OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  The tugging of a leaf upon a bough in late October, a skirl of blown papers in the street, a cloud that came and went and made its shadow in the lights of April. And the forgotten laughter of lost people in dark streets, a face that passed us in another train, the house our mistress lived in as a child, a whipping of flame at a slum's cold corner, the corded veins on an old man's hand, the feathery green of a tree, a daybreak in a city street in the month of May, a voice that cried out sharply and was silent in the night, and a song that a woman sang, a word that she spoke at dusk before she went away,--the memory of a ruined wall, the ancient empty visage of a half-demolished house in which love lay, the mark of a young man's fist in crumbling plaster, a lost relic, brief and temporal, in all the everlasting variousness of your life, as the madness, pain and anguish in the heart that caused it--these are all that we have taken from you, iron-breasted city, and they are ours and gone for ever from us, even as things are lost and broken in the wind, and as the ghosts of time are lost, and as the everlasting river that flowed past us in darkness to the sea.

  The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the pockets of the earth. By night it drinks strange time, dark time. By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time's dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come.

  They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And for ever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.

  And there are ships there! Have we not heard the ships there? (Have we not heard the great ships going down the river? Have we not heard the great ships putting out to sea?)

  Great whistles blow there. Have we not heard the whistles blow there? Have we not heard the whistles blowing in the river? (A harness of bright ships is on the water. A thunder of faint hooves is on the land.)

  And there is time there. (Have we not heard strange time, dark time, strange tragic time there? Have we not heard dark time, strange time, the dark, the moving tide of time as it flows down the river?)

  And in the night-time, in the dark there, in all the sleeping silence of the earth have we not heard the river, the rich immortal river, full of its strange dark time?

  Full with the pulse of time it flows there, full with the pulse of all men living, sleeping, dying, waking, it will flow there, full with the billion dark and secret moments of our lives it flows there. Filled with all the hope, the madness and the passion of our youth it flows there, in the daytime, in the dark, drinking with ceaseless glut the land, mining into its tides the earth as it mines the hours and moments of our life into its tides, moving against the sides of ships, foaming about piled crustings of old wharves, sliding like time and silence by the vast cliff of the city, girdling the stony isle of life with moving waters--thick with the wastes of earth, dark with our stains, and heavied with our dumpings, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, as it flows by us, by us, by us, to the sea!

  LIX

  Full night had come when he got off the train at the town where Joel was to meet him. After the heavy rains of the afternoon, and the stormy sunset, the sky had cleared completely: a great moon blazed in the cloudless bowl of a depthless sky; after the rain, and the sultry swelter of the city streets, the tainted furnace-fumes of city breath, the air was clean and fresh, and marvellously sweet, and the great earth waited, and was still enormously, and one always knew that it was there.

  The engine panted for a moment with a hoarse, metallic resonance, in the baggage-car someone threw mail-bags and thick bundles of evening papers off onto the platform, there was the swinging signal of a brakesman's lantern, the tolling of the engine bell, thick, hose-like jets of steam blew out of her, the terrific pistons moved like elbows, caught, bore down, the terrific flanges spun for a moment, the short, squat funnel belched explosive thunders of hot smoke, the train rolled past with a slow, protesting creak of ties, a hard-pressed rumble of the heavy coaches, and was on her way again.

  Then the train was gone, and there was nothing but the rails, the earth, the moon, the river, and strong silence--and the haunting and immortal visage of America by night. It was there, and it was there for ever, and he had always known it, and it abode there and was still, and there was something in his heart he could not utter. The rails swept northward towards the dark, and in the moon the rails were like two living strands of burning silver, and between the rails the heavy ballast rock was white as lunar marble, and the brown wooden ties were resinous and dry and very still.

  Sheer beside the tracks, the low banks of the ballast-fill sloped to the edges of the mighty river. And the river blazed there in the great blank radiance of the moon, cool waters gently lapped small gluts and pockets of the shore, and in the great wink of the moon the river blazed more brightly than elves' gold. And farther off, where darkness met it, the light was broken into scallop-shells of gold; it swam and shimmered in a billion winks of fire like a school of herrings on the water, and beyond all that there was just the dark, the cool-flowing mystery of velvet-hearted night, the silent, soundless surge and coolness of the strange, the grand, the haunting, the unceasing river.

  Far, far away in darkness, on the other shore--more than a mile away--the river met the fringes of the land, but where the river ended, or the land began, was hard to say. There was just there a greater darkness, perhaps just by a shade, a deeper, dark intensity of night--a dark, perhaps, a shade less lucent, smooth, and fluid, by an indefinable degree more solid.

  Yet there were lights there--there were lights--a bracelet of a few, hard lights along the river, a gem-like incandescence, few and hard and bright, and so poignantly lost and lonely in enormous darkness as are all lights in America, sown sparsely on the enormous viewless mantle of the night, and by that pattern so defining it--a scheme of sparse, few lights, hard, bright and small, sown there upon night's enormous darkness, the great earth's secret and attentive loneliness, its huge, abiding mystery.

  And for ever, beyond the mysterious river's farthest shore, the great earth waited in the darkness, and was still. It waited there with the huge, attentive secrecy of night and of America, and of the wilderness of this everlasting earth on which we live; and its dark visage that we cannot see was more cruel, strange and lonely than the visage of dark death, and its rude strength more savage and destructive than a tiger's paw, and its wild, mysterious loveliness more delicate than magic, more desireful than a woman's flesh, and more thrilling, secret and seductive than a woman's love.

  As he stood there, tranced in that powerful spell of silence and of night, he heard swift footsteps running down the station stairs, he turned and saw Joel Pierce approaching. He ran forward quickly, his tall, thin figure clad in a blue coat and white flannels, alive with the swift boyish eagerness that was one of his engaging qualities.

  "Gosh!" he said, in his eager whispered tone, panting a little as he came up, "--I'm sorry that I'm late: we have people staying at the house; I had to drive a woman who's been staying with us to Poughkeepsie--I tried to get you there, but your train had already gone. I drove like hell getting here.--It's good to see you!" he burst out in his eager whispering way--at once so gentle, and so friendly and spontaneous--"It's swell that you could come!" he whispered enthusiastically. "Come on! They're all waiting for you!"

  And picking up his friend's valise, he walked swiftly across the platform and began to climb the stairs.

  Although Joel Pierce would have spoken in this way to any friend--to anyone for whom he had a friendly feeling, however casual--and although the other youth knew that he would have spoken this way to many other people--the words filled him with happiness, with an instinctive warmth and affection for the person who had spoken them. Indeed, the very fact that there wa
s in Joel's words--in all his human relationships--this curious impersonality, gave what he said an enhanced value. For in this way Joel revealed instinctively what everyone who knew him well felt about him--an enormous decency and radiance in his soul and character, a wonderfully generous and instinctive friendliness towards humanity--that became finer and more beautiful because of its very impersonality.

  This warm, instinctive humanity was evident in all he did, it came out somehow in the most casual words and relationships with people. For example, when they went upstairs into the station waiting-room, which was completely empty, Joel paused for a moment at the booking-office window and spoke to a man in shirt-sleeves inside.

  "Joe," he said casually yet in his eager, whispering way, "if Will comes down will you tell him not to wait? I've got everyone: there'll be no one else tonight."

  "All right, Mr. Pierce," the man said quietly. "If I see him, I'll tell him."

  Joel's car, a small, cheap one of a popular make, was backed up against the station curb: he opened the door and put his friend's suitcase in the back, then they both got in and drove away.

  About two miles back from town upon the crest of a hill that gave a good view of the great moon-wink of the noble and haunting river far below, Joel suddenly, and without slackening his reckless speed, swerved from the concrete highway into a dusty and gravel road that went off to the left. And now they were really in the heart of the deep country: on each side of them the moon-drenched fields and dreaming woods of a noble, grand and spacious land slept in the steep, white silence of the moon. From time to time they would pass corn-fields, the high and silent stature, the cool figure of the corn at night, and see a great barn, or small lights burning in some farmer's house. Then there would be only the deep, dark mystery of sleeping woods beside the road and once, in a field, a herd of cows, all faced one way, bedded down upon their forequarters, the mottled colours of their hides showing plainly in the blazing radiance of the moon. When they had gone about a mile their road swept into another one that joined it at right angles: between these roads, in the angle that they formed, there was a pleasant house--a wooden structure of eight or ten rooms, white and graceful in the moon, and surrounded by a trim, well-kept lawn and well laid-out flower-plots and gardens.

  A swift and pleasurable conviction told the youth that this was Joel's house: he was therefore surprised when the car shot past without slackening its speed and then turned left upon the other road. He turned to Joel and, almost with a note of protest in his voice, said:

  "Don't you live there? Isn't that your house?"

  "What?" Joel whispered quickly, startled from the focal concentration of his driving. He turned to his companion with a surprised inquiring look. "Oh, that house?" he went on at once. "No," he said softly. "That's not our house.--That is, it is our house," he corrected himself, "it belongs to us, but a friend of ours--Margaret Telfair--lives there now. You'll meet her tonight," he went on casually. "She's at the house now.--You'll like her," he whispered with soft conviction, "--she's grand! An incredible person!" he whispered enthusiastically.

  They drove on in silence for some time: more moon-drenched fields, great barns and little farmhouses, and herds of crouching cattle, more dreaming and mysterious woods, the mysterious shadows of great trees against the road, and secrecy, and sweet balsamic scents and cool-enfolding night.--They were now driving back in the direction of the river: the new road led that way.

  "When do we come to your place, Joel?" the other youth asked, when they had driven on in silence for a time. "How far is it?"

  "What?" Joel whispered quickly, again turning his radiant and inquiring face. "Our place? Oh!" he said. "We're on our place now."

  "On it?" the other stammered, after a moment's bewildered pause. "But--but--where--I didn't see a gate or anything--when?--"

  "Oh," Joel whispered, with an enlightened air. "That! We passed it."

  "Passed it? Where?"

  "When we turned in from the main road," Joel whispered. "Do you remember?"

  "The--the main road?" the other stammered. "You--you mean--that concrete highway way back there?"

  "Yes," Joel whispered. "That was the entrance to our place--one of them. It's not much of an entrance," he whispered apologetically. "I don't wonder that you couldn't see it."

  "Then--then--everything since then--all we passed--all this--?" the other stammered.

  "Yes," Joel whispered, with his radiant, eager look, "that's it. That's our place. It's really grand country," he went on matter-of-factly. "I want to show you around tomorrow."

  They swept suddenly around a curve of the gravelled road, bordered with fragrant shrubs. Before them stretched out an immense sward of velvet lawn, darkened by the grand and silent stature of great trees. The car swept forward; through the tree-barred vista of the lawn, the outline of a house appeared. It was a dream-house, a house such as one sees only in a dream--the moonlight slept upon its soaring wings, its white purity, and gave the whole enormous structure an aerial delicacy, a fragile loveliness like some enchanted structure that one sees in dreams. And yet, for all this quality of dream-enchantment, there was something hauntingly familiar about it too. The car swept around the drive and halted before the moonlit façade of the house. A back porch level with the ground was flanked by tall, square columns of graceful, slender wood. To one side, far below, beyond the house, and the great moon-sweep of velvet, he could see the wink and glimmer of the Hudson River.

  And suddenly that haunting sense of familiarity fused to a blind flash of recognition. The house was the house he had passed a dozen times in darkness, had seen a dozen times at morning from the windows of a speeding train along the river, as he hurtled citywards again from those blind night passages of desire and fury in a town called Troy.

  They got out of the car. Joel took his valise, and like a person walking in a dream, he followed him across the porch, into a large and dimly lit entrance-hall. Joel put his valise down in the hall, and turning, whispered:

  "Look. I'll show you your room later. Mums and some other people are waiting for us on the terrace. Let's go and say hello to them first."

  He nodded, unable to speak, and in silence followed his guide down the hall and through the house. Joel opened a door: the blazing moonlight fell upon the vast, swarded lawn and sleeping woods of that magic domain known as Far Field Farm. And that haunting and unearthly radiance fell as well upon the white wings of that magic house and on a group of its fortunate inhabitants who were sitting on the terrace.

  The two young men went out: forms rose to greet them.

  LX

  A group of eight or ten people were gathered on the terrace. Joel introduced Eugene swiftly, quietly, in an eager, whispering voice, as always, with his fine, kind intuition, mindful of another person's embarrassment and confusion: the moonlit figures rose, looked toward him, passed and swam and mixed around him in a blur of names and moon-white faces and politely murmured words. Then all the figures resolved themselves again into their former positions; he was standing beside Joel's mother, looking at her with a helpless and bewildered face; she put one hand swiftly, lightly on his arm, and in a kind and quiet voice said to him: "You sit down here, next to me."

  Then she sat down again in her chair--a big, wicker chair with a vast, fan-shaped back, he sat down beside her, and sank gratefully into oblivion while the other people resumed their interrupted conversation.

  "No, but--Polly! Surely not! You know, she actually did not go through with it?" said a strong, protesting voice, in which yet an eager curiosity was evident. "You know, they stopped the thing before she went the whole way?"

  "My dear," said Polly firmly--she had evidently been well named: in the moonlight her face showed sharp and pointed, with a big nose, and the shrewd, witty, and rather malicious features of a parrot--"my dear, I know she did. I was visiting Alice Bellamy at Newport when it happened: I got the whole story straight from her. The family were perfectly frantic--they were calling Hugh Bel
lamy up or running in to see him a dozen times a day to find out if something could be done--how to get it annulled--But I tell you," Polly cried, shaking her head obstinately and speaking in a tone of unmistakable conviction, "--I know what I'm talking about! There's no doubt about it whatever--she married him--the ceremony was actually performed--"

  "And she really lived with him--with this--this stable-boy?"

  "Lived with him!" Polly cried. "My dear, they'd been living together for almost two weeks before old Dick Rossiter found them. Now, of course," she said piously, but with a faint, malicious smirk, "--I don't know what they'd been doing all that time--perhaps the whole affair had been quite idyllic, but--well, my dear, you can use your own imagination. My own experience with ostlers is rather limited, but I shouldn't think they were particularly renowned for their platonic virtues."

  "No," said Mrs. Pierce quietly, but with an unmistakable note of level and obdurate cynicism in her voice, "--nor Ellen Rossiter either--not if I know the breed! . . . After all," she went on in a moment, in a voice that was characterized by its grimly quiet conviction, "what else could you expect out of that crowd? . . . There's bad blood there! Bad blood in the whole lot of them," her voice rose on a formidable and powerful note of unrelenting judgment. "--Everyone in Society knows that old Steve Buchanan, that girl's grandfather, was a thorough-going rotter," she bit the word off almost viciously. "His reputation was so bad that most people wouldn't even have him in their house--that was the reason he spent the last twenty years of his life in France: he had become an outcast over here, no one would speak to him--he had to get out!--But! Heavens! A stable-boy!" she laughed again, and this time her laugh was almost hard and ugly. "What a blow to Myra--after all her years of scheming and contriving to get Timmy Wilson and his millions into the family! . . . I knew it! I knew it!" she shook her head with formidable, obstinate conviction. "I could have told them long ago they'd have trouble with that girl before they were done with her! There's bad blood there! Of course, it was bound to happen, sooner or later, anyway--Myra's a fool of the first water: she never had the brains of a rabbit. But to think!--Heavens! what a let-down after all her scheming: a stable-boy! I bet she had a fit!"