OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  Later he could remember just four things that had held him there in that great provincial town. They were a river, two restaurants, and a girl. The river was the Rhône; it came foaming out of the Alps to form at Lyons its juncture with the Saône. Day after day he sat on a café terrace looking at the river; it foamed past bright and glacial, green as emerald, cold and shining, bearing in for ever its message of the Alps, the thaw of crystal ice, the coming on of spring. All of the coming of the spring was somehow written in the cold, sparkling and unforgettable green loveliness of that shining water; it haunted him like something he had always known, like something he had found, like something he would one day discover.

  The food in the town was incomparable. It was a native cookery, a food belonging to the region--plain, pungent, peasant-like and nobly good; there is in all the world no better cooking than can be found in the great provincial town of Lyons.

  At two places there, La Mère Guy's and La Mère Filliou's, they call their best cooks by the name of "mother." They offer eating fit for kings, yet all so reasonable and plain that almost any man can afford it. La Mère Guy's establishment is in an old house with various old rooms all used as restaurants. The floor is sanded, there are no suave carpets, no low murmuring of refined voices, no thin tinkle of musical glasses, none of the suave, worldly luxury that one finds in the great restaurants of Paris. It is a place not made for tourists--for Lyons is not a tourist town, and what tourist before ever came there to eat?--It is a place made for the Lyonnais--according to their taste--and one will find them there at Mother Guy's and Filliou's, in all their robust, straightforward eating earnestness. Mother Filliou's is a more open sort of place than Mother Guy's; it is across the river, away from the central part of Lyons, which is on an island formed by the green girdling of the Rhône and Saône. At Mother Filliou's one can look inside; when the weather permits, most people eat outside on a terrace: Mother Filliou's has more sunlight, open air, and gaiety, but the rooms at Mother Guy's have a more convenient, closed, and homely appearance. Both places are crowded with solid-looking Lyonnais of both sexes, their faces filled with sanguinary life, their voices loud and robust, their napkins tucked in under their chins, as they set heartily to work.

  The food is largely chicken, beef, and fish, superbly cooked. One will never forget the chicken at Mother Guy's or Mother Filliou's: the chicken is plump and tender country chicken, fresh from the lovely countryside near Lyons; it is so crisp and succulent it almost melts away in your mouth. The beef is thick and juicy and tender, everything is cooked plainly, but with all the peasant spice and pungency; they like spicy and robust relishes, and one eats whole onions, pickled in a kind of brine. There, people drink only one wine, but that is Beaujolais, a plain, grand wine that in this town is cheaper than mineral water, and seems made by nature to wash down such victuals as these people eat.

  On the opposite side of the central isle of Lyons, which is the side bounded by the Saône, there is a steep hill surmounted by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, a famous place of pilgrimage for the devout. And there, one day, while pilgrims filed in to see the relics and pay devotion to their saint, and while some monks were chanting from their sonorous and reverberating litany through the great spaces, he saw a girl he could not forget: she sat down across the aisle from him, looked at him, smiled drowsily. She was small, plump; her figure was erotically seductive; she raised her head, and seemed to listen drowsily to chanting monks, and he saw that in her neck, a warm, slow pulse was beating--slowly, slowly, richly, warmly beating. She turned her eyes, which were grey and smoky with a cat-like potency, and looked at him again, smiled drowsily, and slowly crossed her heavy legs with a slow, sensual sliding of warm silk. And all the time the pulse beat slowly, richly, with a drowsy warmth of maddening and hot desire--and that was the last of the four things he saw, remembered, and could not forget of Lyons.

  A shining river, emerald-green, and magic with its Alpine prescience of spring, of known, undiscovered loveliness; the noble cooking of Mother Guy and Mother Filliou; a pulse in the throat of an unknown girl that beat its slow, warm promise of fulfilled desire--these, of a town of more than six hundred thousand lives and faces, were all that later clearly would remain.

  The rest was smoke and silence--some faces here and there, a scheme of streets, an enormous square, a hill crowned with a pilgrim's church, a priest, broad-hatted, with slit mouth and gimlet eyes, some museum relics out of ancient Gaul--all fugitive and broken, gone like smoke.

  . . . An emerald river and a shining light; some glorious cookery and drink; the pulse-beat in the warm throat of a girl--these would remain. Smoke! Smoke! has it been otherwise with any man?

  And again, he was hurtling southward in a train.

  C

  Time, please, time. . . . What time is it? . . . Gentlemen, it's closing time. . . . Time, gentlemen . . . that time of year thou mayst in me behold. . . . In the good old summer-time. . . . I keep thinking of you all the time . . . all the time . . . and all the time. . . . A long time ago the world began. . . . There goes the last bell, run, boy, run: you'll just have time. . . . There are times that make you ha-a-ap-py, there are times that make you sa-a-ad. . . . Do you remember the night you came back to the University: it was that time right after your brother's death, you had just come back that night; I know I was coming across the campus before Old East when I saw you coming up the path with a suitcase in your hand. It was raining, but we both stopped and began to talk there--we stepped in under one of the oak-trees because it was raining. I can still remember the old, wet, shining bark of the tree--the reason I can remember is that you put your hand out and leaned against the tree as you talked to me and I kept thinking how tall you were--of course you didn't notice it, you weren't conscious of it, but you had your head up and it must have been about eight feet above the ground. But I can remember everything we said that night--it was that time when you came back just after your brother's death: that's when it was all right, I guess that's why I can remember it so well. . . . It's time all little boys were in bed. . . . Now, boy, I'll tell you when it was: it was that time your Papa made that trip to California--the reason that I know is I had just got a letter from him that morning written from Los Angeles telling me how he had seen John Balch and old Professor Truman, and how they had both gone into the real-estate business out there, and both of them getting rich by leaps and bounds--but that's just exactly when it was, sir, the time he made that trip out there in 1906, along towards the end of February, and I had just finished reading his letter when--well, as I say now . . . Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes . . . time of my father's time, life of his life. "Ah, Lord," he said, "I knew them all--and all of them are gone. I'm the only one that's left. By God! I'm getting old." . . . In the year that the locusts came, something that happened in the year the locusts came, two voices that I heard there in that year. . . . Child! Child! It seems so long ago since the year the locusts came, and all of the trees were eaten bare: so much has happened, and it seems so long ago. . . .

  "To keep time with!"--To Eugene Gant, Presented to Him on the Occasion of His Twelfth Birthday, by His Brother, B. H. Gant, October 3, 1912. . . . "To keep time with!" . . . Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep in the hill, Ben, cold, cold, cold.

  "Ces arbres--"

  "Monsieur?" a thin, waxed face of tired Gaul, professionally attentive, the eyebrows arched perplexedly above old tired eyes, the waiter's fatigued napkin on the arm.

  "--Monsieur--?"

  "Ces arbres--" he stammered, pointing helplessly--"J'ai--j'ai--mais je les ai vu--avant--"

  "Monsieur?"--the eyebrows still more patient, puzzled and concerned, the voice wrought with attention--"vous dites, monsieur?"

  "J'ai dit que--ces arbres--je les ai vu--" he blundered helplessly, and suddenly muttered, with a face gone sullen and ashamed--"Ça ne fait rien--l'addition, s'il vous plaît."

  The waiter stared at him a moment with courteous, slightly pained aston
ishment, then smiled apologetically, shrugged his shoulders slightly in a movement of defeat, and saying, "Bien, monsieur," took the ten-franc note upon the table, counted the racked saucers, and made change for him.

  When the waiter had gone, he sat for a moment staring at the trees. It was in the month of April, it was night, he was alone on the café terrace, and yet the chill air was touched with a fragrance that was soft, thrilling and mysterious--a citrous fume, the smell of unknown flowers, or perhaps not even this--but only the ghost of a perfume, the thrilling, barren, and strangely seductive odour of Provence.

  It was a street in the little town of Arles, at night--an old, worn, rutted, curiously dirty-looking street, haunted by the trunks of immense and dusty-looking trees. He had never been here before, the scene was strange and haunting as a dream, and yet it was instantly and intolerably familiar. It was, somehow, he thought, like a street he had been to in some small town in the hot South at the faded end of summer--a South Carolina town, he thought it must be, and he was sure that he would hear the sound of familiar, unknown voices, the passing of feet, the rustling of quiet, tired leaves. And then he saw again how strange it was, and could see the tired waiter racking chairs and tables for the night, and in the café tired lights and emptiness, and the white, tired light upon the old dusty street, the huge haunting boles of the great trees; and he knew that he had never been along that way before.

  Then he got up and walked away, and put his hand upon the trunk of one of the old trees: it was white and felt smooth to the touch, and was somewhat like the sycamores at home--and yet it was not this that haunted him with troubling memory. He felt, intolerably, that the place, the scene, the great wreathed branches of the trees, were something he had seen before--that he had seen it here from the same spot where now he sat--but when, when, when?

  And suddenly, with a thrill of recognition that flashed across his brain like an electric spark, he saw that he was looking at the same trees that Van Gogh had painted in his picture of the roadmenders at their work in Arles, that the scene was the same, that he was sitting where the painter had sat before. And he noted that the trees had tall, straight, symmetrical trunks, and remembered that the trees that Vincent had painted had great, tendoned trunks that writhed and twisted like creatures in a dream--and yet were somehow more true than truth, more real than this reality. And the great vinelike trunks of these demented trees had wound and rooted in his heart, so that now he could not forget them, nor see this scene in any other way than that in which Van Gogh had painted it.

  When he got up, the waiter was still racking chairs upon the tables, and the white and quiet light from the café fell like a tired stillness on the dusty street, and he walked away, haunted by unfathomed memories of home, and with something in his heart he could not utter.

  In all the dreams and visions that now swarmed across his sleep, dreams and visions which can only be described as haunted fatally by the sense of time--his mind seemed to exercise the same complete control it ever had shown in all the operations of its conscious memory. He slept, and knew he slept, and saw the whole vast structure of the sleeping world about him as he slept; he dreamed, and knew he dreamed, and like a sorcerer, drew upward at his will, out of dark deeps and blue immensities of sleep, the strange, dark fish of his imagining.

  Sometimes they came with elvish flakings of a hoary light, sometimes they came like magic and the promise of immortal joy; they came with victory and singing and a shout of triumph in his blood, and again he felt the strange and deathless joy of voyages: he was a passenger upon great ships again, he walked the broad, scrubbed decks exultantly, and smelled the hot, tarred roofs of powerful and ugly piers; he smelled the spermy sea-wrack of the harbour once again, the wastes of oil, the sharp, acrid and exultant smoke from busy little tugs, the odour of old, worn plankings, drenched with sunlight, and the thousand strange compacted spices of the laden piers. Again he felt the gold and sapphire loveliness of a Saturday in May, and drank the glory of the earth into his heart, and heard in lucent and lyrical air the heavy shattering "baugh" of the great ship's whistle, as it spoke gloriously, of springtime, new lands and departure. Again he saw ten thousand faces, touched with their strange admixture of sorrow and joy, swarm past the openings of the pier, and again he saw the flashing tides that girdled the city, whitened around the prows of a hundred boats and gleaming with a million iridescent points of light. Again the great walled cliff, the crowded isle, the fabulous spires and ramparts of the city, as delicate as the hues of light that flashed around them, slid away from him, and one by one, the great ships, with the proud sweep of their breasts of white, their opulent storeyed superstructure, their music of power and speed, fell into line at noon on Saturday. And now, like bridled horses held in leash, with princely chafe and curvetings, they breach the mighty harbour, nose the narrows, circle slowly to brief pauses at the pilot's boat, and then, like racers set loose from the barriers, they are sent away, their engines tremble to a mighty stroke, the ships are given to the sea, to solitude, and to their proper glory once more.

  And again he walked the decks, he walked the decks alone, and saw the glittering sea-flung city melt within his sight, and watched the sandy edges of the land fade away, and felt the incredible gold and sapphire glory of the day, the sparkle of dancing waters, and smelled salt, seaborne air again, and saw upon the decks the joyful and exultant faces of the passengers, their looks of wonder, hope, and speculation, as they looked into the faces of strange men and women, now by the miracle of the voyage and chance isled with them in the loneliness of water, upon the glorious prison of a ship. And again he saw the faces of the lovely women, and saw the lights of love and passion in their eyes, and again he felt the plangent and depthless undulance, the unforgettable feeling of the fathomless might of the sea beneath a ship; a wild cry was torn from his throat, and a thousand unutterable feelings of the voyage, of white coasts and sparkling harbours and the creaking, eerie cries of gulls, of the dear, green dwelling of the earth again, and of strange, golden cities, potent wines, delicious foods, of women, love, and amber thighs spread amorously in ripe golden hay, of discovery and new lands, welled up in him like deathless song and certitude.

  But just as these visions of delight and joy thronged upward through the deep marine of sleep, so, by the same fiat, the same calm order of an imperial will, the visions of a depthless shame, a faceless abomination of horror, an indefinable and impalpable corruption, returned to haunt his brain with their sentences of inexpiable guilt and ruin: under their evil spell he lay tranced upon his bed in a hypnosis of acquiescent horror, in a willing suspension of all his forces of resistance, like some creature held captive before the hypnotic rhythm of a reptile's head, the dull, envenomed fascination of its eye.

  He moved on ceaselessly across a naked and accursed landscape and beneath a naked and accursed sky, an exile in the centre of a planetary vacancy that, like his guilt and shame, had neither place among things living nor among things dead, in which there was neither vengeance of lightning nor mercy of burial, in which there was neither shade nor shelter, curve nor bend, nor hill, nor tree, nor hollow, in which--earth, air, sky, and limitless horizon--there was only one vast naked eye, inscrutable and accusing, from which there was no escape, and which bathed his naked soul in its fathomless depths of shame.

  And then the vision faded, and suddenly, with the bridgeless immediacy of a dream, he found himself within the narrow canyon of a street, pacing interminably along on endless pavements where there was neither face nor footfall save his own, nor eye, nor window, nor any door that he might enter.

  He thought he was walking through the harsh and endless continuity of one of those brown stone streets of which most of the city was constructed fifty years ago, and of which great broken lengths and fragments still remain. These streets, even if visited by someone in his waking hours, by some stranger in the fullness of health and sanity, and under the living and practical light of noon or, more particularly, by some
man stunned with drink, who came there at some desolate and empty hour of night, might have a kind of cataleptic horror, a visionary unreality, as if some great maniac of architecture had conceived and shaped the first harsh, ugly pattern of brown angularity, and then repeated it, without a change, into the infinity of illimitable repetition, with the mad and measureless insistence of an idiotic monotony.

  And for ever he walked the street, under the brown and fatal light that fell upon him. He walked the street, and looked for a house there that was his own, for a door he knew that he must enter, for someone who was waiting for him in the house, and for the merciful dark wall and door that would hide and shelter him from the immense and naked eye of shame that peered upon him constantly. For ever he walked the street and searched the bleak, untelling façades for the house he knew and had forgotten; for ever he prowled along before the endless and unchanging façades of the street, and he never found it, and at length he became aware of a vast sibilant whispering, of an immense conspiracy of subdued and obscene laughter, and of the mockery of a thousand evil eyes that peered in silence from these bleak façades, and that he could never find or see; and for ever he walked the streets alone and heard the immense and secret whisperings and laughter, and was bathed in the bottomless depths of a wordless shame, and could never find the house he had lost, the door he had forgotten.

  He was sitting in Marseilles, at a table on the terrace of a café on La Canebière, when he saw them. Suddenly, above the rapid and vociferous animation of the café crowd, he heard Starwick's strangely timbred voice, and turning, saw them seated at a table not a dozen feet away. Starwick had just turned to Elinor and was saying something quietly, in his tone of grave yet casual seriousness that often introduced his drolleries, and then he could see Starwick's ruddy face suffuse and deepen with his laughter, and Elinor's heavy shoulders begin to tremble, and then heard her shriek of high, astounded, and protesting merriment. Ann was seated listening, dark, silent, sullenly intent, with one long, slender hand resting upon the neck of the big dog who crouched quietly beside her, and suddenly her dark and sullen face was lighted by its rare and radiant smile that gave her features the instant configuration of noble beauty.