OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Well, what do you call a great play, then, if The Cherry Orchard isn't one?" one of the young men said acidly. "Who wrote the great plays that you talk about?"

  "Why, George M. Cohan wrote some," whined Seth instantly. "That's who. Avery Hopwood wrote some great plays. We've had plenty of guys in this country who wrote great plays. If they'd come from Russia you'd get down and worship 'em," he said bitterly; "but just because they came out of this country they're no good!"

  In the relation of the class towards old Seth Flint, it was possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life everywhere around them. For here was a man--whatever his defects as a playwright might have been--who had lived incomparably the richest, most varied and dangerous, and eventful life among them; as he was himself far more interesting than any of the plays they wrote, and as dramatists they should have recognized and understood his quality. But they saw none of this. For their relation towards life and people such as old Seth Flint was not one of understanding. It was not even one of burning indignation--of that indignation which is one of the dynamic forces in the artist's life. It was rather one of supercilious scorn and ridicule.

  They felt that they were "above" old Seth, and most of the other people in the world, and for this reason they were in Professor Hatcher's class. Of Seth they said:

  "He's really a misfit, terribly out of place here. I wonder why he came."

  And they would listen to an account of one of Seth's latest errors in good taste with the expression of astounded disbelief, the tones of stunned incredulity which were coming into fashion about that time among elegant young men.

  "Not really! . . . But he never really said that. . . . You can't mean it."

  "Oh, but I assure you, he did!"

  ". . . It's simply past belief! . . . I can't believe he's as bad as that."

  "Oh, but he is! It's incredible, I know, but you've no idea what he's capable of." And so on.

  And yet old Seth Flint was badly needed in that class: his bitter and unvarnished tongue caused Professor Hatcher many painful moments, but it had its use--oh, it had its use, particularly when the play was of this nature:

  Irene (slowly, with scorn and contempt in her voice). So--it has come to this! This is all your love amounts to--a little petty selfish thing! I had thought you were bigger than that, John.

  John (desperately). But--but, my God, Irene--what am I to think? I found you in bed with him--my best friend! (with difficulty). You know--that looks suspicious, to say the least!

  Irene (softly--with amused contempt in her voice). You poor little man! And to think I thought your love was so big.

  John (wildly). But I do love you, Irene. That's just the point.

  Irene (with passionate scorn). Love! You don't know what love means! Love is bigger than that! Love is big enough for all things, all people. (She extends her arms in an all-embracing gesture.) My love takes in the world--it embraces all mankind! It is glamorous, wild, free as the wind, John.

  John (slowly). Then you have had other lovers?

  Irene: Lovers come, lovers go. (She makes an impatient gesture.) What is that? Nothing! Only love endures--my love, which is greater than all.

  Eugene would writhe in his seat, and clench his hands convulsively. Then he would turn almost prayerfully to the bitter, mummied face of old Seth Flint for that barbed but cleansing vulgarity that always followed such a scene:

  "Well?" Professor Hatcher would say, putting down the manuscript he had been reading, taking off his eye-glasses (which were attached to a ribbon of black silk) and looking around with a quizzical smile, an impassive expression on his fine, distinguished face. "Well?" he would say again urbanely, as no one answered. "Is there any comment?"

  "What is she?" Seth would break the nervous silence with his rasping snarl. "Another of these society whores? You know," he continued, "you can find plenty of her kind for three dollars a throw without any of that fancy palaver."

  Some of the class smiled faintly, painfully, and glanced at each other with slight shrugs of horror; others were grateful, felt pleasure well in them and said underneath their breath exultantly:

  "Good old Seth! Good old Seth!"

  "Her love is big enough for all things, is it?" said Seth. "I know a truck driver out in Denver I'll match against her any day."

  Eugene and Ed Horton, a large and robust aspirant from the Iowa cornlands, roared with happy laughter, poking each other sharply in the ribs.

  "Do you think the play will act?" someone said. "It seems to me that it comes pretty close to closet drama."

  "If you ask me," said Seth, "it comes pretty close to water-closet drama. . . . No," he said sourly. "What that boy needs is a little experience. He ought to go out and get him a woman and get all this stuff off his mind. After that, he might sit down and write a play."

  For a moment there was a very awkward silence, and Professor Hatcher smiled a trifle palely. Then, taking his eye-glasses with a distinguished movement, he looked around and said:

  "Is there any other comment?"

  XVII

  Often during these years of fury, hunger, and unrest, when he was trying to read all the books and know all the people, he would live for days, and even for weeks, in a world of such mad and savage concentration, such terrific energy, that time would pass by him incredibly, while he tried to eat and drink the earth, stare his way through walls of solid masonry into the secret lives of men, until he had made the substance of all life his own.

  And during all this time, although he was living a life of the most savage conflict, the most blazing energy, wrestling day by day with the herculean forces of the million-footed city, listening to a million words and peering into a hundred thousand faces, he would nevertheless spend a life of such utter loneliness that he would go for days at a time without seeing a face or hearing a voice that he knew, and until the sound of his own voice seemed strange and phantasmal to him.

  Then suddenly he would seem to awake out of this terrific vision, which had been so savage, mad, and literal that its very reality had a fabulous and dreamlike quality, and time, strange million-visaged time, had been telescoped incredibly, so that weeks had passed by like a single day. He would awake out of this living dream and see the minutes, hours, and days, and all the acts and faces of the earth pass by him in their usual way. And instantly, when this happened, he would feel a bitter and intolerable loneliness--a loneliness so acrid, grey, and bitter that he could taste its sharp thin crust around the edges of his mouth like the taste and odour of weary burnt-out steel, like a depleted storage battery or a light that had gone dim, and he could feel it greyly and intolerably in his entrails, the conduits of his blood, and in all the substance of his body.

  When this happened, he would feel an almost unbearable need to hear the voice and see the face again of someone he had known and at such a time as this he would go to see his Uncle Bascom, that strange and extraordinary man who, born like the others in the wilderness, the hills of home, had left these hills for ever.

  Bascom now lived alone with his wife (for his four children were grown up and would have none of him) in a dingy section of one of the innumerable suburbs that form part of the terrific ganglia of Boston, and it was here that the boy would often go on Sundays.

  After a long confusing journey that was made by subway, elevated, and street car, he would leave the chill and dismal street car at the foot of a hill on a long, wide, and frozen street lined with tall rows of wintry elms, with smoky wintry houses that had a look of solid, closed and mellow warmth, and with a savage frozen waste of tidal waters on the right--those New England waters that are so sparkling, fresh and glorious, like a tide of sapphires, in the springtime, and so grim and savage in their frozen desolation in the winter.

  Then the street car would bang its draughty sliding doors together, grind harshly off with its cargo of people with pinched lips, thin red pointed noses, and cod-fish faces, and vanish, leaving him with the kind of loneliness and ab
sence which a street car always leaves when it has gone, and he would turn away from the tracks along a dismal road or street that led into the district where his uncle had his house. And stolidly he would plunge forward against the grey and frozen desolation of that place to meet him.

  And at length he would pause before his uncle's little house, and as he struck the knocker, he was always glad to hear the approaching patter of his Aunt Louise's feet, and cheered by the brightening glance of her small birdy features, as she opened the door for him, inwardly exultant to hear her confirm in her bright ladylike tones his own prediction of what she would say: "Oh, theah you ah! I was wondering what was keeping you."

  A moment later he would be greeted from the cellar or the kitchen by his uncle Bascom's high, husky and yet strangely remote yell, the voice of a prophet calling from a mountain:

  "Hello, Eugene, my boy. Is that you?" And a moment later the old man would appear, coming up to meet him from some lower cellar-depth, swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward him howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed and faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching his great hands together at his waist; then hold one gaunt hand out to him and howl:

  "Hello, hello, hello, sit down, sit down, sit down," after which, for no apparent reason, he would contort his gaunt face in a horrible grimace, convolve his amazing rubbery lips, and close his eyes and his mouth tightly and laugh through his nose in forced snarls: "Phuh! Phuh Phuh! Phuh! Phuh!"

  Bascom Pentland had been the scholar of his amazing family: he was a man of powerful intelligence and disordered emotions. Even in his youth, his eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, manner had made him an object of ridicule to his Southern kinsmen, but their ridicule was streaked with pride, since they accepted the impact of his personality as another proof that theirs was an extraordinary family. "He's one of 'em, all right," they said exultantly, "queerer than any of us!"

  Bascom's youth, following the war between the States, had been seared by a bitter poverty, at once enriched and warped by a life that clung to the earth with a rootlike tenacity that was manual, painful, spare and stricken, and that rebuilt itself--fiercely, cruelly, and richly--from the earth. And because there burned and blazed in him from the first a hatred of human indignity, a passionate avowal of man's highness and repose, he felt more bitterly than the others the delinquencies of his father, and the multiplication of his father's offspring, who came regularly into a world of empty cupboards.

  "As each of them made its unhappy entrance into the world," he would say later, his voice tremulous with passion, "I went out into the woods striking my head against the trees, and blaspheming God in my anger. Yes, sir," he continued, pursing his long lip rapidly against his few loose upper teeth, and speaking with an exaggerated pedantry of enunciation, "I am not ashamed to confess that I did. For we were living in conditions un-worthy--unworthy"--his voice rising to an evangelical yell, "I had almost said--of the condition of animals. And--say--what do you think?"--he said, with a sudden shift in manner and tone, becoming, after his episcopal declaration, matter of fact and whisperingly confidential. "Why, do you know, my boy, at one time I had to take my own father aside and point out to him we were living in no way becoming decent people."--Here his voice sank to a whisper, and he tapped Eugene on the knee with his big, stiff finger, grimacing horribly and pursing his lip against his dry upper teeth.

  Poverty had been the mistress of his youth and Bascom Pentland had not forgotten: poverty had burned its way into his heart. He took what education he could find in a backwoods school, read everything he could, taught, for two or three years, in a country school and, at the age of twenty-one, borrowing enough money for railway fare, went to Boston to enrol himself at Harvard. And, somehow, because of the fire that burned in him, the fierce determination of his soul, he had been admitted, secured employment waiting on tables, tutoring, and pressing everyone's trousers but his own, and lived in a room with two other starved wretches on $3.50 a week, cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, and studying in the one place.

  At the end of seven years he had gone through the college and the school of theology, performing brilliantly in Greek, Hebrew, and metaphysics.

  Poverty, fanatical study, the sexual meagreness of his surroundings, had made of him a gaunt zealot: at thirty he was a lean fanatic, a true Yankee madman, high-boned, with grey thirsty eyes and a thick flaring sheaf of oaken hair--six feet three inches of gangling and ludicrous height, gesticulating madly and obliviously before a grinning world. But he had a grand lean head: he looked somewhat like the great Ralph Waldo Emerson--with the brakes off.

  About this time he married a young Southern woman of a good family: she was from Tennessee, her parents were both dead, and in the 'seventies she had come North and had lived for several years with an uncle in Providence, who had been constituted guardian of her estate, amounting probably to about $75,000, although her romantic memory later multiplied the sum to $200,000. The man squandered part of her money and stole the rest: she came, therefore, to Bascom without much dowry, but she was pretty, bright, intelligent, and had a good figure. Bascom smote the walls of his room with bloody knuckles, and fell down before God.

  When Bascom met her she was a music student in Boston: she had a deep full-toned contralto voice which was wrung from her somewhat tremulously when she sang. She was a small woman, birdlike and earnest, delicately fleshed and boned, quick and active in her movements and with a crisp tart speech which still bore, curiously, traces of a Southern accent. She was a brisk, serious, ladylike little person, without much humour, and she was very much in love with her gaunt suitor. They saw each other for two years: they went to concerts, lectures, sermons; they talked of music, poetry, philosophy and of God, but they never spoke of love. But one night Bascom met her in the parlour of her boarding-house on Huntington Avenue, and with a voice vibrant and portentous with the importance of the words he had to utter, began as follows: "Miss Louise!" he said carefully, gazing thoughtfully over the apex of his hands, "there comes a time when a man, having reached an age of discretion and mature judgment, must begin to consider one of the gravest--yes! by all means one of the most important events in human life. The event I refer to is--matrimony." He paused, a clock was beating out its punctual measured tock upon the mantel, and a horse went by with ringing hoofs upon the street. As for Louise, she sat quietly erect, with dignified and ladylike composure, but it seemed to her that the clock was beating in her own breast, and that it might cease to beat at any moment.

  "For a minister of the Gospel," Bascom continued, "the decision is particularly grave, because, for him--once made, it is irrevocable, once determined upon, it must be followed inexorably, relentlessly--aye! to the edge of the grave, to the uttermost gates of death, so that the possibility of an error in judgment is fraught"--his voice sinking to a boding whisper--"is fraught with the most terrible consequences. Accordingly," Uncle Bascom said in a deliberate tone, "having decided to take this step, realizing to the full--to the full, mind you--its gravity, I have searched my soul, I have questioned my heart. I have gone up into the mount-ings and out into the desert and communed with my Maker until"--his voice rose like a demon's howl--"there no longer remains an atom of doubt, a particle of uncertainty, a vestige of disbelief! Miss Louise, I have decided that the young lady best fitted in every way to be my helpmate, the partner of my joys and griefs, the confidante of my dearest hopes, the in-spir-a-tion of my noblest endeavours, the companion of my declining years, and the spirit that shall accompany me along each step of life's vexed and troubled way, sharing with me whatever God in His inscrutable Providence shall will, whether of wealth or poverty, grief or happiness--I have decided, Miss Louise, that that lady must be--yourself!--and, therefore, I request," he said slowly and impressively, "the honour of your hand in mar-ri-age."

  She loved him, she had hoped, prayed, and agonized for just such a moment, but now that it had come she rose immediately with la
dylike dignity, and said: "Mistah Pentland: I am honuhed by this mahk of yoah esteem and affection, and I pwomise to give it my most unnest considahwation without delay. I wealize fully, Mistah Pentland, the gwavity of the wuhds you have just uttuhed. Foh my paht, I must tell you, Mistah Pentland, that if I accept yoah pwoposal, I shall come to you without the fawchun which was wightfully mine, but of which I have been depwived and defwauded by the wascality--yes! the wascality of my gahdian. I shall come to you, theahfoh, without the dow'y I had hoped to be able to contwibute to my husband's fawchuns."

  "Oh, my dear Miss Louise! My dear young lady!" Uncle Bascom cried, waving his great hand through the air with a dismissing gesture. "Do not suppose--do not for one instant suppose, I beg of you!--that consideration of a monetary nature could influence my decision. Oh, not in the slightest!" he cried. "Not at all, not at all!"

  "Fawchnatly," Louise continued, "my inhewitance was not wholly dissipated by this scoundwel. A pohtion, a vewy small pohtion, remains."