Finally, in repose, or when she was alone, her face was likely to have a sombre, brooding and almost sorrowful depth. It had at such a time a beauty that was profound, and full of mystery. And it had also in it the troubling quality of something fatal and last of someone who has “lost out” somewhere in life in some priceless and irrecoverable thing; her forehead was low and at such a time could be wrinkled by an almost animal-like look of perplexity, confusion, and even grief. Such a look could trouble a friend or a lover because it suggested a knowledge buried, secret, and fundamental to the life of a person he believed he had come to know. And at such a moment, she looked completely like the woman with no trace of the child about her.
She was three parts a Jewess, and it was at such a time as this that the ancient, dark, and sorrowful quality of her race was most evident. But this was not often, to act, to work, to move and live in the world, with almost furious industry was the way people remembered her best, the very weather of her soul, the way she appeared most often was as a glowing, jolly, indomitably active and eager little creature, in whose delicate and lovely face the image of the child, proud, and with an invincible joyfulness was looking out of the woman’s face with an immortal confidence.
Thus, in the woman’s face were all the lights and tunes of beauty, grave, gay, or eager, troubled by strange depths and haunted by an obscure and sorrowful perplexity, now the woman, now the child, and now strangely, marvelously, both, she had in her all the enchantment of a beauty that was dark and strange as Asia, and as familiar as the light of day. By night—in the great cliff and glitter of the city night, with all its proud and arrogant dust of gold, its incredible pollens soaring into space of a million sown lights and with its shining edge of menace, its corrupt and sneering faces, the woman’s face could glow cruel and brilliant in chambers of the night with a proud, sensual and almost arrogant assurance.
But by day, in the first dear light of morning, or by noon, by the high, sane practical light of golden noon, she had as jolly, a rare and good a face of delicate and noble beauty as any on this earth could be. Her jolly apple-cheeks were glowing with all the health and freshness in the world, and they were as red and tender as a cherry, her mouth was red and tender, as the petals of a rose, her eyes were brown and kind, wise, sharp and eager. When she came into a room she filled it with her exultant health and loveliness and she seemed to give structure, a color of morning joy and life to all the brutal and furious stupefaction of the streets she came from.
So, too, when she went out in the streets at morning, glowing all about her with an eager, merry, and insatiable curiosity, she gave a color to these grey beaten pavements which they had never had before. Her little face, among the spires and ramparts of the cruel and inhuman architectures that beetled all about her was blowing like a deathless flower; among the numberless swarms of desolate and sterile people, thrusting and thronging endlessly up and down a thousand streets with a kind of weary and exacerbated fury, as they urged themselves on to the consummation of their arid and fruitless labor, the sight of that woman’s face was like a triumph and a prophecy.
It shone there as the other people thronged about her like the token of a deathless and glorious beauty to people trapped in hell, the man-swarm pressed about her in an incessant tidal grey, grey hats and dead grey flesh, and dark dead eyes. They thronged past her with their accursed hats of cheap grey felt, and their million faces set in the few familiar gestures of an inept hardness, a cunning without an end, a guile without a purpose, a cynical knowledge without faith or wisdom, and with their scrabble of a few harsh oaths and cries dedicated to the sterile and unending repetition of their own knavishness. And against all these million evidences of the vileness, cheapness, and shabby, dingy evil of which men are capable if there was only this evidence of their beauty, and magnificence, it was enough. The woman passed among them, and that one deathless flower of a face that bloomed among so many millions of the dead at once struck music from the shining morning: it gave a tongue to chaos, a music of energy and joy to the vast pulsation of the city’s life, a structure of beauty, life, and certitude to everything it passed,—so that even the sterile and grey-faced people thrusting about her everywhere with their harassed and driven eyes, were halted suddenly in the dreary fury of their lives, and looked at her, at the music of health and joy that shone out of her face, and stared after her little figure as it moved briskly along, and which in its opulence, its sense of something fertile, curved, and living as the earth was so different from their own grey and meagre flesh, that they looked at her almost like wretches who are trapped and damned in hell, but to whom for one moment a vision of a living and deathless beauty has been granted.
MORNING
• • •
MRS. JACK AND THE MAID
• • •
At this moment, as Mrs. Jack stood there by her bed, her maid
servant, Molly, knocked at the door and entered immediately, bearing a tray with a tall silver coffee pot, a small bowl of sugar lumps, a cup, and saucer and a spoon. The maid put the tray down on a little table beside the bed, saying in a thick Irish voice:
“Good maar-nin’, Mrs. Jack.”
“Oh, Hello, Molly!” the woman answered, crying out in the eager and surprised and rather bewildered tone with which she usually responded to a greeting. “How are you?—Hah?”—clapping her hand to one ear as she phrased this conventional question, as if she was really eagerly concerned, but immediately adding: “Isn’t it going to be a nice day? Did you ever see a more beautiful morning in your life?”
“Oh, beautiful, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered. “Beautiful!” The maid’s voice had a solemn and almost reverential tone of agreement as she answered, but there was in it the undernote of something sly, furtive, sullen and Irish, and the other woman looking at her swiftly now saw the maid’s eyes, sullen, drunken, inflamed, and irrationally choleric, staring back at her. The maid’s voice was respectful and even unctuously submissive in its agreement but her bleared and angry looking eyes stared back with a sullen and drunken rancour, a resentfulness, whose bold, wilful and wicked defiant glance seemed to be directed not so much at her mistress as at the general family of the earth. Or, if her angry eye did swelter with a glare of spite more personal and direct, her resentment was instinctive, blind and stubborn—it just smouldered in her with an ugly truculence, and she did not know the reason for it. Certainly, it was not based on any feeling of class inferiority, for she was Irish and a papist to the bone, and where social dignities were concerned she had no doubt at all on which side condescension lay.
She had served this woman and her family for more than twenty years, and it must be admitted (for her present defection was a recent one) that she had swindled them, stolen from them, lied to (and for) them, and grown slothful on their bounty with a very affectionate devotion and warmth of old Irish feeling—but she had never doubted for a moment that they would all ultimately go to hell, together with the other pagans and all alien heathen tribes whatever.