OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Um," the mother now remarked, her gaunt bare smile set grimly, formidably, on her weathered face. "That takes a bit of doin', doesn't it?" And as she spoke these quiet words her grim smile never faltered for an instant and there was a hard, an obdurate, an almost savage irony in her intonation, which left them all completely unperturbed.

  "Oh, a 'strawd'n'ry thing! A 'strawd'n'ry thing!" the huge clerical creature whispered dreamily at this point, as if he had not heard them. And delicately he set his little cup back on the saucer.

  Eugene's first impulse when he saw and heard them was to shout with an astounded laughter--and yet, somehow, one never laughed. They had a formidable and impregnable quality that silenced laughter: a quality that was so assured in its own sense of inevitable rightness that it saw no other way except its own, and was so invincibly sure in its own way that it was indifferent to all others. It could be taken among strange lands and alien faces, and to the farthest and most savage colonies on earth, and would never change or alter by a jot.

  Yes, they had found a way, a door, a room to enter, and there were walls about them now, and the way was theirs. The mark of dark time and the architecture of unnumbered centuries of years were on them, and had made them what they were; and what they were, they were, and would not change.

  Eugene did not know if their way was a good way, but he knew it was not his. Their door was one he could not enter. And suddenly the naked empty desolation filled his life again, and he was walking on beneath the timeless sky, and had no wall at which to hurl his strength, no door to enter by, and no purpose for the furious unemployment of his soul. And now the worm was eating at his heart again. He felt the slow interminable waste and wear of grey time all about him and his life was passing in the darkness, and all the time a voice kept saying: "Why? Why am I here now? And where shall I go?"

  When Eugene got out into the High Street after dinner, the dark air would be thronging with the music of great bells, and there would be a smell of fog and smoke and old October in the air, the premonitory thrill and menace of some intolerable and nameless joy. Often at night, the visage of the sky would by some magic be released from the thick greyness that had covered it by day, and would shine forth barely, blazing with flashing and magnificent stars.

  And, as the old bells thronged through the smoky air, the students would be passing along the street, singly or in groups of two or three, briskly, and with the eager haste that told of meetings to come, appointments to be kept, the expectation of some good fortune, happiness, or pleasure toward which they hurried on.

  The soft glow of lights would shine from the ancient windows of the colleges, and one could hear the faint sounds of voices, laughter, sometimes music.

  Then Eugene would go to different pubs and drink until the closing time. Sometimes the proctors would come into a pub where he was drinking, speak amicably to everyone, and in a moment more go out again.

  Somehow he always hoped that they would take him for a student. He could see them stepping up to him, as he stood there at the bar, saying courteously, yet gravely and sternly:

  "Your name and college, sir?"

  Then he could see the look of astonished disbelief on their grim red faces when he told them he was not a student, and at last, when he had convinced them, he could hear their crestfallen muttered-out apologies, and would graciously excuse them.

  But the proctors never spoke to him, and the bar-man, seeing him look at them as they went out one night, misunderstood the look and laughed with cheerful reassurance:

  "You've nothing at all to worry about, sir. They won't bother you. It's only the gentlemen at the university they're after."

  "How do they know I'm not there?"

  "That I couldn't tell you, sir," he answered cheerfully, "but they 'ave a way of knowin'! Ah, yes!" he said with satisfaction, slapping a wet cloth down upon the bar. "They 'ave a way of knowin', right enough! They're a clever lot, those chaps. A very clever lot, sir, and they always 'ave a way of knowin' when you're not." And smiling cheerfully, he made a vigorous parting swipe across the wood, and put the cloth away below the counter.

  Eugene's glass was almost empty and he looked at it, and wondered if he ought to have another. He thought they made them very small, and kept thinking of the governors of North and South Carolina. It was a fine, warm, open sort of pub, and there was a big fire-place just behind him, crackling smartly with a fire of blazing coals: he could feel the warmth upon his back. Outside, in the fog-numb air, people came by with lonely rapid footsteps and were lost in fog-numb air again.

  At this moment the bar-maid, who had bronze-red hair and the shrewd witty visage of a parrot, turned and called out in a cheerful, crisply peremptory tone: "Time, please, gentlemen. Closing time."

  Eugene put the glass down empty on the bar again. He wondered what the way of knowing was.

  It was October, about the middle of the month, at the opening of the Michaelmas term. Everywhere there was the exultant thrill and bustle of returning, of a new life, a new adventure beginning in an ancient and beautiful place that was itself enriched by the countless lives and adventures of hundreds of years which had come and gone. In the morning there was the smoky old-gold yellow of the sun, the numb excitement of the foggy air, a smell of good tobacco, beer, grilled kidneys, ham and sausages, and grilled tomatoes, a faint nostalgic smell of tea, and incredibly, somehow, in that foggy old-gold light, a smell of coffee--an intolerable, maddening, false, delusive smell, for when one went to find the coffee it would not be there: the coffee was black liquid mud, bitter, lifeless, and undrinkable.

  Everything was very expensive and yet it made you feel rich yourself just to look at it. The little shops, the wine shops with their bay windows of small leaded glass, and the crusty opulence of the bottles of old port and sherry and the burgundies, the mellow homely warmth and quietness of the interior, the tailor shops, the tobacco shops with their selected grades of fine tobacco stored in ancient crocks, the little bell that tinkled thinly as you went in from the street, the decorous, courteous, yet suavely good-natured proprietor behind the counter, who had the ruddy cheeks, the flowing brown moustache and the wing-collar of the shopkeeper of solid substance, and who would hold the crock below your nose to let you smell the moist fragrance of a rare tobacco before you bought, and would offer you one of his best cigarettes before you left--all of this gave somehow to the simplest acts of life and business a ritualistic warmth and sanctity, and made you feel wealthy and secure.

  And everywhere around Eugene in the morning there was the feeling of an imminent recovery, a recapture of a life that had always been his own. The buildings seemed to come from some essence of reality he had always known, but had never seen, and could scarcely believe in now, even when he put his hand upon the weathered surface of the stone.

  And this look kept shining at him through the faces of the people. Sometimes it was in the faces of the college boys, but more often he saw it in the people of the town. It was in the faces of tradesmen--people in butcher shops, wine shops, clothing stores--and sometimes it was in the faces of women, at once common, fine, familiar, curiously delicate and serene, going to the markets, in the foggy old-bronze light of morning, and of men who passed by wearing derby hats and with wing collars. It was in the faces of a man and his son, good-humoured little red-faced bullocks, packed with life, who ran a pub in the Cowley Road near the house where, later, he went to live.

  It was a look round, full, ruddy, and serene in its good nature and had more openness and mellow humour in it than Eugene had found in the faces of the people in New England. It was more like the look of country people and small-town people in the South. Sometimes it had the open tranquil ruddiness, the bovine and self-satisfied good humour of his uncle, Crockett Pentland, and sometimes it was like Mr. Bailey, the policeman, whom the negro killed one winter's night, when snow was on the ground and all the bells began to ring. And then it was full and hearty like the face of Mr. Ernest Pegram, who was the City Plumb
er and lived next door to Eugene's father, or it was plump, common, kindly, invincibly provincial, ignorant and domestic, like the face of Mrs. Higginson, who lived across the street, and had herself been born in England, who had a family of eight children and three baking days a week, and was a playing, singing, and fanatic Baptist; yet on her common kindly face was the same animal, gentle, smoke-like delicacy of expression round the mouth that some of these men and women had.

  It was a life that seemed so near to Eugene that he could lay his hand on it and make it his at any moment. He seemed to have returned to a room he had always known, and to have paused for a moment, without any doubt or perturbation of the soul, outside the door.

  But he never found the door, or turned the knob, or stepped into the room. When he got there he couldn't find it. It was as near as his hand if he could only reach it, only as high as his heart and yet he could not reach it, only a hand's breadth off if he would span it, a word away if he would speak it. Only a stride, a move, a step away was all the peace, the certitude, the joy--and home for ever--for which his life was panting, and he was drowning in the darkness.

  He never found it. The old smoke-gold of morning would be full of hope and joy and imminent discovery but afternoon would come and the soft grey humid skies pressed down on him with their huge numb waste and weight and weariness of intolerable time, and the empty naked desolation filled his body.

  He would walk that legendary street past all those visible and enchanted substances of time and see the students passing through the college gates, the unbelievable velvet green of college quads, and see the huge dark room of peace and joy that time had made, and he had no way of getting into it.

  Each day he walked about the town and breathed the accursed languid softness of grey foreign air, that had no bite or sparkle in it, and went by all their fabulous age-encrusted walls of Gothic time, and wondered what in the name of God he had to do with all their walls or towers, or how he could feed his hunger on the portraits of the Spanish king, and why he was there, why he had come!

  Sometimes it was just a word, the intonation of a phrase--the way they would say "very" or "American," which chilled and withered all the ardours of the heart, or the way they would say "Thank you!" when you paid for something, crisply, courteously, yet with a quick, cautious, and obdurate finality, as if someone had swiftly and firmly closed a door lest you should try to enter it. Eugene could listen to them talk and hear all the words, the moods and tones of life and humour that he had known all his life, until it seemed that he could foresee the very stories they were going to tell, the very situations they were going to describe--and then in an instant all the familiar pattern of their speech would vanish, and their words could not have been stranger to him had they spoken in a foreign tongue.

  Thus, as Eugene looked at the young undergraduates playing in the fields below the house, their shouts and cries, the boyish roughness of their play, their strong scurfed knees, and panting breath, evoked the image of a life so familiar to him that he felt all he had to do to enter it again was to walk across the velvet width of lawn that separated him from it. But if he passed these same people two hours later in the High Street, their lives, their words were stranger than in a dream, or they seemed to have an incredible fictitious quality that made everything they did or said seem false, mannered, and affected, so that when he listened to them he had a feeling of resentment and contempt for them as if they spoke and moved with the palpable falseness of actors.

  Eugene would see two young fellows before a college gate, and one, fragile of structure, with a small lean head, a sheaf of straight blond hair and thin sensitive features which were yet sharply and strongly marked, would be talking to another youth, his hands thrust jauntily into the pockets of his baggy grey trousers as he talked and the worn elegance of his baggy coat falling across his hands in folds of jaunty well-worn smartness.

  "I say!" the youth would be saying in his crisp, rapid, sharply blurred inflections that seemed to come out of lips that barely moved. "Where were you last night? We missed you at the party in old Lambert's rooms, you know. Everyone wondered why you didn't turn up."

  "Oh," the other said (but the way he said this word sounded almost like "Ow" to Eugene). "Did they? I'm frightfully sorry to have missed it, but I simply couldn't get thöh. Had dinner with a chap I know at Magdalen. His sister's down for a day or so, and later on I simply couldn't break away.--How was the party?"

  "Ow!" the other cried, casting his head back with a strong quick movement and an exultant little laugh. "Ripping! Simply ripping! What a shame you had to miss it! Old Fenton got quite squiffy about ten o'clock," he went on affectionately and with his exultant little laugh, "and really it was priceless! He insisted on doing an imitation of Queen Victoria sitting down to read The Times--Ow!" he cried exultantly again, casting his head up with a sharp strong movement, "the whole thing was convulsing!--To see old Fenton settle down!" he cried, "to see him look round suspiciously," he whispered, still maintaining the perfect dramatic sharpness of his inflection as he looked round with a descriptive gesture, "to see him wait uneasily to see what's going to happen--finally to see the look of blissful satisfaction and contentment gradually stealing over his face," he whispered rapturously, "as he settles back to read The Times in peace--ow!" he cried again, as he cast back his small head with an exultant laugh, "--the whole thing was really too superb!--it really was, you know! Lambert was quite convulsed! We had to lift him up and stretch him out upon the bed before he got his breath again."

  In conversations such as these, in the choice and accent of the words, the sharp crisp and yet blurred inflections of the speech, even in the jaunty nonchalance of hands in pockets, the hang and fold of the coat, in the exultant little laugh and the sharp strong upward movement of the small lean head, there was something alien, suave, and old. To Eugene it seemed to be the style of a life that was far older, more suavely knowing and mature, than any he had ever known, so that at such a time as this, these young boys who on the playing fields had almost the appearance of tousled overgrown urchins, now seemed far more assured and sophisticated than he could ever be.

  At the same time, the sound and inflection of their words--their assured exercise of a style of language that knew exactly where to use and how to inflect such words as "very," "quite," "superb," "priceless," "terribly," "marvellous," and so on--this style and use seemed to Eugene almost false, fictional, affected, and theatrical.

  He felt this way chiefly because he had read about such people all his life in books and for the most part had heard them speak in this manner only in smart plays upon the stage. He was always connecting these young Englishmen with actors in the theatre, and for a moment his mind would resentfully accuse them of being nothing but cheap and affected actors themselves and, bitterly, of "trying to talk with an English accent"--a phrase which obviously had no meaning, since they were only speaking their own language in the way they had been taught to speak it.

  But then, at tea-time, Eugene would see these youths again in Buol's, flirting, with the clumsy naïveté of a grubby schoolboy, with a leering rawboned hag of a waitress, and obviously getting the thrill of their lives from the spurious grins which this dilapidated strumpet flashed at them through her artificial teeth. Or, as he went up the road towards his house at night, he would pass them standing in the dark shadows of the stormy trees, with their arms clumsily clasped around the buttocks of a servant girl, and their lives seemed unbelievably young, naked, and innocent again.

  Around Eugene was the whole structure of an enchanted life--a life hauntingly familiar and just the way he had always known it would be--and now that he was there, he had no way of getting into it. The inn itself was ancient, legendary, beautiful, elfin, like all the inns he had ever read about, and yet all of the cheer, the warmth, the joy and comfort he had dreamed of finding in an inn was lacking.

  Upstairs the halls went crazily up and down at different levels, one mounted steps, went down again, g
ot lost and turned around in the bewildering design of the ancient added-on-to structure--and this was the way he had always known it would be. But the rooms were small, cold, dark, and dreary, the lights were dim and dismal, you stayed out of your room as much as possible and when you went to bed at night you crawled in trembling between clammy sheets, and huddled there until the bed was warm. When you got up in the morning there was a small jug of warm water at your door with which to shave, but the jug was too small, you poured it out into the bowl and shaved yourself and added cold water from the pitcher, then, in order to get enough to wash your face and hands. Then you got out of the room and went downstairs as quickly as you could.

  Downstairs it would be fine. There would be a brisk fire crackling in the hearth, the old smoke-gold of morning and the smell of fog, the crisp cheerful voices of the people and their ruddy competent morning look, and the cheerful smells of breakfast, which was always liberal and good, the best meal that they had: kidneys and ham and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and tea.

  But at night there would come the huge boiled-flannel splendour of the dinner, the magnificent and prayerful service of the waiter, who served you with such reverent grace from heavy silver platters that you felt the food must be as good as everything looked. But it never was.

  Eugene ate at a large table, in the centre of the dining-room, provided by a thoughtful management for such isolated waifs and strays as himself. The food looked very good, and was, according to the genius of the nation, tasteless. How they ever did it he could never tell: everything was of the highest quality and you chewed upon it mournfully, wearily, swallowing it with the dreary patience of a man who has been condemned for ever to an exclusive diet of boiled unseasoned spinach. There was a kind of evil sorcery, a desolate and fathomless mystery in the way they could take the choicest meats and vegetables and extract all the succulence and native flavour from them, and then serve them up to you magnificently with every atom of their former life reduced to the general character of stewed hay or well-boiled flannel.