OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "I have wanted to know more about you, Frank," the other young man said. "All that I know about your life before you came here is that you come from somewhere in the Middle West, and yet are completely different from anyone I ever knew who came from there."

  "Yes," said Starwick quietly. "From Horton, for example?" his tone was still quiet, but there was a shade of irony in it.

  "Well," the other boy said, flushing, but continuing obstinately, "--yes, from Horton. He is from Iowa; you can see, smell, read, feel Iowa all over him, in everything he says and does--"

  "'It's--a--darn--good--yarn,'" said Starwick, beginning to burble with laughter as he imitated the heavy, hearty, sonorous robustiousness of Horton's voice when he pronounced his favourite judgment.

  "Yes," said Eugene, laughing at the imitation, "that's it, all right--'it's a darn good yarn.' Well, Frank, you couldn't be more different from Horton if you had come from the planet Mars, and yet the place you came from out there in the Middle West, the kind of life you knew when you were growing up, could not have been so different from Ed Horton's."

  "No," said Starwick quietly. "As a matter of fact, I know where he is from--it's not over fifty miles from the town I was born in, which is in Illinois, and the life in both places is much the same."

  He was silent a moment longer, as he stared across the river, and then continued in a quiet voice that had a calm, weary, and almost inert detachment that characterized these conversations with his friend, and that was almost entirely free of mannered speech:

  "As to the kind of people that we came from," he continued, "I can't say how different they may be, but I should think it very likely that Horton's people are much the same kind of people as my own--"

  "His father is a Methodist minister," the other young man quickly interposed. "He told me that."

  "Yes," said Starwick in his quiet and inert voice--"and Horton is the rebel of the family." His tone had not changed apparently in its quality by an atom, yet the quiet and bitter irony with which he spoke was evident.

  "How did you know that?" the other youth said in a surprised tone. "Yes--that's true. His wife told me that Ed and his father are scarcely on speaking terms--the old man prays for the salvation of Ed's soul three times a day, because he is trying to write plays and wants to get into the theatre. Effie Horton says Ed's father still writes Ed letters begging him to repent and mend his ways before his soul is damned for ever: she says the old man calls the theatre the Devil's Workshop."

  "Yes," said Starwick in his quiet and almost lifeless tone that still had curiously the cutting edge of a weary and detached sarcasm--"and Horton has bearded the Philistines in their den, hasn't he, and given all for art?"

  "Isn't that a bit unjust? I know you don't think very highly of Ed Horton's ability, but, after all, the man must have had some genuine desire to create something--some real love for the theatre--or he would not have broken with his family and come here."

  "Yes. I suppose he has. Many people have that desire," said Starwick wearily. "Do you think it is enough?"

  "No, I do not. And yet I think a man who has it is better off--will have a better life, somehow--than the man who does not have it at all."

  "Do you?" Starwick answered in a dead tone. "I wish I thought so, too."

  "But don't you, Frank? Surely it is better to have some kind of talent, however small, than none at all."

  "Would you say, then," Starwick answered, "that it was better to have some kind of child--however puny, feeble, ugly, and diseased--as King Richard said about himself, brought into the world 'scarce half made up'--than to have no child at all?"

  "I would not think so. No."

  "Have you ever thought, Eugene, that the great enemy of life may not be death, but life itself?" Starwick continued. "Have you never noticed that the really evil people that one meets--the people who are filled with hatred, fear, envy, rancour against life--who wish to destroy the artist and his work--are not figures of satanic darkness, who have been born with a malignant hatred against life, but rather people who have had the seeds of life within themselves and been destroyed by them? They are the people who have been given just enough to get a vision of the promised land--however brief and broken it may be--"

  "But not enough to get there? Is that what you mean?"

  "Exactly," Starwick answered. "They are left there in the desert, maddened by the sight of water they can never reach, and all the juices of their life then turn to gall and bitterness--to envy and malignant hate. They are the old women in the little towns and villages with the sour eyes and the envenomed flesh who have so poisoned the air with their envenomed taint that everything young and beautiful and full of joy that lives there will sicken and go dead and vicious and malignant as the air it breathes. They are the lecherous and impotent old men of the world, those foul, palsied creatures with small rheumy eyes who hate the lover and his mistress with the hate of hell and eunuchry--who try to destroy love with their hatred and the slanderous rumour of their poisoned tongues. And, finally, they are the eunuchs of the arts--the men who have the lust, without the power, for creation, and whose life goes dead and rotten with its hatred of the living artist and the living man."

  "And you think that Horton will be one of these?"

  Again Starwick was silent for a moment, staring out across the river. When he spoke again, he did not answer his companion's question directly, but in a quiet and inert tone in which the cutting edge of irony was barely evident, he said:

  "My God! Eugene"--his voice was so low and wearily passionate with revulsion that it was almost inaudible--"if ever you may come to know, as I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh, the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of the heart--the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons of this earth . . ." He was silent a moment longer, and then went on in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone--"I was the youngest in a family of nine children--the same kind of family that you will find everywhere. I was the only delicate flower among them," he went on with a cold impassive irony. "We were not rich people . . . a big family growing up with only a small income to support us. They were all good people," he said quietly. "My father was superintendent of a small farm-machinery plant, and before that they were farming people, but they sent me to school, and after that to college. I was the 'bright boy' of the town"--again the weary irony of his voice was evident--"the local prodigy, the teacher's pet. . . . Perhaps that is my destiny; to have something of the artist's heart, his soul, his understanding, his perceptions--never to have his power, the hand that shapes, the tongue that can express--oh, God! Eugene! is that to be my life--to have all that I know and feel and would create rot still-born in my spirit, to be a wave that breaks for ever in mid-ocean, the shoulder of a strength without the wall--my God! My God! to come into this world scarce half made up, to have the spirit of the artist and to lack his hide, to feel the intolerable and unspeakable beauty, mystery, loveliness, and terror of this immortal land--this great America--and a skin too sensitive, a hide too delicate and rare--" his voice was high and bitter with his passion--"to declare its cruelty, its horror, falseness, hunger, the warped and twisted soul of its frustration, and lacking hide and toughness, born without a skin, to make an armour, school a manner, build a barrier of my own against its Hortons--"

  "And is that why--?" the other boy began, flushed, and quickly checked himself.

  "Is that why--what?" said Starwick, turning, looking at him. Then as he did not answer, but still remained silent, flushed with embarrassment, Starwick laughed, and said: "Is that why I am an affected person--a poseur--what Horton calls a 'damned little æsthete'--why I speak and act and dress the way I do?"

  The other flushed miserably and muttered:

  "No, I didn't say that, Frank!"

  Starwick
laughed suddenly, his infectious and spontaneous laugh, and said:

  "But why not? Why shouldn't you say it? Because it is the truth. It really is, you know," and almost mockingly at these words, his voice assumed its murmured and affected accent. Then he said quietly again:

  "Each man has his manner--with each it comes for his own reason--Horton's, so that his hearty voice and robust way may hide the hatred in his eyes, the terror in his heart, the falseness and pretence in his pitiable warped small soul. He has his manner, I have mine--his for concealment, mine for armour, because my native hide was tender and my skin too sensitive to meet the Hortons of the earth--and somewhere, down below our manner, stands the naked man." Again he was silent and in a moment he continued quietly:

  "My father was a fine man and we never got to know each other very well. The night before I went away to college he 'took me to one side' and talked to me--he told me how they had their hearts set on me, and he asked me to become a good and useful man--a good American."

  "And what did you say, Frank?"

  "Nothing. There was nothing I could say. . . . Our house stands on a little butte above the river," he went on quietly in a moment, "and when he had finished talking I went out and stood there looking at the river."

  "What river, Frank?"

  "There is only one," he answered. "The great slow river--the dark and secret river of the night--the everlasting flood--the unceasing Mississippi. . . . It is a river that I know so well, with all my life that I shall never tell about. Perhaps you will some day--perhaps you have the power in you--And if you do--" he paused.

  "And if I do?"

  "Speak one word for a boy who could not speak against the Hortons of this land, but who once stood above a river--and who knew America as every other boy has known it." He turned, smiling: "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story."

  In a moment he got up, and laughing his infectious laugh, said:

  "Come on, let's go."

  And together they walked away.

  BOOK III

  TELEMACHUS

  XXXIX

  October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed brilliant hues of blazing colours, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow and delight--and with October. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, an ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollenated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all the men who were returning, a haunting sorrow for the buried men and for all those who were gone and would not come again.

  His father was dead, and now it seemed to him that he had never found him. His father was dead, and yet he sought him everywhere, and could not believe that he was dead, and was sure that he would find him. It was October and that year, after years of absence and of wandering, he had come home again.

  He could not think that his father had died, but he had come home in October, and all the life that he had known there was strange and sorrowful as dreams. And yet he saw it all in shapes of deathless brightness--the town, the streets, the magic hills, and the plain prognathous faces of the people he had known. He saw them all in shapes of deathless brightness, and everything was instantly familiar as his father's face, and stranger, more phantasmal than a dream.

  Their words came to him with the accents of an utter naturalness, and yet were sorrowful and lost and strange like voices speaking in a dream, and in their eyes he read a lost and lonely light, as if they were all phantoms and all lost, or as if he had revisited the shores of this great earth again with a heart of fire, a cry of pain and ecstasy, a memory of intolerable longing and regret for all the glorious and exultant life that he had known and which he must visit now for ever as a fleshless ghost, never to touch, to hold, to have its palpable warmth and substance for his own again. He had come home again, and yet he could not believe his father was dead, and he thought he heard his great voice ringing in the street again, and that he would see him striding toward him across the Square with his gaunt earth-devouring stride, or find him waiting every time he turned the corner, or lunging toward the house bearing the tremendous provender of his food and meat, bringing to them all the deathless security of his strength and power and passion, bringing to them all again the roaring message of his fires that shook the fire-full chimney-throat with their terrific blast, giving to them all again the exultant knowledge that the good days, the magic days, the golden weather of their lives would come again, and that this dreamlike and phantasmal world in which they found themselves would waken instantly, as it had once, to all the palpable warmth and glory of the earth, if only his father would come back to make it live, to give them life, again.

  Therefore, he could not think that he was dead, and yet it was October, and that year he had come home again. And at night, in his mother's house, he would lie in his bed in the dark, hearing the wind that rattled dry leaves along the empty pavement, hearing, far-off across the wind, the barking of a dog, feeling dark time, strange time, dark secret time, as it flowed on around him, remembering his life, this house, and all the million strange and secret visages of time, dark time, thinking, feeling, thinking:

  "October has come again, has come again. . . . I have come home again and found my father dead . . . and that was time . . . time . . . time. . . . Where shall I go now? What shall I do? For October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the life we knew, and we are lost."

  Storm shook the house at night--the old house, his mother's house--where he had seen his brother die. The old doors swung and creaked in darkness, darkness pressed against the house, the darkness filled them, filled the house at night, it moved about them soft and secret, palpable, filled with a thousand secret presences of sorrowful time and memory, moving about him as he lay below his brother's room in darkness, while storm shook the house in late October, and something creaked and rattled in the wind's strong blast. It was October, and he had come home again: he could not believe that his father was dead.

  Wind beat at them with burly shoulders in the night. The darkness moved there in the house like something silent, palpable--a spirit breathing in his mother's house, a demon and a friend--speaking to him its silent and intolerable prophecy of flight, of darkness and the storm, moving about him constantly, prowling about the edges of his life, ever beside him, with him, in him, whispering:

  "Child, child--come with me--come with me to your brother's grave tonight. Come with me to the places where the young men lie whose bodies have long since been buried in the earth. Come with me where they walk and move again tonight, and you shall see your brother's face again, and hear his voice, and see again, as they march toward you from their graves the company of the young men who died, as he did, in October, speaking to you their messages of flight, of triumph, and the all-exultant darkness, telling you that all will be again as it was once."

  October had come again, and he would lie there in his mother's house at night, and feel the darkness moving softly all about him, and hear the dry leaves scampering on the street outside, and the huge and burly rushes of the wind. And then the wind would rush away with huge caprice, and he could hear it far off roaring with remote demented cries in the embraces of great trees, and he would lie there thinking:

  "October has come again--has come again"--feeling the dark around him, not believing that his father could be dead, thinking: "The strange and lonely years have come again. . . . I have come home again . . . come home again . . . and will it not be with us all as it has been?"--feeling the darkness as it moved about him, thinking: "Is it not the same darkness that I knew in childhood, and have I not lain here in bed before and felt this darkness moving all about me? . . . Did we not hear dogs that barked in darkness, in October?" he then thought. "Were not their howls far broken by the wind? . . . And hear dry leaves that scampered on the streets at night . . .
and the huge and burly rushes of the wind . . . and hear huge limbs that stiffly creak in the remote demented howlings of the burly wind . . . and something creaking in the wind at night . . . and think, then, as we think now, of all the men who have gone and never will come back again, and of our friends and brothers who lie buried in the earth? . . . Oh, has not October now come back again?" he cried. "As always--as it always was?"--and hearing the great darkness softly prowling in his mother's house at night, and thinking, feeling, thinking, as he lay there in the dark:

  "Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

  "Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say: 'I'll bet that there's a forest fire in Michigan.' And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: 'Mister, yore ole woman's goin' to whup ye if ye don't go home.'"