OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  Recounting past triumphs with an epic brag, it said: "'You're comin' out of dere!' I said. 'Wat do you t'ink of dat?' . . . 'Oh, yeah,' he says, 'who's goin' t' make me?' So I says, 'You hoid me--yeah! . . . You're goin' to take dat little tin crate of yoehs right out of deh! You'll take yoeh chance right on duh line wit' all duh rest of us!' . . . 'Oh, yeah,' he says. . . . 'You hoid me, misteh'--an' he went!" In tones of ladylike refinement, it recounted romance into ravished ears as follows: "'Lissen,' I says, 'as far as my boss is consoined it's bizness only. . . . An' as far as Mr. Ball is consoined it's my own bizness' (hah! hah! hah! Y'know that's wat I tol' him. . . . Jeez: it handed him a laugh, y'know!)--'An afteh five o'clock,' I says, 'I'm my own boss. . . . At duh same time,' I says, 'deh's duh psychological side to be considehed.'"

  And with the sweet accent of maternal tribulation, it admitted, "Sure! I hit her! I did! Oh, I hit her very hahd! Jeez! It was an awful crack I gave her, honestleh! My hand was boinin' f'r a half-oueh aftehwads! . . . I just blow up, y'know! . . . Dat's my on'y reason f'r dat! I jus' blow up! Dis fellah's in duh bathroom callin' f'r his eggs, duh baby's yellin' f'r his bottle, an' I jus' blow up! . . . Dat's my on'y reason f'r dat! Dat's duh on'y reason dat I hit her, see! I'm afraid she'll hoit duh baby, see? She bends its fingehs back. So I says, 'F'r God's sake, please, don't do dat! . . . I gotta headache' . . . an' then, I jus' blow up! Sure! I hit her hahd! . . . Duh trouble is I can't stop wit' one slap, see! . . . Jeez! I hit her! My hand was boining f'r a half-oueh aftehwads!"

  Hot with its sense of outraged decency, it said, "I went upstairs an' pounded on dat doeh! . . . 'Come out of dere, you s. of a b.,' I says--Sure, I'm tellin' yuh! Dat's what I said to her, y'know! . . . 'Come out of dere,' I says, 'before I t'row you out,'" and regretfully it added, "Sure! I hate to do dese t'ings--it makes me feel bad lateh--but I won't have dem in my place. Dat's duh one t'ing I refuse t'do," it said. And with a passionate emotion, it asserted, "Sure! . . . Dat's what I'm tellin' yuh! . . . Yuh know how dat was, don't cha? Duh foist guy--her husban'--was passin' out duh sugah an' duh otheh guy--duh boy-friend--was layin' her. Can yuh ima-a-gine it?" it said.

  Amazed, in tones of stupefaction, it would say "No kiddin'! No!" And with solemn reprehension it would add, "Oh, yuh know I think that's te-e-ri-bul! I think that's aw-w-ful!"--the voice of unbelieving horror would reply.

  Finally, friendly and familiar, the great Voice of the city said, "Well, so long, Eddy. I'm goin' t' ketch some sleep," it said, and answered, "Well, so long, Joe, I'll be seem' yuh." "So long, Grace," it added with an accent of soft tenderness and love, and the huge Voice of the city murmured, "O.K. kid! Eight o'clock--no kiddin'--I'll be deh!"

  Such were some of the million tongues of that huge single Voice, as he had heard them speak a thousand times, and as now instantly, incredibly, as soon as he came back to them, they spoke again.

  And as he listened, as he heard them, their speech could not have been more strange to him had they been people from the planet Mars. He stared gape-mouthed, he listened, he saw the whole thing blazing in his face again to the tone and movement of its own central, unique, and incomparable energy. It was so real that it was magical, so real that all that men had always known was discovered to them instantly, so real he felt as if he had known it for ever, yet must be dreaming as he looked at it; therefore he looked at it and his spirit cried:

  "Incredible! Oh, incredible! It moves, it pulses like a single living thing! It lives, it lives, with all its million faces"--and this is the way he always knew it was.

  XLVII

  That year--the first year that he lived there in the city--he was twenty-three years old. After these months of frenzy, drunkenness, and arrest, he was at the last gasp of his resources, and the eighteen hundred dollars a year, which was his salary at the university that had employed him as an instructor, seemed to him a wage of princely munificence--a stroke of incredible good fortune.

  And although his position as instructor had been given to him in one of the usual ways, through the recommendation of the teachers' bureau at Harvard University, and the letters of some of the professors there, he was tortured constantly by the thought of his inadequacy and ignorance, and by the horrible fear that his incompetence would be discovered and that one day he would be suddenly, peremptorily, ruinously, and disgracefully discharged.

  At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels with cold poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold to the class-room at the university a few hundred yards away--from cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside, thence to the brawling and ugly corridors of the university, which drowned one, body and soul, with their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides of dark amber Jewish flesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the class-room with its smaller horde of thirty or forty Jews and Jewesses all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick with their hot and swarthy body-smells, their strong female odours of rut and crotch and arm-pit and cheap perfume, and their hard male smells that were rancid, stale, and sour--the successive stages of this journey were filled with such dazed numbness, horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: the world swarmed blindly, nauseously, drunkenly about him. He looked at the faces in the hotel lobby, the brawling, furious, and chaotic street, and the swarming and rancid corridors, with dizzy swimming eyes and a constricted heart; a thousand unutterable and horrible premonitions and imaginings of ruin and shame swarmed through his mind--every day he felt the impending menace of some new and fatal catastrophe, some indefinable and crushing disgrace with which each hour was ominously, murderously pregnant.

  What these fears and forebodings were he could not have told, but they occasionally found articulate expression in some scene of frightful insubordination and rebellion, in which he found himself faced with forty brawling, mocking, swarthily jeering faces who, like savage and untamed horses that have sensed the fear and incompetence of their driver, have now broken the last feeble thread of restraint and are running free and wild before him. The terror and menace of such a disgrace were heightened by the intrusion into the scene at the apex of such a moment of riot and rebellion of one of his employers, the Dean, the head of the department, or a creature with a wry lean face, a convulsive Adam's apple, a habit of writhing his lean belly and loins erotically as he spoke, and a mind of the most obscene Puritanism, who was employed to oversee the work and methods of the instructors: he could visualize the moment of their fatal entrance into the class-room, and hear their words of stern, curt and immediate dismissal as they drove him out and gathered the reins strongly into their own parched and freckled hands.

  A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which pressed upon him from the sky, which hovered in the vast unrest and dissonance of the air he breathed, and which at length crept poisonously through all the rivers of life, corrupting the healthy music of the blood, the sweet exultant music of the heart, curdling men's bowels with fear and withering their loins with sterile impotence. What was this grey lipless shape of fear that stalked their lives incessantly--that was everywhere, legible in the faces, the movements, and the driven frenzied glances of the people who swarmed on the streets? What was this thing that duped men out of joy, tricked them out of all the exultant and triumphant music of the world, drove them at length into the dusty earth, cheated, defrauded, tricked out of life by a nameless phantom, with all their glory wasted?

  Already, in the city, he had begun to se
e how life was duped and menaced by this cheat: a thousand images of cruelty, violence, cowardice and dishonour swarmed about him in the streets. As the sparkling and winy exultancy of October, with its grand and solemn music of death and life, of departure and return, moved on into the harsh, raw, green implacability of winter, one could observe the death of joy and hope, the barometric rise of hate and fear and venom in the city's life: it got into the faces of the people, it wasted their flesh and corrupted their blood, it glittered in the eyes of the instructors at the university, their flesh got green and yellow with its poisons, the air about them was webbed, cross-webbed, and counter-webbed with the dense fabric of their million spites and hatreds. They wasted and grew sick with hate and poison because another man received promotion, because another man had got his poem printed, because another man had eaten food and swallowed drink and lain with women, and lived and would not die; they sweltered with hate and fear against the professors who employed them--they grew pale and trembled, and spoke obsequiously when their employer passed, but when the man had gone, they whispered with trembling lips: "Has he spoken to you yet? . . . Has he said anything to you yet about next year? . . . Are you coming back next year? . . . Did he say anything to you about me next year? . . ." They greeted him with sly humility and a servile glance, but they snickered obscenely at him when his back was turned. And they smiled and sneered at one another with eyes that glittered with their hate: they never struck a blow but they spoke lying words of barbed ambiguity, they lied, cheated, and betrayed, and they sweltered in the poisons of their hate and fear, they breathed the weary hatred-laden air about them into their poisoned lungs.

  Around him in the streets, again, as winter came, he heard a million words of hate and death: a million words of snarl and sneer and empty threat, of foul mistrust and lying slander: already he had come to see the poisonous images of death and hatred at work in the lives of a million people--he saw with what corrupt and venomous joy they seized on every story of man's dishonour, defeat, or sorrow, with what vicious jibe and jeer they greeted any evidence of mercy, honesty, or love.

  By night, the hard and sterile lights of their glittering, barren and obscene streets fell lividly over the pale and swarthy faces of a million rats of the flesh, and by day, in the weary and hatred-laden air of the university, the harsh and merciless light shone on the venomous faces of the rats of the spirit.

  In his heart a dogged and furious resentment was beginning to glow and moulder--a savage hate of hate, a fear of fear, a murderous intensity of desire to strangle the shapes of death and barrenness--a resistance, still passive, but growing in bitterness and pugnacity with every passing day, as he saw how uselessly and horribly men allowed themselves to be duped, cheated, and beaten by the living rat and by the fraud of fear, and that was being strengthened momently now by an implacable conviction, a dogged and incontrovertible memory that, incredibly sharpened by his fury and desire, awoke and netted out of the sea-depths of the past, the shining fish of a million living moments. The sound of forest waters in the night, the rustling of cool corn-blades in the dark, the goat-cries of a boy into the wind, the pounding of great wheels upon a rail, the sound of quiet casual voices at a country station in the night, and the thorn of delight, the tongueless cry of ecstasy that trembles on the lips of the country kid as he lies awake for the first time in the night in the top berth of a Pullman car while the great wheels pound beneath him toward the city, and he hears the good-looking woman in the berth below him stir languorously and move, in a gesture of heavied and sensual appeasement, her milky thighs.--These things had been upon the earth, past all the mockery of the old scornmaker's pride, and would endure for ever. These facts, together with a thousand more--the incredible magic of the peach bloom in the month of April, the smell of rivers after rain, the wordless glory and first green of a young tree seen in a city street at daybreak in the month of May, the bird-song breaking into light once more, a cry, a leaf, the passing of a cloud--these facts, as bright as herrings in a shining water, as literal as nails to fix the hides of falsehood to the wall, as real as April and all magic whatsoever, returned now under the furious light of his awakened and incontrovertible memory.

  A murderous hatred against the haters, the mockers, dupers, cheaters, and all of the walking frauds of death rose up in him. He resolved to kill the phantoms of this fear and shame which pressed upon him namelessly; he swore that he should not starve in the midst of plenty, batter his knuckles bloody on the four walls of a little cell, break the great shoulder of his power and strength against a barren wall, prowl ceaselessly and damnably a million sterile streets, in which there was neither pause nor curve nor stay, nor door, to enter: he knew there was earth for his feet, food for his hunger, liquor for his thirst, the exultant reality of strong golden joy for all the savage passion of his conviction and desire, and he swore that he should come at length to doors and harbours, he knew he would not starve and sicken in the wilderness, and that the venomous rats of the flesh and of the spirit should never gnaw his bones in triumph in the desert.

  Yet, the sense of drowning daily in the man-swarm returned to him. Each day there began anew one of the most ancient and fatal struggles that was ever waged--the struggle of man against the multitude: each day, like a man who is going into battle, he would brace himself with savage resolution, and gird his spirit to the sticking point each time he went out in the streets, and each day, beaten, driven, trembling and inchoate, drowned in horror and oblivion, he would at length retreat into the four walls of his cell again, conscious only of having passed through a maelstrom of sound, movement, violence, and living tissue--of living tissue from which all of the radiant and succulent essences of individual character and memory had been extracted--and which flowed constantly back and forth along the beaten pavement in a lava-like tide of tallowy flesh, dark dead eyes, and grey felt hats. The grey felt hats, in particular, those machine-made millions of neat cheap cones of crisp grey felt, all worn in the same way, and tilted at the same angle, and for the most part shading faces of the same tallowy texture--those million points of changeless grey that bobbed and moved incessantly through a thousand streets--drowned him with their tidal flow of weariness and sterility: they seemed to be the badge, the uniform, of a race of mechanical creatures, who were as essential and inhuman a part of the city's substance as stone and steel and brick, who had been made of one essential substance and charged with one general and basic energy along with the buildings, tunnels, streets, and a million glittering projectiles of machinery, and who flowed by incessantly, were poured into tunnels or driven through streets, were added to here, and thinned out there, were portioned, doled, and celled out in a million destinations, a thousand swarming heaven-daring hives, the mindless and unwitting automatons of a gigantic and incomprehensible pattern.

  But if he retreated daily, out of this savage and unequal struggle with the Herculean forces of the city, if he returned trembling, beaten and exhausted to the hermitage of his own small cell, it was with no sense of final defeat, no desire for ultimate escape. His pride and fury grew from every beating that they got, his faith grew stubborn on adversity, his spirit fed upon humiliation, and spat into the face of failure, his soul plunged darkly to the sea-floor of blind horror, swarming desolation, and came up dripping with a snarl of hatred and defiance: daily they beat him with their blind appalling mass, daily they drove him livid, shaking, blind with horror, back into his cell, so stunned and stricken by the savage, obscene, and mindless fury of the streets that he could no longer think, feel, or remember; and hour by hour his soul swam upwards out of the jungles of the sea! And every night, the merciful anodyne of dark restored him; sunk deep, at length, in midnight, beastwise aprowl in all the brooding silence of the night, his spirit swept out through the fields of sleep, he heard the heartbeats of six million men: within their million cells sleep crossed the faces of six million sleepers and in the night-time, in the dark, in all the living silence of the night, the sleeping face
s of Snodgrass, Weisberg, and O'Hare were strange and dark as his. He saw the city with the great giant webbing of its thousand streets, he heard the long deep notes of warning and departure from the great ships in the harbour; and then he saw the city as a whole, six million sleepers celled in sleep and walled in night, and girdled by the bracelet of two flashing sea-borne tides that isled them round: he held them legible as minted gold within his hand, he saw them plain as apples in the adyts of his brain. Exultant certitude and joy welled up in him, and he knew that his hunger could eat the earth, his eye and brain gulp down the vision of ten thousand streets, ten million faces; he knew he should beat and eat them all one day, and that a man was more than a million, stronger than a wall, and greater than a door, and taller than a ninety-storey tower.

  They swept around him on the rootless pavements in drowning tides of grey abomination, of numberless depth and horror, and like the memory of a bird-song in the wood, the memory of all his people who had lived and died alone for two hundred years within the wilderness, and whose buried bones were pointing eighty ways across the continent, returned to him in a rush of savage resolution, and he swore that he would beat death and nothingness and all the abominations of a sterile and nameless fear: he swore it with a sick heart, a trembling lip, and a nauseous stomach in which the rancid wash of a sour distressful coffee growled and rumbled queasily--for in those months, this sense of nameless fear and dread, impending ruin, disgrace and menace, was so great each time he went to meet a class, its damnable victory over all the clean and healthful music of the flesh, the exultant joy of thirst and hunger, so complete and devastating, that he was unable to touch a mouthful of food for hours in advance.