The Web and the Rock - Thomas Wolfe

by Thomas Wolfe

  Jim's feeling for news, although keen and brilliantly colorful, was, like his whole vision of life, more or less determined by the philosophy of the playing field. In spite of his experience in the World War, he was still fascinated by war, which he regarded as the embodiment of personal gallantry. A war to him was a kind of gigantic sporting contest, an international football game, which gave the star performers on both sides an opportunity to break loose around the flanks on a touchdown dash. Like a Richard Harding Davis character, he not only wanted to see a war and report a war, he wanted also to play a part in war, a central and heroic part. In his highly personal and subjective view of the news, Jim saw each event as somehow shaped for the projection of his own personality.

  It was the same way with athletic contests, in which his interest was naturally keen. This was strikingly and amusingly evident at the time of the fight between Dempsey and Firpo for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  The fighters were in training. The air was humming with excited speculation. The champion, Dempsey, destined later, after his defeat by Tunney, to become, according to the curious psychology of the American character, immensely popular, was at this time almost bit terly hated. For one thing, he was the champion, and the job of being champion in any walk of American life is a perilous and bitter one.

  Again, he enjoyed the unenviable reputation of being almost invincible. This, too, aroused hatred against him. People wanted to see him beaten. Finally, he was viciously assailed upon all sides on account of his war record. He was accused of being a slacker, of having stayed at home and worked in the shipyard while his contemporaries were risk ing their lives on the fields of France. And of course one heard on every hand the familiar American charge that he was "yellow." This was untrue.

  Firpo, on the other hand, appealed to the popular imagination, although he had little to recommend him as a fighter except enormous physical strength and a clumsy but tremendous punch. This was enough. In fact, his very deficiencies seemed to increase the excitement over the uneven match. Firpo became, in the popular mind, "The Wild Bull of the Pampas," and it was believed he would rush in, bull like, with head lowered, and try to annihilate his opponent with a punch of his powerful right hand.

  The two men were now in training for the fight, and every day it was part of Jim's job to go out to Firpo's training camp and observe his progress. The South American took a great liking to Jim, who could speak understandable Spanish, and Jim became intensely interested in the man and in his prospects for the fight. Perhaps something helpless, dumb, and inarticulate in the big, sullen brute awakened Jim's quick sympathies. Every night, now, Jim would come in, swear ing and fuming about the day's happenings at the training camp.

  "Oh that poah, dumb son-of-a-bitch," he would softly swear. "He don't know any more about getting into condition than the fat woman at Barnum and Bailey's Circus. And no one around him knows any thing. Christ!--they've got him out there skipping the rope!" He laughed softly and swore again. "You'd think they were training him to be Queen of the May. Why the hell should he skip the rope to get ready for Dempsey? He's not goin' to get out of Dempsey's way.

  Dempsey will nail him with that right before the fight has gone five seconds. This bird don't know anything about boxing. They're trying to teach him how to weave and bob when his only chance is to get in there and slug for all he's worth.... And condition? All I know is about conditioning a football team, but if I couldn't take him and get him in better shape in the next three weeks than he's ever been in before, you can kick me all the way from here to the Polo Grounds."

  Laughing softly, he shook his head. "God almighty, it's a crime to see it! Why, dammit, they let him eat anything he likes! Any football coach that saw a halfback eat like that would drop dead. I've seen him begin with soup, go right through two big porterhouse steaks, with smothered onions and French fried potatoes, and top that off with a whole apple pie, a quart of ice cream, and foah cups of coffee! After that they expect him to go out and skip rope for a few minutes to get that belly down!"

  "But why doesn't he get a good trainer, Jim?" someone asked.

  "Why?" said Jim. "I'll tell you why. It's because he's too damn tight, that's why. Why that cheap-----!" he laughed, shaking his head again, "--he's so tight that he's got the first nickel he ever earned when he came to this country. Dempsey may knock him the whole way from here to Argentina, but he's going to take every penny he ever made when he goes."

  These daily accounts were thrilling news for the others. They be came passionately excited over the career and progress of the bull-like Argentinian, and as the time for the great battle drew near they all devised and entered into a fascinating speculation for their enrichment.

  Under Jim's leadership, they all bought tickets for the fight. It was their plan to hold these until the very eve of battle, and then to sell them to fight enthusiasts for a fabulous profit. They hoped to get as much as fifty dollars for tickets which had cost only five or ten.

  This hope might have been realized if, at the last moment, they had not committed one of their characteristic follies. None of them, of course, would admit to the others that he would like to see the fight himself. Any suggestion of this was greeted by hoots of scorn. Jim, in fact, almost exploded with outraged contempt when one of them hinted that he might prefer to use his ticket instead of selling it for fifty dollars.

  And yet, they held on to the tickets until it was too late--until, at any rate, they would have had to try to sell them at the Polo Grounds to possible last-minute purchasers. They might have been able to do this, but really what they had wanted all along, the secret hope that each of them had cherished in his heart and that none of them would admit, was that they could see that fight themselves. And that is what they did. And in the light of retrospect Monk was glad they did it.

  That night made history in their lives, in a curious, poignant, and indefinable way, as only a popular song or a prize fight can do in America, evoking a time with blazing vividness, a host of memories that otherwise would later be only obscure, blurred fragments of a half-forgotten past.

  An hour before the fight was scheduled to begin, and even after the preliminary contests had begun, they were all together in the living room of their apartment, debating with one another violently. Each accused the others of having failed to go through with the plan. Each denied vehemently that he had had any intention of weakening. Above the whole excited babble, Jim's voice could be heard passionately asserting that he was still out to sell his ticket, that he was going to the Polo Grounds for purposes of speculation only, that the rest of them could back down if they wished but that he would sell his ticket if it was the last thing he ever did on earth.

  The upshot of it was that the more he argued and asserted, the less they believed him; and the more he shouted, the less he convinced himself. They all squabbled, argued, challenged, and denied until the final moment, which they knew somehow was coming. And then it came. Jim paused suddenly in his hot debate with himself, looked at his watch, ripped out an alarmed oath, and then, looking at them, laughed his soft and husky laugh, saying: "Come on, boys. Who's going to this fight with me?"

  It was perfect. And it was the kind of folly and unreason that was characteristic of them all: the great plans and projects and the protestations they were forever making, and their ultimate surrender to impulse and emotion when the moment came. And it was exactly like Jim Randolph, too. It was the kind of thing he did, the kind of thing that he had always done, the irrational impulse that wrecked his best laid plans.

  Now that the time had come, now that they had all surrendered, now that all of them had openly admitted at last what they were going to do, they went jubilantly and exultantly. And they saw the fight.

  They did not sit together. Their tickets were in different sections of the field. Monk's was over behind third base and well back in the upper tier. That square of roped-in canvas out there in the center of the field looked very far away, and that surroun
ding mass of faces was enormous, overwhelming. Yet his vision of the whole scene remained ever afterwards startlingly immediate and vivid.

  He saw the little eddies in the crowd as the fighters and their handlers came towards the ring, then heard the great roar that rose and mounted as they climbed through the ropes. There was some thing terrific in the sight of young Dempsey. Over all the roar and tumult of that mighty crowd Monk could feel the currents of his savagery and nervous tension. Dempsey could not sit still. He jumped up from his stool, pranced up and down, seized the ropes and stretched and squatted several times, as skittish and as nervous as a race horse.

  Then the men were called into the center of the ring to receive their last instructions. Firpo came out stolidly, his robe stretched across his massive shoulders, his great coarse shock of hair shining blackly as he stood and glowered. He had been well named. He was really like a sullen human bull. Dempsey could not be still. As he got his last instructions, he fidgeted nervously and kept his head down, a little to one side, not meeting Firpo's sullen and stolid look.

  They received their instructions and turned and went back to their corners. Their robes were taken off. Dempsey flexed and squatted swiftly at the ropes, the bell clanged, and the men came out.

  That was no fight, no scheduled contest for a title. It was a burning point in time, a kind of concentration of our total energies, of the blind velocity of the period, cruel, ruthless, savage, swift, bewildering as America. The fight, thus seen, resumed and focalized a period in the nation's life. It lasted six minutes. It was over almost before it had begun. In fact, the spectators had no sense of its beginning. It exploded there before them.

  From that instant on, the battle raged and shifted with such savage speed, with such sudden and astounding changes of fortune, that later people were left stunned and bewildered, no one knowing clearly what had happened. No two could agree. The crowd milled and mobbed, the hundred thousand voices raised in argument. No one was certain just how many knockdowns there had been, how often Firpo had been driven to the floor by the thudding power of Dempsey's fists, or how long Dempsey had been out of the ring when Firpo drove him through the ropes. Some said there had been seven knockdowns, some said nine, some said four. Some asserted bitterly that Dempsey had been knocked out of the ring for more than fifteen seconds, that the count was late in taking up, that Firpo had been robbed of a just victory.

  Others asserted that Dempsey had fought with a vicious disregard for the rules, that the referee had allowed him to take ruthless and illegal openings.

  Certainly it was no crafty exhibition of ring skill or strategy. It was a fight between two wild animals, each bent on the annihilation of the other, by any means, by any method, in the shortest time. What finally remained most vivid, in that kaleidoscopic whirl of violent images, was the memory of Dempsey's black and bobbing head, his teeth bared in a grin of passion, the incredible speed and power of his sledge hammer fists, and the sound of blows that moved so swiftly that the eye could not perceive them. He was like a human riveting machine.

  Over the terrific roar and tumult of the crowd one could hear the steady thud, thud, thud, the sickening impact of blows delivered with the velocity of a bullet. Again and again, the great brute went down before those whizzing gloves as if he had been shot. He had been shot, too. He looked and acted just like a man who has received a bullet in the brain. For a moment, for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, he would stand erect. And then he would not fall, he would just collapse, as if his massive legs had been broken. He just looked stunned, bewildered, sullenly infuriated, like a baffled bull.

  But suddenly, like a baffled and infuriated bull, he charged. He caught Dempsey solidly with a terrible right-hand blow that knocked him clear across the ring, and then he charged upon him and fairly flailed him through the ropes and out of the arena. And now, while the crowd insanely roared, Firpo was like a triumphant bull that has driven his antagonist into oblivion and has the whole arena to himself.

  Dempsey went hurtling through the ropes like a battered doll. The newspaper men thrust up their arms to protect themselves. The fighter came crashing down into a nest of typewriters, and, at the same moment, muttered thickly, with the instinct of a fighting animal, "Get me back in there!"

  They pushed him up and back, in through the ropes. He reeled in glassy-eyed, tottering like a drunken man. He fell into a clinch and hung on desperately; his brain cleared, the fight was on again--and again the riveting thud, thud, thud of those relentless hands. The bull halted, stunned, and collapsed again like broken straw.

  It was all over in the first round, really, a round that lasted for three minutes, but that had attained such a focal concentration of intensity that men asserted later that it seemed to last for hours. In the second round it was ended definitely. The killer had learned caution now. He came out craftily this time, with his black jaw tucked in below his shoulder. It was all over then. The great bull had no weapons for methods such as these. He lowered his head and charged. The riveter shot him down.

  That night the city was a boiling of excitement. It was like a war, like the announcement of a general mobilization order. After the fight, Jim Randolph, Monty Bellamy, Harvey Williams, Perce Smead, and Monk got together again at one of the exits to the grounds and went downtown. By the time they reached midtown New York the news was there. Broadway and the triangulated space before the Times Building was a seething horde of wildly excited, milling, fiercely argumentative people. Monk had never seen anything like it before. It was passionately and desperately exciting, but it was also sinister.

  The crowd was composed, for the most part, of men of the Broad way type and stamp, men with vulpine faces, feverish dark eyes, features molded by cruelty and cunning, corrupted, criminal visages of night, derived out of the special geography, the unique texture, the feverish and unwholesome chemistries of the city's nocturnal life of vice and crime. Their unclean passion was appalling. They snarled and cursed and raged at one another like a pack of mongrel curs. There were raucous and unclean voices, snarls of accusation and suspicion, with hatred and infuriating loathing, with phrases of insane obscenity and filth.

  Monk could not understand it. He was so new to the city, and the image of those livid faces, those convulsed and snarling mouths, those feverish eyes shining there in the glare of night, evoked a sense of some sinister and yet completely meaningless passion. He listened to their words. He heard their epithets of hatred and of filth. He tried to find the meaning of it, and there was no meaning. Some hated Firpo, some hated Dempsey, some hated the fight and the result. Some charged that the fight had been "fixed," others that it should never have been held. Some asserted that Firpo had been doped, others that he had been bribed; still others, that he was "nothing but a tramp," that Dempsey was "a yellow bum," that a former champion could have beaten both of them at the same time.

  But what was behind their snarling hatred? Unable to explain it any other way, Monk at last concluded that what they really hated was not so much the fight, the fighters, and the fight's result: it was themselves, one another, every living thing on earth. They hated for the sake of hate. They jeered, reviled, cursed one another because of the black poison in their souls. They could believe in nothing, and neither could they believe in themselves for not believing. They were a race that had been drugged by evil, a tribe that got its only nourish ment from envenomed fruit. It was so blind, so willful, and so evil, so horrible and so meaningless, that suddenly it seemed to Monk that a great snake lay coiled at the very heart and center of the city's life, that a malevolent and destructive energy was terribly alive and working there, and that he and the others who had come here from the little towns and from the country places, with such high passion and with so much hope, were confronted now with something evil and unknown at the heart of life, which they had not expected, and for which all of them were unprepared.

  Monk was to see it, feel it, know it later on in almost every facet of the city's life, t
his huge and baffling malady of man's brain, his spirit, and his energy. But now he witnessed it for the first time. He could see no reason for this idiot and blind malevolence. Yet it was there, it was everywhere, in the hateful passion of those twisted faces and the un wholesome radiance of those fevered eyes.

  And now Monk heard Jim speaking. They had moved about from group to group and listened to these hate-loving men, and now Jim Randolph began to speak, quietly, in his rather soft and husky tones, good-naturedly and yet commandingly, telling them they were mis taken, that the fighters were not drugged, that the fight had not been fixed, that the result had been inevitable and just. And then Monk heard one of those mongrel voices snarl back at him in hatred and derision, a twisted and corrupted mouth spat out at him a filthy epithet.

  Then, quicker than the eye could wink, the thing had happened. Jim seized the creature with one hand, draping his garments together in his powerful fingers, lifting him clear off his feet into the air, and shaking him like a rat.

  "Listen, mister!" his husky voice was now charged with a murderous intensity of passion that struck silence through the whole raucous and disputing crowd and turned the creature's face a dirty grey, "No man alive is going to say that to reel Another word from you and I'll break your dirty neck!" And he shook him once again till the creature's head snapped like a broken doll's. And then Jim dropped him like a soiled rag, and, turning to his companions, said quietly: "Come on, boys.

  We'll get out of here." And the creatures of the night held back before him as he passed.

  Poor Jim! He, too, was like a creature from another world. With all his folly and his sentiment, with all his faults and childish vanities, he was still the heroic remnant of a generation that had already gone, and that perhaps we needed. But he was lost.

  George Webber had grown into a youth somewhat above the middle height, around five feet nine or ten, but he gave the impression of being shorter than that because of the way he had been shaped and molded, and the way in which he carried himself. He walked with a slight stoop, and his head, which was carried somewhat forward with a thrusting movement, was set down solidly upon a short neck, between shoulders which, in comparison with the lower part of his figure, his thighs and legs, were extremely large and heavy. He was barrel chested, and perhaps the most extraordinary feature of his make-up- which accounted for the nickname he had had since childhood--were the arms and hands: the arms were unusually long, and the hands, as well as the feet, were very big, with long, spatulate fingers which curved naturally and deeply in like paws. The effect of this inordinate length of arms and hands, which dangled almost to the knees, together with the stooped and heavy shoulders and the out-thrust head, was to give his whole figure a somewhat prowling and half-crouching posture.