by Thomas Wolfe
Meanwhile, she had done herself pretty well among these prosperous infidels for some twenty years, fattening herself up in a cushy job, wearing the scarcely worn garments of two of the best dressed women on the earth and seeing to it that the constable who came to woo her several times a week should lack for nothing in the way of food and drink to spur him on to fresh accomplishment in the exercise in which, it seemed to her, he excelled—or, as she would have put it, “a [?].”
Meanwhile she had feathered her nest snugly to the tune of several thousand dollars, and kept the old folks back in Clare or Cork or wherever it was she came from, faithfully furnished with a glittering and lascivious chronicle, sprinkled with pious interjections of regret and deprecation and appeals to the Virgin to watch over her and guard her among such infidels of this brave new world that had such pickings in it. No—decidedly this truculent resentment which smouldered in her eye had nothing to do with caste: she had lived here for twenty years a kind of female Marco Polo enjoying the bounty of a very good superior sort of heathen, and growing used and tolerant to almost all their sinful customs, but she had no doubt where the true way and the true light was, and that she would one day find her way back into the more civilized and Christian precincts of her own kind.
Neither did the grievance in the maid’s hot eye come from a sense of poverty, the stubborn silent anger of the poor against the rich, the feeling that good decent people like herself must fetch and carry all their lives for lazy idle wasters, that she must drudge with roughened fingers all day long in order that this fine lady might smile brightly and keep beautiful. No, the maidservant knew full well that there was no task in all the household range of duties—whether of serving, mending, cooking, cleaning or repairing, which her mistress could not do far better and with more dispatch than she.
And she knew further that every day in the great city which roared all about her own dull ears this other woman was going back and forth with the energy of a dynamo, a shining needle flashing through the million repetitions of the earth’s dull web, buying, ordering, fitting, cutting, and designing—now on the scaffolds with the painters, beating them at their own business in immense, draughty and rather dismal rooms where her designs were hammered into substance, now sitting cross-legged among great bolts of cloth and plying a needle with a defter finger than any on the dully flashing little hands of the peaked and pallid tailors all about her, now searching and prying about indefatigably through a dozen gloomy little junk shops until she unearthed triumphantly out of the tottering heaps of junk the exact small ornament which she must have—always after her people, always good humoredly but formidably pressing on, keeping the affair in hand, and pushing it to its conclusion (enforcing the structure, the design, the rich incomparable color of her own life on the incompetent chaos of inept lives and actions all about her) in spite of the laziness, carelessness, vanity, stupidity, indifference and faithlessness of the people with which she had to work—painters, actors, shifters, bankers, union bosses, lighters, tailors and costumers, producers and directors—the whole immense motley, and for the most part shabbily inept and tawdry crew which carried on the crazy and precarious affair that is known as “the show business.”
No: the maid had seen enough of the hard world in which her mistress daily strove and conquered to convince herself that even if she had possessed any of the immense talent and knowledge that her mistress had to have, she did not have in all her lazy body as much energy, resolution, and power as the other woman carried in the tip of her little finger. And this knowledge, so far from arousing any feeling of resentment in her, only gave her a feeling of self-satisfaction, a gratified feeling that her mistress, not herself, was really the working woman and that, enjoying the same food, the same drink, the same shelter—yes! even the same clothing as her mistress—she would not swap places with her for any thing on earth.
Yes, the maid knew that she was fortunate, and had no cause for complaint: yet her grievance, ugly and perverse, glowered implacably in her inflamed and mutinous eye. And she could not have found a word or reason for that grievance, but as the two women stood there, it scarcely needed any word. The reason for it was printed into their flesh, legible in everything they did, in every act and move they made. It was not against the other woman’s wealth, authority, and position that the maid’s rancour was directed, but against something much more personal and indefinable—against the very tone and quality of the other woman’s life. For there had come over the maid’s life in the past year a distempered sense of failure, and frustration, an angry discontent, an obscure but powerful feeling that her life had somehow gone awry and dissonant, and was growing into a sterile and fruitless age without ever having come to any ripeness. And she was goaded, baffled, and tormented, as so many people have been, by a sense of having missed something splendid and magnificent in life, without knowing at all what it was. But whatever it was, the other woman seemed marvelously somehow to have found it and enjoyed it to the full, and this obvious fact, which she could plainly see, but could not define, goaded the maid almost past endurance.
Both women were about the same age, and so nearly the same size that the maid could wear any of her mistress’ garments without alteration. But if they had been creatures from separate planetary systems, if each had been formed, filled and given life by a completely different protoplasm, the physical differences between them could not have been more extreme.
The maid was not an ill-favored woman. She had a mass of fairly abundant red-brown hair, coarsely woven and clean looking, brushed over from the side. Her face, had it not been for the distempered and choleric look which drink and her own baffled and incoherent fury had now given it, would have been a pleasant and attractive one. It had in it the warmth, and a trace of that wild fierceness, which belongs to something mad, red, and lawless in nature, at the same time coarse and delicate, murderous, tender, savagely ebullient like a lawless chemistry, which so many women of her race have had. Moreover, she still had a trim figure, which wore neatly the well-cut skirt of rough green plaid which her mistress had given her (for, because of her long service, her position in the household as a kind of unofficial captain to the other maids was recognized, and she was usually not required to wear maid’s uniform).
But where the figure of the mistress was at once rich and delicate, small of bone and fine of line and yet lavishly opulent and seductive, packed as it was from top to toe with juice and sweetness (so that the woman when one looked at her jolly, glowing, marvelously delicate face and figure was not only “good enough to eat,” but of such a maddening and appetizing succulence, such wholesome relish that it was with difficulty one restrained himself from leaping upon her and devouring her then and there), the figure of the maid was by contrast almost thick and clumsy-looking, no longer young, no longer living, and no longer fresh and fertile, but already heavied, thickened, dried and hardened by the shock, the wear, the weight, the slow inexorable accumulations of the intolerable days, the merciless years that take from people everything, and from which there is no escape. “No—no escape, except for her” the maid was thinking bitterly, with a dull and tongueless rancour, a feeling of inarticulate outrage, “—and for her, for her, there was never anything but triumph, there was never anything but an outrageous and constantly growing success. And why? Why?”
It was here upon this question that her spirit halted like a wild beast, baffled by a sheer and solid blank of wall. Had they not both drawn the nurture of their lives from the same earth? Had they not breathed the same air, eaten the same food, been clothed by the same garments, and sheltered by the same walls? Had she not had as much, as good, of everything as her mistress—yes! Even of love, she thought with a contemptuous bitterness, for she had seen the other woman’s lovers come and go for twenty years, and if that was what it took to keep a woman young she thought, she had had as many and as good herself.
Yet here she stood, baffled and confused, glowering sullenly with an ugly and truculent e
ye into the shining face of the other woman’s glorious success—and she saw it, she knew it, she felt its outrage but she had no word to voice the sense that sweltered in her an intolerable wrong. Instead, she stood there stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman an added grace and suppleness, her skin dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added health and lustre to the radiant beauty of the other one, her body stunned and deadened of its youth and freshness by the merciless collisions of ten thousand furious days which had served only to pack the other woman to her red rose lip with health and sweetness, energy and joy—and the end of it all was that she was being devoured by the same qualities the other woman fed upon, that she was growing old on the same earth, beneath the same impartial sky, whereon the other woman grew more beautiful day by day, that time whose grey and cancerous tongs was feeding like an adder on her life had yielded to this woman all that it had of richness, strangeness, beauty, that there was pulsing in her constantly a wild and dissonant chemistry of ruin, hatred, and defeat, that fed the sullen flames of her distempered eye, while—in the other woman there coursed forever a music of health and joy, an exquisite balance of power and control, of ecstasy and temperance, a pulse, a flame, a star!—an exquisite confluence of all the forces of a rare and subtle beauty which was as vital as the omnipotent and everlasting earth, yet poised more sweetly than a bird in flight.
And all of this—the tidal flood of this all conquering ever growing beauty had found its well spring somehow in the hard and dismal rock of stony life from which her own ruined flesh and baffled soul had drawn no provender but an acrid and unwholesome dust. Oh, it was true, staring her in the face with an incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence, established by a literal and cruel comparison, so that the story of her ruin and the other woman’s glory was written down in lip, cheek, eye, in every line and movement of the figure, and in the very chemistry of the blood which brought to one an ugly jungled dissonance, and to the other the singing and triumphant music of beauty and success, until the other woman’s victory was evident with every breath she drew, and not only the color of her life, the health and radiance of her soul, seemed to shine out, with a charitable but merciless benignity upon the warped and blackened spirit of the maid, but the very texture of her flesh, the weave of her hair, the rose of her lip, the living satin of her skin, the spittle of her mouth, together with all combining sinews, nerves and tissues, juices, fibres, jellies, marrows, the whole warm integument of pulsing flesh that bound her life together seemed of a finer, rarer substance than the maid had ever known.
Yes, she saw it, she knew it, cruelly and terribly true past the last atom of hope and disbelief, and as she stood there before her mistress with the weary distemper of her mutinous eye, enforcing by a stern compulsion the qualities of obedience, and respect into her voice and into the composed humility of her face which betrayed her effect nakedly in the mottled and choleric color of her cheeks and jaws, she saw that the other woman read the secret of her envy and frustration plainly and pitied her because of it. And for this she hated her, because pity seemed to her the final and intolerable indignity.
And, in fact, although the kind, jolly and eager look on the other woman’s lovely face had not changed a bit since she had greeted the maid, her eye had read instantly and with a merciless and deadly precision, every minute sign of fever, envy and inchoate mutiny, the unwholesome dissonant fury that was raging in the woman, mind and body, and at this moment, with a strong emotion of pity, wonder and regret, she was thinking:
“She’s been at it again: this is the third time in a week that she’s been drunk. I wonder what it is, I wonder what it is that happens to that kind of person,” she thought, without knowing clearly what it was she understood by “that kind of person,” but feeling the detached, momentary, and half-indifferent regret and curiosity that people of a powerful, rich and decisive character may feel when they pause for a moment from the brilliant and productive exercise of an energy and talent that has crowned their life with a triumphant ease and success almost every step of the way, and note suddenly, and with surprise, that most of the other people in the world are groping, reeling, fumbling, blindly and wretchedly about, eking out from day to day, the inept and wretched progress of grey lives, that are so utterly lacking in any individual distinction, character, or talent that each seems to be rather a small, grey and flabby particle of some immense and vicious life-substance than a living and beautiful creature who is able to feel and to inspire the whole intolerable music of love, beauty, joy, passion, pain and death, of wild regret, exultancy, desire and depthless sorrow, which men have felt and made immortal on the earth.
And now, the mistress, with a strong emotion of discovery and surprise, was feeling this as she looked at the servant who had lived with her familiarly for more than twenty years, and as she now for the first time reflected closely on the kind of life the other woman might have had:
“What is it?” she kept thinking. “What’s gone wrong with her? She never used to be this way, it’s all happened in the last six months. And Molly used to be so pretty, too,” she thought. “Why—when she first came to us twenty years ago she was really a very handsome girl,”—and she started with a memory of surprise—“Isn’t it a shame!” she thought indignantly, “That she should let herself go to seed like this—a girl who’s had the chances that she’s had! I wonder why she never married—she used to have a half dozen of those big policemen on the string, they were mad about her, she could have had her pick of them!”
And suddenly, as she stood there looking kindly at the servant, the woman’s breath, foul, stale and sour with a rank whiskey stench was blown upon her, and she got suddenly a rank body smell, an old odor of pit and crotch, strong, hairy, female and unwashed. She frowned slightly with a feeling of revulsion that was almost like a physical pain, and her rosy and delicate face began to burn more deeply with a hot excited glow of shame, embarrassment, and acute distaste.
“God! But she stinks!” she thought, with a feeling of horror and disgust. “You could cut the smell around her with an axe! The nasty bitches!” she thought suddenly, now including all her servants in a feeling of indignant contempt. “I’ll bet they never wash—and here they are all day long with nothing to do, and they could at least keep clean! My God! You’d think these people would be so damned glad to be here in this lovely place with the fine life that we’ve made for them, that they would be a little proud of it and try to show that they appreciate it—but no!—What trash they are—the lazy, lying, thieving sluts! They’re just not good enough!” she thought scornfully, and for a moment her fine and delicate mouth was disfigured slightly at one corner by an expression, almost racial in its contempt and arrogance, and certainly common to people of her race.
It was an expression which had in it not only the qualities of contempt and scorn, but also a quality that was too bold and naked in its sneering arrogance, as if it was too eager to flaunt and brandish its insolent contempt into the face of any passer by. And although this ugly look, so full of pride and scorn, and a lewd and cynical materialism, rested only for a second, and almost imperceptibly, about the edges of the woman’s mouth, it did not sit well on her lovely face, and for just a moment it gave her fine, strong and sensitive mouth a coarse touch of something ugly, loose and sensual. Then it was gone. But the maid had seen it, and that swift look, with all it carried of contempt and arrogance, had stung and whipped her frenzied spirit to the quick.
“Oh, yes, my fine lady!” she was thinking. “It’s too good for the likes of us, you are, isn’t it? Oh my, no, but we’re very fine, aren’t we? What with our fine clothes and our evening gowns, and our forty pairs of hand made shoes—Jesus! now! Ye’d think she was some kind of centipede to see the different pairs of shoes she’s got—and our silk petticoats and step-ins that we have made in Par-is, now—yes!—that makes it very fine, doesn’t it—it’s not as if we ever did a little private [fucking] on the side
, like ordinary people, is it?—Oh my, no! We are gathered together wit a friend fer a little elegant an’ high-class entertainment durin’ the course of the evenin’—What’s this I heard her say to him?—‘Yer face is so delicate,—it’s like an angel’s!’ Jesus! now! But aint that nice!—His face! God, it’s the first time, that I ever knew of anyone to keep his face buttoned in his britches!—But maybe that’s the way they do it now, in high society!—But if it’s some poor girl without an extra pair of drawers to her name, it’s different, now! It’s ‘Oh! you nasty thing! I’m disgusted wit you! I believe ye’re no better than a common whore!’ Yes! An’ there’s many a fine lady livin’ on Park Avenoo right now who’s no better, if the truth was told—That I know and could swear to—So just take care, my lady, not to give yerself too many airs, for it wouldn’t take me long to pull ye down a peg or two when I got started,” she thought with a rancourous triumph.
“Ah! If I told all that I know of you—wit yer angels and their faces and ‘He’s simply mad about me little Edith,’ and ‘Molly, if anyone calls when I’m not here I wish ye’d take the message yerself—Mr. Jack doesn’t like to be disturbed’—Jesus! From what I’ve seen there’s none of them who likes to be disturbed. It’s live and let live wit them, no questions asked an’ the devil take the hindmost, so long as ye do it in yer leisure hours, but if ye’re twenty minutes late fer dinner, it’s where the hell have ye been and what’s to become of us when ye neglect yer family in this way? Sure,” she thought, warming with a flush of humor and a more tolerant and liberal spirit, “It’s a queer world, ain’t it?—And these are the queerest of the lot! Thank God, I was brought up like a Christian in the Holy Church, and still have grace enough be ashamed when I have sinned! But, then—” and now, as often happens with people of strong but disordered feeling, she was already sorry for her flare of ugly temper, and her affections were running warmly in a different direction—