by Thomas Wolfe
“Eh? What’s that? What did you say? Who said that?” cried Jack eagerly, beginning to grin and scenting a good story to tell his business friends even before he understood the meaning of her reference.
“Oh, that fellow Atwater! That big bum!” she said in a disgusted tone.
“Reginald Atwater?—” Jack said eagerly. “The one who played the Older Man?”
“Yes, doesn’t it sound like him?—God! I could have killed him!” she burst out furiously. “To think he’d have no more sense than to do a thing like that.”
“What! What did he do?” said Jack.
“Why, coming on in the second act in that God-awful evening suit! I thought I’d have a fit when I looked at him!” she cried.
“Well, I did notice it!” Jack admitted. “It was pretty gay. I sort of wondered why you did it.”
“I?” she cried indignantly. “Do you think I had anything to do with it? Do you think I’d have let him come on in a rig like that. No! Over my dead body!” she declared.
“Why, wasn’t it the suit you’d picked out for him?”
“Of course not!” she cried furiously. “It was his own ham actor’s outfit that he goes out shop-girl hunting with—or something,” she muttered angrily. “Couldn’t you tell it by looking at it—those fancy silk lapels about twice too wide, and that fancy actor’s vest with rolled lapels, and about three acres of that God-damned shirt all bulged out in front like a pouter pigeon? Do you think I’d ever do a thing like that?” she said indignantly. “Not on your life.”
“Then how did it happen?”
“—Oh, the way it always happens! If you’re not there to watch over them every second of the time it will always happen. I had a beautiful quiet suit all picked out for him,—just the one he needed for the part—and got him fitted up in it—”
“Did he want to wear the other one—his own?”
“Oh, yes, of course! They always do!” she said impatiently. “That’s what I’m always fighting with them for—trying to beat it into their heads that—‘Look here, Atwater,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter at all what you want to wear. What you think looks best on you! I’m not costuming you but the character in the play! You’re not playing Atwater’—(which is a big lie, of course, he’s always playing Atwater!) He couldn’t play anything else but Atwater if he tried!” she said scornfully—“‘You’re playing the man in the play’ I said. ‘And you’ve simply got to get that into your head.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’—(God! Fritz, his face looks just exactly like a piece of cold sliced ham)—I know,’ he says, ‘but then, you know we all have our points,’—Points!” she muttered resentfully. “That fellow has nothing else but points: He’s one complete mass of sore thumbs as far as I’m concerned.—‘We all have our points,’ he said. ‘And as for me’—sticking his chest out about a mile and hitting himself on it like a piece of ham—‘As for me’”—her voice rose to a rich full yell of laughter. “‘I am noted for muh Torso!’”
And their laughter joined and rang around the room.
“—But isn’t it a shame,” she went on presently in an indignant tone. “To give the words and thoughts of a great poet or anything that’s any good to a fellow like that! You’d think they’d be so damned glad to make the most of the chance they have!—Really, you wouldn’t believe it—some of the things they say. ‘As for me I am noted for muh torso.’” she muttered. “God! I didn’t believe I’d heard him right—‘What did you say?’ I cried. ‘Oh what did you say, Mr. Atwater?’—It just didn’t seem possible—I had to get off the stage as fast as I could! When I told Roberta I thought she’d have a fit!—‘Torso!’” she muttered scornfully again. “I suppose he thought I should have dressed him up in a lion skin.”
She was silent for a moment, then she said wearily, “Gee, I’m glad this season’s at an end, I wish there was something else I could do.—If I only knew how to do something else, I’d do it. Really, I would,” she said earnestly. “I’m tired of it. I’m too good for it,” she said simply, and for a moment stared moodily ahead.
Then, still frowning in a sombre and perturbed manner, she fumbled nervously in a wooden box upon the desk, took from it a cigarette and lighted it. She got up nervously and began to walk about the room with short steps holding the cigarette in the rather clumsy charming and unaccustomed manner of a woman who rarely smokes, and frowning intently when she puffed at it.
“I wonder if I’ll get some good shows to do next year,” she muttered, as if scarcely aware of his presence. “I wonder if there’ll be anything for me to do. No one’s spoken to me yet,” she said gloomily.
“Well if you’re so tired of it, I shouldn’t think you’d care,” he said ironically, and he added, “Why worry about it till the time comes?”
MORNING
• • •
THE WORLD THAT JACK BUILT
• • •
Jack had, in fact, listened to her complaint and her account of her troubles in the recent production, with the serious attention, and the keen interest and amusement that her stories of her labors, trials and adventures in the theatre always aroused in him. For, in addition to the immense pride and satisfaction that he took in his wife’s talent and success, he was like most rich men of his race, and particularly those who like himself were at that time living every day in a glamorous, unreal and fantastic world of speculation, strongly attracted by the glittering electric life of the theatre.
The progress of his life, indeed, for almost forty years when, as a boy, he had come to America from the little Rhineland town where his family lived, had been away from the quieter, more traditional, and as it now seemed to him, duller forms of social and domestic life, to those forms which were more brilliant and gay, filled with the constant excitement of new pleasures and sensations, and touched with a spice of uncertainty and menace. Thus, the life of his boyhood—the life of his family, who for a hundred years had carried on a private banking business in a little German town—now seemed to him impossibly dull and stodgy. Not only its domestic and social life, which went on as steadily and predictably as a clock from year to year, and which was marked at punctual intervals by a ritual of dutiful visits and counter-visits among dull and heavy-witted relatives, but its business life, also, with its small and cautious transactions, now seemed paltry and uninteresting.
His life, in fact, had for more than thirty years moved on from speed to speed and height to height—keeping time indeed, with all the most glittering and magnificent inclines of speed and height in the furious city that roared in constantly increasing crescendo about him. Now, even in the mad world in which he lived by day, and whose feverish air he breathed into his veins exultantly, there was a glittering, inflamed and feverish equality that was not unlike the night time world of the theatre in which the actors lived.
At nine o’clock in the morning of every working day, Jack was hurled southward to his employment in a great glittering projectile of machinery which was driven by a man who was himself as mad, inflamed, and unwholesome as any of the life around him. In fact, as the chauffeur prowled above his wheel, his dark and sallow face twisted bitterly by the thin and dry corruption of his mouth, his dark eyes glittering with the unnatural glitter of a man who is under the stimulation of a powerful drug, he seemed to be a creature which this new and furious city had created—whose dark and tallowy flesh seemed to have compacted, along with millions of other men who wore grey hats and had faces of the same lifeless and unutterable hue, out of a common city-substance—the stuff of pavement grey, as well as the stuff of buildings, towers, tunnels, bridges, streets. In his veins there seemed to pulse and flow, instead of blood, the feverish, unnatural, and electric energies to which the whole city moved, and which was legible in every act and gesture the man made, as his corrupt, toxic and sinister face prowled above the wheel, so that as his glittering eyes darted right and left as, with the coming of a maniac, the skill and precision of a sinister but faultless mechanism grazing, cut
ting, flanking, shifting, and insinuating, as he snaked and shot the great car through all but impossible channels and with a perilous and murderous recklessness, it was evident that the criminal and unwholesome chemistry that raced in him was consonant to a great energy that was pulsing everywhere about him in the city.
Yet, to be driven downtown by this sinister and toxic creature seemed to increase Jack’s sense of pleasure, power and anticipation: as he sat behind his driver and saw his eyes now sly and cunning as a cat’s, now hard and black as basalt, now glittering humidly with a drugged and feverish glitter, as his thin face now peered slyly and evilly right and left, now full of cunning and sly triumph as he snaked his car ahead around some cursing rival, now from the thin twisted corner of his convulsed, corrupt and obscene mouth snarling out his hate loudly at other drivers or at some careless pedestrian—“Guh-wan ya screwy bast-ed—guh-wan!”—more softly at the menacing figure of some hated policeman, or speaking to his master from the twisted corner of that bitter, sterile, and corrupted mouth a few constricted words of grudging praise for some policeman who would grant him privileges—“Some of dem are all right,” he said. “You know,” with a shining and a powerful and constricted accent of high strained voice. “Dey’re not all basteds. Dis guy”—with a jerk of his head toward the policeman who had nodded and let him pass, “Dis guy’s all right—I know him—Sure! Sure!—He’s a bruddeh of me sisteh-in-law!”
And all of this—the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, stealth, and victory—above all else, the sense of privilege, added to Jack’s pleasure and even gave him a heady tonic joy as he rode down to work. The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver, the man’s drugged eyes and evil face evoked in Jack’s mind, as well, a whole image of a phantasmal and theatrical world. Instead of seeing himself as one man among a million other men who were going to their work, in the homely, practical, immensely natural light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous and inhuman architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of the traffic, the web of the streets swarming with a million nameless people became a kind of tremendous, woven, chameleon backdrop for his own activities.
And just as that unreal and feverish world of gigantic speculation in which he lived by day and which had now come to have a theatrical cast and color was everywhere sustained by this great sense of privilege—the privilege of men, selected from the man-swarm of the earth because of some mysterious intuition or knowledge they were supposed to have, to live gloriously with labor or production in a world where their profits mounted incredibly with every ticking of the clock, or where their wealth was increased fabulously by a nod of the head, the lifting of a finger, so did it seem to Jack, not only entirely reasonable but even pleasant and desirable that the whole structure of society from top to bottom should be honeycombed with privilege and dishonesty.
He knew, for example, that this same driver, who was part Irish, part Italian, and whose name was Barney Dorgan, swindled and stole from him right and left, that every bill for fuel, oil, tires, repairs or overhauling was viciously padded, and that this same Dorgan was in collusion with the garage owner for this purpose, and received a handsome percentage from him as a reward. Yet this knowledge did not disturb or anger him. Instead, he actually got from it a feeling of pleasure and cynical amusement. The knowledge that his driver stole from him and that he could afford it, gave him somehow a sense of power and security. If he ever questioned his dishonesty at all, it was only to shrug his shoulders indifferently, and to smile cynically, as he thought: “Well, what of it? There’s nothing to be done about it. They all do it. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.”
Similarly, he knew that the Irish maids in his household were stealing all the time, and that at least three members of the police force, and one red-necked Irish foreman spent most of their hours of ease in his kitchen and in the maid’s sitting or bed rooms. He also knew all these guardians of the public peace and safety ate royally every night of the choicest dishes of his own table, and that their wants were cared for even before he, his family, and his guests were served, and that his best whiskey and his rarest wine was theirs for the asking.
But, beyond an occasional burst of temper and annoyance, when he discovered that a case of real Irish whiskey (with rusty sea-stain markings on the bottles to prove genuineness) had melted away almost overnight, a loss which roused his temper because of the rareness of the thing that was lost, he said very little. When his wife spoke to him about these thefts, as she occasionally did, in a tone of vague protest, saying: “Fritz, I’m sure those girls are stealing from us all the time. I think it’s perfectly dreadful don’t you? What do you think we ought to do about it?” His only answer was to shrug, smile cynically, and show his palms.
And although it had cost him more than seventy thousand dollars the year before to keep the five members of his family provided with shelter, clothing, service, food, and entertainment, the fact that a large part of this shocking amount had been uselessly squandered or actually stolen from him caused him no distress whatever. Rather, the extravagance, waste, and theft in his own household expense seemed to give authority and justification to that unbelievable madness which he was witnessing every day in the business world which was at that time mounting to its crest. Neither was the indifferent and tolerant acquiescence he gave to this shameful waste the fact of a man who feels his world is trembling on a volcanic crust that certain ruin and collapse is before him, and that he will make merry with all his might and spend riotously until the crash comes.
No. He gave consent to the theft, extravagance, and privilege which he saw everywhere about him not because he doubted but because he felt secure, convinced that this rotten fabric was woven from an iron thread, not because he felt that ruin was impending, but because he was so convinced that ruin would never come—that the tottering, corrupt, and fictitious edifice of speculation was hewn from an everlasting granite, and would not only endure, but would grow constantly greater.
It was an ironic fact that this man who now lived in a world in which every value was false and theatrical should see himself, not as a creature tranced by a fatal and illusionary hypnosis, but rather as one of the most practical, hardheaded, and knowing men alive. Just as he saw himself, not as a theatrical and feverishly stimulated gambler, obsessed and fascinated by his belief in the monstrous fictions of speculation, but rather as the brilliant and assured executive of great affairs, who at every moment of the day had his “finger on the pulse” of the nation, so when he looked about him and saw everywhere in the world from top to toe, nothing but the million shapes of privilege, dishonesty and self-interest, he was convinced that this was inevitably “the way things are.”
Moreover, he was so far from understanding that his own vision was distorted, false, and theatrically easy that he flattered himself on his “hardness,” fortitude, and intelligence for being able to swallow this black picture of the earth with such an easy and tolerant cynicism. The real substance of this “hardness,” fortitude, and intelligence was to be painfully demonstrated in another year or two when, the gaudy bubble of his world having been exploded overnight before his eyes, this plump, ruddy, and assured man would shrink and wither visibly in three days’ time into a withered and palsied senility. But now nothing could exceed his satisfaction and assurance. He looked about him in the world, and, like an actor, found that all was false and evil, and this brilliant discovery only enhanced the joy and pleasure which he took in life.
In fact, at this time, the choicest stories which Jack and his associates told each other, all had to do with some facet of human chicanery, treachery, or dishonesty. They delighted in matching stories concerning the delightful knaveries of their chauffeurs, maids, cooks, and bootleggers, describing the way in which these people had cheated them as one would describe the antics of a household pet, and they found that these stories usually had a great success at the di
nner table, and were characterized by the ladies as: “I—think—that—is—simply—price-less!” (Spoken slowly and deliberately as if the enormity of the tale has simply stunned and duped the listener into a state of stupefaction), or, “Isn’t it in-credi-i-bul!” (Spoken with a faint rising scream of laughter), or, “Stop! You know he didn’t,” delivered with a lady-like shriek—all the fashionable and stereotyped phrases of people who are listening to an “amusing” story, and whose lives have become so sterile and savorless that laughter has gone dead in them.
One of the stories which Jack told with considerable success, was this: A year or two before (when he was still living in the brown-stone house on Seventy-Fourth Street which he had occupied for more than twenty years), his wife was giving one of the jolly open-house parties which she gave every year to the members of a “group” theatre for which she worked. At the height of the gaiety when the party was in full swing and the actors were swarming through the rooms, gorging themselves to their heart’s content on the food and drink with which the tables were groaning, there was a great screaming of police sirens on Riverside Drive, which was only a few yards away, and the sound of motors driven to their limit, and approaching at top speed. Suddenly the entourage turned into the street, and to the alarm and stupefaction of Jack and his guests who now came crowding to the windows, a high powered motor truck flanked by two motor cycle policemen pulled up before the house, and stopped. Immediately, two burly policemen, whom Jack instantly recognized as friends of his Irish maids, sprang to the ground from the body of the truck and, in a moment more, with the assistance of their fellows, they had lifted a great barrel from the truck and were solemnly rolling it across the sidewalk and up the stone steps into the house. This enormous barrel, it turned out, was filled with beer which the police were contributing to the party to which they had also been invited (for when Jack’s wife, Esther, gave a party to the actors and actresses, the maids and cook were also allowed to give a party to the policemen and firemen in the kitchen).