The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  “Oh, Angels in Heaven, listen to him! I was married to your father for twenty years. I bore him nine children. I was the happiest woman in Antofagasta.”

  “You were happy! You were happy!—Were we happy?”

  Rosa Dávilos started to reply when Clara said to them all, authoritatively, “Papa is watching us.”

  Ashley wiped his forehead. He all but groaned aloud. He seemed to himself to be dreaming—that is: present at one of those ten-act dramas of which we are simultaneously the spellbound spectator, the protagonist, and the unavowed author. A quarter of an hour later his eyes happened to meet those of Rosa Dávilos. As she looked at him expressions of astonishment and fear crossed her face. She drew herself up and assumed the air of a great lady. When the passengers descended at the next station she moved her family to another car. He walked down the village’s one sunbaked street. He stood by the water tower and the pepper tree. At intervals he heard the sounds of detonation from the plain—dynamite cracking the surface to extract the nitrate that would cross the seas to furnish instruments of death and to fertilize crops. “Life affords no second chances,” he thought. “Is this what growing older is—seeing always more clearly the things we failed to see?” When he returned to the train he found himself in the midst of another family—a party so large that it filled several benches. All were a little tipsy. They were celebrating the name day of a little old lady who sat opposite him, giggling sleepily. From time to time her children and grandchildren would lean down and embrace her, exclaiming noisily: “Mamita, you treasure!” “Abuelita, darling!” The men pressed drinks on him. He was introduced to them all and paid his compliments to the old lady. It is the diversity of life that renders thinking difficult. Many a beginning philosopher has been on the point of grasping the problem of suffering, but what sage can cope with that of happiness?

  At Manantiales he rented a room in the workers’ quarter. His depression lifted. He was young; he was well; he had escaped his pursuers. For the first time in a year he was in a temperate climate; the nights were cold. Best of all he was active. He repaired the flue in his landlady’s kitchen; he roused her son from torpor and together they cleaned the cistern. He sang. He made himself useful in the neighborhood and was invited to dinner. Imagine a gentleman getting himself dirty at tasks like that! It was “Don Jaime” here and “Don Jaime” there.

  It was said later of the Ashley children that they were all slow to mature. They were, but not as preposterously slow as their father. The principal harm in being thus fast or slow seems to be that the growing boy or girl may skip or skimp or over-prolong one or other of the automutative phases to which—as it were—the young are entitled. John Ashley of Pulley’s Falls, New York, had seen himself as the young Alexander conquering one world after another, but he had not been the boy who gives his life to working among lepers; he had been the knight crusader of the story books, but he had not seen himself as the statesman who would correct all the injustices in the social order. He had been a rebel only to the extent of erecting a wall between himself and his doting parents and of rejecting their idols. At engineering school he had calmly declared himself to be an atheist, only to commit himself to a more abject superstition: he had been certain that some agent was at his beck and call; catastrophes descended upon other people but not upon him; circumstances rushed forward to offer him whatever he most wanted. Above all, he had barely brushed that phase in late adolescence when every youth is an argumentative philosopher. Ashley in Manantiales was belatedly suffering pains that he should have endured twenty years before. At night he lay on the roof of his inn and gazed up at the constellations among the peaks. Like another young man in a story book thousands of miles away, he thought: “In infinite space, in infinite time, in infinite matter, an organism like a bubble is formed; it lasts a short while and then bursts; and that bubble is myself.”

  Another memory of his past life returned to torment him—his relations with his parents. John Ashley had eloped with Beata Kellerman on the day following his graduation from engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey. His parents had journeyed down from Pulley’s Falls, New York, to be present at the exercises. They had seen him carry off the honors, prize after prize. The next day they returned to their home; he was to follow them within the week. At Christmas he sent them a card without return address. He never wrote them, though he considered doing so in his happiness when Lily was born. Without resentment and with little cause for resentment both he and Beata had cut themselves off from their families. During all the intervening years this conduct had caused John Ashley no regret and no self-reproach. Only now, when his attention was so urgently directed toward the family life about him, did he begin to ask himself anxiously wherein he was to blame. Was he an unnatural son? Had this “unnaturalness” exerted a harmful influence in the life of his own family? Would his children, in turn—self-sufficient and without affection—disappear into the throng? Had there been something amiss in the life at “The Elms”? But there had been seventeen years of loving happiness there!

  Why, then, had María Icaza replied with scorn to his claim to having been happy?

  His father had been an honorable man, a leader in the community, the president of the bank in Pulley’s Falls. John was an only child, though he remembered that his parents had lost two children in infancy, two girls, before he was born. His father had been taciturn and undemonstrative, perhaps in reaction to his wife’s effusiveness. His mother idolized her son, adored him. Even in the religious realm, these emotions often conceal an unspoken contract. Adoration of a human being, under guise of self-effacement and humility, advances large claims and is an attempt at possession. John had a good disposition; his rejection of his mother’s demands on him never took the form of exasperation. He pretended to be unaware of them. He had in his life an example of the love which enlarges freedom; the summers he spent on his Grandmother Ashley’s farm were the happiest days he was ever to know. It came back to him now that his father had one trait that had then seemed to him to be embarrassing but unimportant. His father had been a miser—a clandestine miser. His house was run in comfort; he made his contribution to the church; but any financial demand that exceeded his precise budget tortured him. His wife spent a great deal of time and ingenuity in attempting to conceal the extent of his idiosyncrasy from the neighbors, but stories circulated of complicated maneuvers to save a “red cent”! It now struck Ashley for the first time that his father was rich, probably very rich. In addition to his work at the bank he was constantly buying and selling farms, houses, and stores. Now, in Manantiales, Ashley realized that he had formed himself to be the opposite of his father and that his life had been as mistaken as his father’s. The root of avarice is the fear of what circumstance may bring. The opposite of the miser is not the spendthrift of the parable—the prodigal son who wastes his substance in riotous living—but the grasshopper who heedlessly sings through a long summer. Ashley had lived without fear and without judgment.

  He groaned aloud. “Is that what family life is? The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?” Ashley’s wonderful grandmother had been an eccentric. He knew very little about her early life. She had been born a Roman Catholic in Montreal. Marrying his grandfather, a small farmer on rocky soil, she had attended his Methodist church. She had persuaded him to move fifty miles south to better soil. But something had gone wrong between them. She had joined one of those peculiar religious sects—rigidly ascetic, yet given to emotional camp meetings and to “speaking in tongues”—that were particularly prevalent in northern New York State. Her husband had left to seek gold in Alaska. She ran her farm alone with the help of a succession of unreliable “hands” and developed her extraordinary gift for handling animals. She was strong-minded and tirelessly active; lavish in the works but not
the words of love. She had sent her son to a small college from which he graduated to become the banker of Pulley’s Falls—living in that world of little triumphs and vast dreads, which is a miser’s life. Thereafter there had been no friendly bond between them. Had her very virtues been transmuted into her son’s avarice?

  Such is the endless chain of the generations?

  During those summers his grandmother had taken him to the Wednesday-evening prayer meetings at her church. He was surprised to see that there was no preacher. Some sat, some stood, some knelt. There were long silences. There were short hushed hymns. There were brief requests for patience, for death, for light. All churches henceforward seemed trivial to him who had known this self-forgetting urgency. The company seemed to be waiting for his grandmother to pray. When she had spoken the meeting came to an end. She arose and addressed the Lord without closing her eyes. She spoke with a strong French accent which, when she was in deep earnest, became almost unintelligible. Many times her contribution was brief. Her thought turned always on God’s plan for the universe. She asked to be shown her part in it. She complained of His slowness in its fulfillment. She asked that God be merciful to those who in wickedness or in ignorance had interfered with His great design. The air in the room became charged with electric energy. There was no doubt about it—it was her wickedness and ignorance that weighed her down—but all of her listeners took it on themselves. There was a murmuring and a rising and a sinking to the floor and a covering of eyes. John could not understand why his grandmother talked like that. She was the perfectest person he had ever known. Finally she consoled herself and the congregation by the conviction that God converts even our shortcomings to His own ends. She always ended by saying: “Let’s sing, ‘Come Holy Ghost and Make Thy Home.’”

  He understood her now.

  He lay on the roof of his inn and gazed up at the constellations. He was dog-tired and slept.

  The moment in his growth arrived when he felt the need to admire someone. His thoughts kept returning to that Mrs. Wickersham. He visited her hospital, her orphanage, her lace-making school for the blind. These first two were municipal institutions, but the town, the sisters, and the patients had no doubt that all were hers. He had not called with Andrew Smith’s letter at “the best hotel in South America”; that was rat catchers’ country. He saw her riding her black horse through the streets of the town—erect, authoritative, her iron grey hair pulled back to a low bun under her wide-brimmed Spanish hat, a red rose in her lapel—doing her marketing and visiting her institutions. Storekeepers and shopgirls rushed out into the street to kiss her hand; men stood with lowered attentive heads while she harangued them. She spoke the language of the working people even better than he did. She laughed. Everyone around her laughed. Ashley seldom laughed; he did not despise laughter, but it seemed to him to be prompted by unimportant digressions that delayed the sober occupations of life. His curiosity was aroused by Mrs. Wickersham and he was ready to admire her. He came to know the hours when she was absent from her hotel. One morning he went to the door of the Fonda and asked to see her. He was told she was out. He walked by the house boy into the reception room and said that he would wait.

  A number of the Conquistadores chose to end their days in the new world. It is hard to believe that they did not wish to return to that Spain of powerful compulsion—to Vizcaya, mother of seamen, even to Estremadura, whose beauties are not revealed to the hasty. They settled down in America, built themselves houses, and begot broadnosed children. But they had left a realm that was even closer to them than their birthplace and their land of adoption—the oceans which they had crossed and recrossed so many times. Their new homes were white without and within, with one exception. The walls of their reception rooms were painted blue from the floor to the level of a standing man’s eyes: the lower portion of the four walls was sea-blue, the sea on a day of sun and light breeze. Mrs. Wickersham had also brought the sea and the horizon into her reception room. From the ceiling above a center table hung the model of a sixteenth-century galleon. On the wall—embattled Presbyterian though she was—she had placed an enormous time-faded crucifix. Through the open door and windows the wealth of the garden threatened to inundate the room in a many-colored tide. For Ashley the function of a room was to be serviceable; it had never occurred to him that it could be beautiful. He who lacked so many qualities—humor, ambition, vanity, reflection—had never distinguished a category of the beautiful. Some pictures on grocers’ calendars had pleased him. At school he had been praised for the “beauty” of his mechanical drawings. We remember how on his flight through Illinois he had been overwhelmed by the beauty of dawn, and later of Chimborazo, and of his Chilean peaks. He sat down in a high-backed chair and looked about him. He became aware of an odd sensation in his throat: he sobbed. His eyes rested on the exhausted and submissive head on the wall before him. The world was a place of cruelty, suffering, and confusion, but men and women could surmount despair by making beautiful things, emulating the beauty of the first creation.

  He rested between sleeping and waking. He was abruptly aroused by a sharp voice. Mrs. Wickersham was standing at the door looking at him. She spoke with military truculence: “Who are you?”

  He rose quickly. “Is James Tolland here?” he asked.

  “James Tolland? I don’t know the name.”

  “I hoped he’d be here, Mrs. Wickersham. I’ll call later. Thank you, ma’am. Good morning.”

  The next day he continued his journey. He had his first nosebleed at nine thousand feet. He lay down on the floor of the train. He kept laughing quietly and the laughter hurt him. At the junction for Rocas Verdes he was met by two Spanish-speaking Indians. The connecting line had been interrupted by an avalanche; they must proceed on muleback. He rode five hours, half asleep, and spent the night in a hut by the road. He arrived at the mines at noon on the following day and was put to bed for twenty-four hours by the Dutch doctor.

  Several times he awoke and smelled violets or lavender. His mother’s clothes had been redolent of the sachets of violet that her husband had unfailingly given her at Christmas. Beata had cultivated beds of lavender at “The Elms”; her clothes and the household linen breathed lavender. It cost nothing. At times Ashley’s room was filled with people. His mother and his wife stood at either side of his bed and firmly tucked the ends of the blanket under him. They had never met, but seemed now to have entered into a close understanding. The blanket pressed upon his chest. Their faces were grave.

  “You’re not going to school tomorrow,” his mother said in a low voice. “I shall write a note to Mr. Shattuck.”

  He pulled at the blanket to free himself. “Mama, I’m not a mummy.”

  “Sh, dear, sh!”

  “I think we’re going to like it here,” said Beata.

  “You always say that!”

  “Go to sleep, dear.”

  “Where are the children?”

  “They were here a minute ago. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Sh, sh! Go to sleep now.”

  He awoke later at the moment when Eustacia Lansing entered the room. She was wearing one of those outrageous dresses of plum color and red, suggesting tropical flowers and fruits set in deep green foliage. There was the fascinating mole under her right eye. He verified for the thousandth time that one of her eyes was green-to-blue and the other was hazel-to-dark brown. As so often she seemed scarcely able to contain herself; some merriment, some reprehensible joke was about to convulse her.

  John Ashley had made it a rule in life not to permit his thoughts to dwell on Eustacia Lansing. At most he allowed his mind in delight, to glance toward her, to brush her. But altitudes play strange tricks on a man.

  “Stacey!” he cried and began to laugh until his sides hurt.

  “This isn’t high,” she said in Spanish. “The children want to go much higher.”

  “Stacey, you can’t speak Spanish! Where’d yo
u learn Spanish?—What children? Whose children?”

  “Our children, Juanito. Ours.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours and mine.”

  He was laughing so he almost fell out of bed. His fingertips touched the floor. “We have no children, Stacey.”

  “Donkey! How can you say a thing like that! We have so many and you know it!”

  Suddenly hushed, he asked hesitantly, “Have we? I only kissed you once and Breck was standing right beside you.”

  “Really?” she said, a strange smile on her face. “Really?” and she went out the closed door.

  In this history there has been some discussion of hope and faith. It is too early to treat of love. The last appearing of the graces is still emerging from the primal ooze. Its numerous aspects are confusedly intermingled—cruelty with mercy, creativity with havoc. It may be that after many thousands of years we may see it “clarify”—as is said of turbid wine.

  His colleagues were embittered men. They had left their countries and kin—they had left home life itself—and come thousands of miles to live in a barely supportable climate—all to make their fortunes. But fortunes in the field had been made in the seventies and eighties; now the fortunes from the mines were being made by men who ate steak every night beside the white shoulders of bejeweled women (these were the images that obsessed the stertorous dreamers of Rocas Verdes). The principle of the economy of energy prevailed on the mountain, including utterance. Their very card games were conducted in grunts and finger gestures. This was not entirely due to the rarity of the air; their very natures partook of ore. Sloth is like a viscous mineral. Under Dr. MacKenzie’s eye they were all (except the mines’ doctor) excellent workers, but sloth is not incompatible with a circumscribed diligence. Sloth breeds self-hatred and hatred; these hatreds hung in the air of the club room. Under the necessity to conserve energy they seldom reached expression. Once or twice a year a man would suddenly screech with rage at another, or would go out of his mind, biting his fists and rolling on the ground. Dr. van Domelen would administer sedatives. Dr. MacKenzie, called from his hut, would save the wretched man’s face: “The fact is we’ve all been working too hard, especially you, Wilson. You’ve been doing splendid work, splendid. Why don’t you go down to Manantiales for a week? Maybe Mrs. Wickersham will put you up. Even if she hasn’t got a room free, she’ll let you come to dinner.”