by Thomas Wolfe
"Well! What happened to you, darling? I thought that You would never get here."
He liked all the things that men are fond of. All of them he had enjoyed himself, each in its proper time and place, and he expected everyone to act as well as he. But ripeness with Mr. Jack was everything, and he always knew the time to stop. His ancient and Hebraic spirit was tempered with a classic sense of moderation. He prized the virtue of decorum highly. He knew the value of the middle way.
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, nor spend his strength 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. He would go with a friend up to the very edge of ruin and defeat, and he would even try to hold him back. 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 drowns 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 Tack was kind and temperate. He had found life pleasant, and had 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 on what was going on around him. But if he wanted to live in this world without getting hit over the head, and without all the useless pain, grief, terror, and bitterness that mortify human flesh, he had also better learn how not to use his eyes and ears. This may sound difficult, but it had not been so for Mr. Jack. Perhaps some great inheritance of suffering, the long, dark ordeal of his race, had left him, as a 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 raw against a wall. He would not madden furiously in the envenomed passages of night, nor would he ever be carried smashed and bloody from the stews. A woman's ways 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 schitzel could, or that young Gentile fool, drunk again, probably, ringing the telephone at one a.m. to ask to speak to Esther.
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--well, they were women, and there was no help for that. Mr. Jack had also known something of the pain and folly that twist the 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----
"One!"
Red of face, he bent stiffly, with a grunt, until his fingers grazed the rich cream tiling of the bathroom floor.
--intolerable!----
"Two!"
He straightened sharply, his hands at his sides.
--that a man with serious work to do----
"Three!"
His arms shot up to full stretching height above his head, and came swiftly down again until he held clenched fists against his breast.
--should be pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night by a crazy young fool!----
"Four!"
His closed fists shot outwards in a strong driving movement, and came back to his sides again.
--It was intolerable, and, by God, be had half a mind to tell her so!
His exercises ended, Mr. Jack stepped carefully into the luxurious sunken tub and settled his body slowly in its crystal-blue depths. A sigh, long, lingering, full of pleasure, expired upon his lips.
* * *
11. Mrs. Jack Awake
Mrs. Jack awoke at eight oclock. 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 and stared straight up at the ceiling.
Then with a vigorous and jubilant movement she flung the covers off of 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 covers, and straightened out flat again. She surveyed her small feet with a look of wonder and delight. The sight of her toes in perfect and solid alignment and of their healthy, shining nails filled her with pleasure.
With the same expression of childlike wonder and vanity she slowly lifted her left arm and began to revolve the hand deliberately before her fascinated eyes. She observed with tender concentration how the small and delicate wrist obeyed each command of her will, and she gazed raptly at the graceful, winglike movement of the hand and at the beauty and firm competence that were legible in its brown, narrow back and in the shapely fingers.. Then she lifted the other arm as well, and turned both hands upon their wrists, still gazing at them with a tender concentration of delight.
"What magic!" she thought. "What magic and strength are in them! God, how beautiful they are, and what things they can do! The design for everything I undertake comes out of me in the most wonderful and exciting way. 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 forehead with an almost animal-like expression of bewildered 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. Then it flows out into my arms until it reaches down into my finger-tips--and then the hand just does 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 to the fork, a dash of pepper when I cook for George," she thought, "and there's a dish the finest chef on earth could never equal--because it's got me in it, heart and soul and all my love," she thought with triumphant 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 me back to the time I was a child."
Now, having surveyed her deft and beautiful hands, she began deliberately to inspect her other members. Craning her head downwards, she examined the full outlines of her breasts, and the smooth contours of her stomach, thighs, and legs. She stretched forth her hands and touched them with approval. Then she put her hands down at her sides again and 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 calm and beautiful, as she thought:
"These are my hands and these are my fingers, these are my legs and hips, these are my fine feet and my perfect toes--this is my body."
And suddenly, as if the inventory of these possessions filled her with an immense joy and satisfaction, she sat up with a shining face and placed her feet firmly on the floor. She wriggled into a pair of slippers, stood up, thrust her arms out and brought the hands down again behind her head, yawned, and then put on a yellow quilted dressing-gown which had been lying across the foot of the bed.
Esther had a rosy, jolly, delicate face of noble beauty. It was small, firm, and almost heart-shaped, and in its mobile features there was a strange union of child and woman. The instant anyone met her for the first time he felt: "This woman must look exactly the way she did when
she was a child. She can't have changed at all." Yet her face also bore the markings of middle age. It was when she was talking to someone and her whole countenance 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 concentration of a mature and expert craftsman engaged in an absorbing and exacting labour, and it was at such time that she looked oldest. It was then that one noticed the somewhat fatigued and minutely wrinkled spaces round her eyes and some strands of grey that were beginning to sprinkle her dark-brown hair.
Similarly, in repose, or when she was alone, her face was likely to have a sombre, brooding depth. Its beauty then was profound and full of mystery. She was three parts a Jewess, and in her contemplative moods the ancient, dark, and sorrowful quality of her race seemed to take complete possession of her. She would wrinkle her brow with a look of perpelexity and grief, and in the cast of her features there would be a fatal quality, as of something priceless that was lost and irrecoverable. This look, which she did not wear often, had always troubled George Webber when he saw it because it suggested some secret knowledge buried deep within the woman whom he loved and whom he believed he had come to know.
But the way she appeared most often, and the way people remembered her best, was as a glowing, jolly, indomitably active and eager little creature in whose delicate face the image of the child peered out with joyfulness and immortal confidence. Then her apple-cheeks would glow with health and freshness, and when she came into a room she filled it with her loveliness and gave to everything about her the colour of morning life and innocence.
So, too, when she went out on the streets, among the thrusting throngs of desolate and sterile people, her face shone forth like a deathless flower among their dead, grey flesh and dark, dead eyes. They milled past her with their indistinguishable faces set in familiar expressions of inept hardness, betraying cunning without an end, guile without a purpose, cynical knowledge without faith or wisdom, yet even among these hordes of the unburied dead some would halt suddenly in the dreary fury of their existence and would stare at her with their harassed and driven eyes. Her whole figure with its fertile curves, opulent as the earth, belonged to an order of humanity so different from that of their own starved barrenness that they gazed after her like wretches trapped and damned in hell who, for one brief moment, had been granted a vision of living and imperishable beauty.
As Mrs. Jack stood there beside her bed, her maidservant, Nora Fogarty, knocked at the door and entered immediately, bearing a tray with a tall silver coffee-pot, a small bowl of sugar, a cup, saucer, and spoon, and the morning Times. The maid put the tray down on a little table beside the bed, saying in a thick voice:
"Good maar-nin', Mrs. Jack."
"Oh, hello, Nora!" the woman answered, crying out in the eager and surprised tone with which she usually responded to a greeting. "How are you--hah!" she asked, as if she were really greatly 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!" Nora answered. "Beautiful!"
The maid's voice had a respectful and almost unctuously reverential tone of agreement as she answered, but there was in it an undernote of something sly, furtive, and sullen, and Mrs. Jack looked at her swiftly now and saw the maid's eyes, inflamed with drink and irrationally choleric, staring back at her. Their rancour, however, seemed to be directed not so much at her mistress as at the general family of the earth. Or, if Nora's eyes did swelter with a glare of spite more personal and direct, her resentment was blind and instinctive: 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 thought she knew on which side condescension lay.
She had served Mrs. Jack and her family for more than twenty years, and had grown slothful on their beauty, but in spite of a very affectionate devotion and warmth of old Irish feeling she had never doubted for a moment that they would ultimately go to hell, together with other pagans and all alien heathen tribes whatever. Just the same, she had done pretty well by herself among these prosperous infidels. She had a "cushy" job, she always fell heir to the scarcely-worn garments of Mrs. Jack and her sister Edith, and she saw to it that the policeman who came to woo her several times a week should lack for nothing in the way of food and drink to keep him contented and to forestall any desire he might have to stray off and forage in other pastures. Meanwhile, she had laid by several thousand dollars, and had kept her sisters and nieces back in County Cork faithfully furnished with a titillating 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 high life in this rich New World that had such pickings in it.
No--decidedly this truculent resentment which smouldered in her eyes had nothing to do with caste. She had lived here for twenty years, enjoying the generous favour of a very good, superior sort of heathen, and growing used to almost all their sinful customs, but she had never let herself forget where the true way and the true light was, nor her hope that she would one day return into the more civilised and Christian precincts of her own kind.
Neither did the grievance in the maid's hot eyes come from a sense of poverty, the stubborn, silent anger of the poor against the rich, the feeling of injustice that decent people like herself should have to fetch and carry all their lives for idle, lazy wasters. She was not feeling sorry for herself because she had to drudge with roughened fingers all day long in order that this fine lady might smile rosily and keep beautiful. Nora 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 her.
She knew, too, 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, 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 wrought out into substance, now sitting cross-legged among great bolts of cloth and plying a needle with a defter finger than any on the flashing hands of the pallid tailors all about her, now searching and prying indefatigably through a dozen gloomy little junk shops until she unearthed triumphantly the exact small ornament which she must have. She was always after her people, always pressing on, formidably but with good humour, keeping the affair in hand and pushing it to its conclusion in spite of the laziness, carelessness, vanity, stupidity, indifference, and faithlessness of those with whom she had to work--painters, actors, scene-shifters, bankers, union bosses, electricians, tailors, costumers, producers, and directors. Upon this whole motley and, for the most part, shabbily inept crew which carried on the crazy and precarious affair known as "show business", she enforced the structure, design, and incomparably rich colour of her own life. Nora knew about all this.
The maid had also seen enough of the hard world in which her mistress daily strove and conquered to convince herself that even if she had had any of the immense talent and knowledge that her mistress possessed, 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 awareness, so far from arousing any feeling of inferiority in her, only contributed to her self-satisfaction, making her feel that it was Mrs. Jack, not herself, who was really the working woman, and that she--enjoying the same food, the same drink, the same shelter, even the same clothing--would not swap places with her for anything 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 eyes. And she could not have found a word or reason for
it. But as the two women faced each other no word was needed. The reason for it was printed in their flesh, legible in everything they did. It was not against Mrs. Jack'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 within the past year there had come over the maid a distempered sense of failure and frustration, an obscure but powerful feeling that her life had somehow gone awry and was growing into sterile and fruitless age without ever having come to any ripeness. She was baffled and tormented by a sense of having missed something splendid and magnificent in life, without knowing at all what it was. But whatever it was, her mistress seemed marvellously 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 her 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's garments without alteration. But if they had been creatures from separate planetary systems, if each had been formed by a completely different protoplasm, the contrast between them could not have been more extreme.
Nora was not an ill-favoured woman. She had a mass of fairly abundant black hair which she brushed over to the side. Her face, had it not been for the distempered look which drink and her own baffled fury had now given it, would have been pleasant and attractive. There was warmth in it, but there was also a trace of that wild fierceness which belongs to something lawless in nature, at once coarse and delicate, murderous, tender, and savagely ebullient. 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, she was recognised as a kind of unofficial captain to the other maids and was usually not required to wear maid's uniform). But where the figure of the mistress was small of bone and fine of line and yet at the same time lavish and seductive, the figure of the maid was, by contrast, almost thick and clumsy-looking. It was the figure of a woman no longer young, fresh, and fertile, but already heavied, thickened, dried, and hardened by the shock, the wear, the weight, and the slow accumulation of intolerable days and merciless years, which take from people everything, and from which there is no escape.