OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "I guess we know Will about as well as anyone, Miss Helen. I've worked for him off and on for thirty years."

  At the same moment, she heard Ollie Gant's easy, deep, and powerful laugh, and saw him slowly lift his cigarette in his coarse paw; she saw Jannadeau's great yellow face and massive domy brow, and heard him laugh with guttural pleasure, saying, "Ah-h! I tell you vat! Dat girl has alvays looked out for her datty--she's de only vun dat coult hantle him; efer since she vas ten years olt it has been de same." And she was overwhelmingly conscious of that immeasurable mountain of a man, Mike Fogarty, beside her, the sweet clarity of his blue eyes and the almost purring music of his voice as he gently laid his mutton of a hand upon her shoulder for a moment, saying:

  "Ah, Miss Helen, I don't know how Will could have got along all these years without ye--for he has said the same himself a thousand times--aye! that he has!"

  And instantly, having heard these words, and feeling the strong calm presences of these powerful men around her, it seemed to Helen she had somehow re-entered a magic world that she thought was gone for ever. And she was immensely content.

  At the same moment, with a sense of wonder, she discovered an astonishing thing, that she had never noticed before, but that she must have heard a thousand times;--this was that of all these people, who knew Gant best, and had a deep and true affection for him, there were only two--Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Ramsay--who had ever addressed him by his first name. And so far as she could now remember, these two men, together with Gant's mother, his brothers, his sister Augusta, and a few of the others who had known him in his boyhood in Pennsylvania, were the only people who ever had. And this revelation cast a strange, a lonely and a troubling light upon the great gaunt figure of the stone-cutter, which moved her powerfully and which she had never felt before. And most strange of all was the variety of names by which these various people called her father.

  As for Eliza, had any of her children ever heard her address her husband as anything but "Mr. Gant"--had she ever called him by one of his first names--their anguish of shame and impropriety would have been so great that they could hardly have endured it. But such a lapse would have been incredible: Eliza could no more have addressed Gant by his first name than she could have quoted Homer's Greek; had she tried to address him so, the muscles of her tongue would have found it physically impossible to pronounce the word. And in this fact there was somehow, now that Gant was dying, an enormous pathos. It gave to Eliza's life with him a pitiable and moving dignity, the compensation of a proud and wounded spirit for all the insults and injuries that had been heaped upon it. She had been a young countrywoman of twenty-four when she had met him; she had been ignorant of life and innocent of the cruelty, the violence, the drunkenness and abuse of which men are capable; she had borne this man fifteen children, of whom eight had come to life, and had for forty years eaten the bread of blood and tears and joy and grief and terror; she had wanted affection and had been given taunts, abuse, and curses, and somehow her proud and wounded spirit had endured with an anguished but unshaken fortitude all the wrongs and cruelties and injustices of which he had been guilty toward her. And now at the very end her pride still had this pitiable distinction, her spirit still preserved this last integrity: she had not betrayed her wounded soul to a shameful familiarity, he had remained to her--in mind and heart and living word--what he had been from the first day that she met him: the author of her grief and misery, the agent of her suffering, the gaunt and lonely stranger who had come into her hills from a strange land and a distant people--that furious, gaunt, and lonely stranger with whom by fatal accident her destiny--past hate or love or birth or death or human error and confusion--had been insolubly enmeshed, with whom for forty years she had lived, a wife, a mother, and a stranger--and who would to the end remain to her a stranger--"Mr. Gant."

  What was it? What was the secret of this strange and bitter mystery of life that had made of Gant a stranger to all men, and most of all a stranger to his wife? Perhaps some of the answer might have been found in Eliza's own unconscious words when she described her meeting with him forty years before:

  "It was not that he was old," she said,--"he was only thirty-three--but he looked old--his ways were old--he lived so much among old people.--Pshaw!" she continued, with a little puckered smile, "if anyone had told me that night I saw him sitting there with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason--that was the very day they moved into the house, the night he gave the big dinner--and Lydia was still alive and, of course, she was ten years older than he was, and that may have had something to do with it--but I got to studying him as he sat there; of course, he was tired and run down and depressed and worried over all that trouble that he'd had in Sidney before he came up here, when he lost everything, and he knew that Lydia was dying, and that was preyin' on his mind--but he looked old, thin as a rake you know, and sallow and run down, and with those old ways he had acquired, I reckon, from associatin' with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason and people like that--but I just sat there studying him as he sat there with them and I said--'Well, you're an old man, aren't you, sure enough?'--pshaw! if anyone had told me that night that some day I'd be married to him I'd have laughed at them--I'd have considered that I was marrying an old man--and that's just exactly what a lot of people thought, sir, when the news got out that I was goin' to marry him--I know Martha Patton came running to me, all excited and out of breath--said, 'Eliza! You're not going to marry that old man--you know you're not!'--you see, his ways were old, he looked old, dressed old, acted old--everything he did was old; there was always, it seemed, something strange and old-like about him, almost like had he been born that way."

  And it was at this time that Eliza met him, saw him first--"Mr. Gant"--an immensely tall, gaunt, cadaverous-looking man, with a face stern and sad with care, lank drooping moustaches, sandy hair, and cold-grey staring eyes--"not so old, you know--he was only thirty-three--but he looked old, he acted old, his ways were old--he had lived so much among older people he seemed older than he was--I thought of him as an old man."

  This, then, was "Mr. Gant" at thirty-three, and since then, although his fortunes and position had improved, his character had changed little. And now Helen, faced by all these working men, who had known, liked, and respected him, and had now come to see him again before he died--suddenly knew the reason for his loneliness, the reason so few people--least of all, his wife--had ever dared address him by his first name. And with a swift and piercing revelation, his muttered words, which she had heard him use a thousand times when speaking of his childhood--"We had a tough time of it--I tell you what, we did!"--now came back to her with the unutterable poignancy of discovery. For the first time she understood what they meant. And suddenly, with the same swift and nameless pity, she remembered all the pictures which she had seen of her father as a boy and a young man. There were a half-dozen of them in the big family album, together with pictures of his own and Eliza's family: they were the small daguerreotypes of fifty years before, in small frames of faded plush, with glass covers, touched with the faint pale pinks with which the photographers of an earlier time tried to paint with life the sallow hues of their photography. The first of these pictures showed Gant as a little boy; later, a boy of twelve, he was standing in a chair beside his brother Wesley, who was seated, with a wooden smile upon his face. Later, a picture of Gant in the years in Baltimore, standing, his feet crossed, leaning elegantly upon a marble slab beside a vase; later still, the young stone-cutter before his little shop in the years at Sidney; finally, Gant, after his marriage with Eliza, standing with gaunt face and lank drooping moustaches before his shop upon the square, in the company of Will Pentland, who was at the time his business partner.

  And all these pictures, from first to last, from the little boy to the man with the lank drooping moustaches, had been marked by the same expression: the sharp thin face was always stern and sad with care, the shallow cold-grey eyes always stared out of the bony cage-formation of the skull with a cold mournfulness
--the whole impression was always one of gaunt sad loneliness. And it was not the loneliness of the dreamer, the poet, or the misjudged prophet, it was just the cold and terrible loneliness of man, of every man, and of the lost American who has been brought forth naked under immense and lonely skies, to "shift for himself," to grope his way blindly through the confusion and brutal chaos of a life as naked and unsure as he, to wander blindly down across the continent, to hunt for ever for a goal, a wall, a dwelling-place of warmth and certitude, a light, a door.

  And for this reason, she now understood something about her father, this great gaunt figure of a stone-cutter that she had never understood or thought about before: she suddenly understood his order, sense of decency and dispatch; his love of cleanness, roaring fires, and rich abundance, his foul drunkenness, violence, and howling fury, his naked shame and trembling penitence, his good clothes of heavy monumental black that he always kept well pressed, his clean boiled shirts, wing collars, and his love of hotels, ships, and trains, his love of gardens, new lands, cities, voyages. She knew suddenly that he was unlike any other man that ever lived, and that every man that ever lived was like her father. And remembering the cold and mournful look in his shallow staring eyes of cold hard grey, she suddenly knew the reason for that look, as she had never known it before, and understood now why so few men had ever called him by his first name--why he was known to all the world as "Mr. Gant."

  Having joined this group of working men, Helen immediately felt an indefinable but powerful sense of comfort and physical well-being which the presence of such men as these always gave to her. And she did not know why; but immediately, once she had grasped Mr. Ramsay by the hand, and was aware of Mike Fogarty's mountainous form and clear-blue eye above her, and Ollie Gant's deep and lazy laugh, and the deliberate and sensual languor with which he raised his cigarette to his lips with his powerful plasterer's hand, drawing the smoke deep into his strong lungs and letting it trickle slowly from his nostrils as he talked--she was conscious of a feeling of enormous security and relief which she had not known in years.

  And this feeling, as with every person of strong sensuous perceptions, was literal, physical, chemical, astoundingly acute. She not only felt an enormous relief and joy to get back to these working people, it even seemed to her that everything they did--the way Mr. Duncan held his strong cheap cigar in his thick dry fingers, the immense satisfaction with which he drew on it, the languid and sensual trickling of cigarette smoke from Ollie Gant's nostrils, his deep, good-natured, indolently lazy laugh, even the perceptible bulge of tobacco-quid in Alec Ramsay's brick-red face, his barely perceptible rumination of it--all these things, though manlike in their nature, seemed wonderfully good and fresh and living to her--the whole plain priceless glory of the earth restored to her--and gave her a feeling of wonderful happiness and joy.

  And later that night when all these men, her father's friends, had gone into his room, filling it with their enormous and full-blooded vitality, as she saw him lying there, wax-pale, bloodless, motionless, yet with a faint grin at the edge of his thin mouth as he received them, as she heard their deep full-fibred voices, Mike Fogarty's lilting Irish, Mr. Duncan's thick Scotch burr, Ollie Gant's deep and lazy laugh, and the humour of Alec Ramsay's deep, gruff and matter-of-fact tone, relating old times--"God, Will!" he said, "at your worst, you weren't in it compared to Wes! He was a holy terror when he drank! Do you remember the day he drove his fist through your plate-glass window right in the face of Jannadeau--and went home then and tore all the plumbing out of the house and pitched the bath-tub out of the second-storey window into Orchard Street--God! Will!--you weren't in it compared to Wes"--as she heard all this, and saw Gant's thin grin and heard his faint and rusty cackle, his almost inaudible "E'God! Poor Wes!"--she could not believe that he was going to die, the great full-blooded working men filled the room with the vitality of a life which had returned in all its rich and living flood, and seemed intolerably near and familiar--and she kept thinking with a feeling of wonderful happiness and disbelief: "Oh, but Papa's not going to die! It's not possible! He can't! He can't!"

  XXXI

  The dying man himself was no longer to be fooled and duped by hope; he knew that he was done for, and he no longer cared. Rather, as if that knowledge had brought him a new strength--the immense and measureless strength that comes from resignation and that has vanquished terror and despair--Gant had already consigned himself to death, and now was waiting for it, without weariness or anxiety, and with a perfect and peaceful acquiescence.

  This complete resignation and tranquillity of a man whose life had been so full of violence, protest, and howling fury stunned and silenced them and left them helpless. It seemed that Gant, knowing that often he had lived badly, was now determined to die well. And in this he succeeded. He accepted every ministration, every visit, every stammering reassurance, or frenzied activity, with a passive gratefulness which he seemed to want everyone to know. On the evening of the day after his first hæmorrhage, he asked for food and Eliza, bustling out, pathetically eager to do something, killed a chicken and cooked it for him.

  And as if, from that infinite depth of death and silence from which he looked at her, he had seen, behind the bridling brisk activity of her figure, for ever bustling back and forth, saying confusedly--"Why, yes! The very thing! This very minute, sir!"--had seen the white strained face, the stricken eyes of a proud and sensitive woman who had wanted affection all her life, had received for the most part injury and abuse, and who was ready to clutch at any crust of comfort that might console or justify her before he died--he ate part of the chicken with relish, and then, looking up at her, said quietly:

  "I tell you what--that was a good chicken."

  And Helen, who had been sitting beside him on the bed, and feeding him, now cried out in a tone of bantering and good-humoured challenge:

  "What! Is it better than the ones I cook for you? You'd better not say it is--I'll beat you if you do.'"

  And Gant, grinning feebly, shook his head, and answered:

  "Ah-h! Your mother is a good cook, Helen. You're a good cook, too--but there's no one else can cook a chicken like your mother!"

  And stretching out his great right hand, he patted Eliza's worn fingers with his own.

  And Eliza, suddenly touched by that word of unaccustomed praise and tenderness, turned and rushed blindly from the room at a clumsy bridling gait, clasping her hands together at the wrist, her weak eyes blind with tears--shaking her head in a strong convulsive movement, her mouth smiling a pale tremulous smile, ludicrous, touching, made unnatural by her false teeth, whispering over and over to herself, Poor fellow! Says, 'There's no one else can cook a chicken like your mother.' Reached out and patted me on the hand, you know. Says 'I tell you what, there's no one who can cook a chicken like your mother.' I reckon he wanted to let me know, to tell me, but says, 'The rest of you have all been good to me, Helen's a good cook, but there's no one else can cook like your mother.'"

  "Oh, here, here, here!" said Helen, who, laughing uncertainly had followed her mother from the room when Eliza had rushed out, and had seized her by the arms, and shook her gently, "good heavens! Here! You mustn't carry on like this! You mustn't take it this way! Why, he's all right!" she cried out heartily and shook Eliza again. "Papa's going to be all right! Why, what are you crying for?" she laughed. "He's going to get well now--don't you know that?"

  And Eliza could say nothing for a moment but kept smiling that false trembling and unnatural smile, shaking her head in a slight convulsive movement, her eyes blind with tears.

  "I tell you what," she whispered, smiling tremulously again and shaking her head, "there was something about it--you know, the way he said it--says, 'There's no one who can come up to your mother'--there was something in the way he said it! Poor fellow, says, 'None of the rest of you can cook like her'--says, 'I tell you what, that was certainly a good chicken'--Poor fellow! It wasn't so much what he said as the way he said it--there was somet
hing about it that went through me like a knife--I tell you what it did!"

  "Oh, here, here, here!" Helen cried again, laughing. But her own eyes were also wet, the bitter possessiveness that had dominated all her relations with her father, and that had thrust Eliza away from him, was suddenly vanquished. At that moment she began to feel an affection for her mother that she had never felt before, a deep and nameless pity and regret, and a sense of sombre satisfaction.

  "Well," she thought, "I guess it's all she's had, but I'm glad she's got that much to remember. I'm glad he said it: she'll always have that now to hang on to."

  And Gant lay looking up from that sunken depth of death and silence, his great hands of living power quiet with their immense and passive strength beside him on the bed.

  XXXII

  Towards one o'clock that night Gant fell asleep and dreamed that he was walking down the road that led to Spangler's Run. And although he had not been along that road for fifty years everything was as fresh, as green, as living and familiar as it had ever been to him. He came out on the road from Schaefer's farm, and on his left he passed by the little white frame church of the United Brethren, and the graveyard about the church where his friends and family had been buried. From the road he could see the line of family gravestones which he himself had carved and set up after he had returned from serving his apprenticeship in Baltimore. The stones were all alike: tall flat slabs of marble with plain rounded tops, and there was one for his sister Susan, who had died in infancy, and one for his sister Huldah, who had died in childbirth while the war was on, and one for Huldah's husband, a young farmer named Jake Lentz who had been killed at Chancellorsville, and one for the husband of his oldest sister, Augusta, a man named Martin, who had been an itinerant photographer and had died soon after the war, and finally one for Gant's own father. And since there were no stones for his brother George or for Elmer or for John, and none for his mother or Augusta, Gant knew that he was still a young man, and had just recently come home. The stones which he had put up were still white and new, and in the lower right-hand corner of each stone, he had carved his own name: W. O. Gant.