The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  His face was still smouldering, and he muttered, "I know, but that damn fellow--"

  She looked at him startled for a moment, then she understood, and said quietly: "Oh--Roy. Yes, I know." He made no reply, and in a moment, still quietly, she went on: "I've known all these people for years. Roy--" she was silent for a moment and then added very simply: "in many ways he is a very fine person.... Those other kids," she went on smiling, after a brief pause, "I watched most of them grow up. A lot of them are just kids from the neighborhood here. We've trained them all."

  He knew that she had intended no reproof in her quiet words, but had simply been trying to tell him something that he did not under stand; and, suddenly remembering the painted faces of the young actors, he remembered also, beneath their bright, unnatural masks, something that was naked and lonely. And he was touched with pity and regret.

  They had reached the wings of the stage now. Here all seemed to be action, confusion, and excited haste. He could see the scene shifters rushing across the stage, wheeling into place with amazing speed the wings of a big set. Still further back in the mysterious depths, there were thumping noises. He could hear the foreman of the stage hands shouting orders in a thick Irish tone, people were scuttling back and forth, dodging each other nimbly, jumping out of the way of big flats as they shot past. It seemed to be a case of every man for himself. For a moment he felt bewildered and confused, like a country fellow caught smack out in the middle of the four corners of a city square, not knowing where to turn, and feeling that he is about to be run down from all directions.

  And yet it was a thrilling scene as well. The whole thing reminded him of a circus. In spite of the apparent disorder, he noticed that things were slipping miraculously into structural form. It was a wonderful place. It had the beauty of all great instruments, of all great engines built for fluent use. Back here, the flim-flam and flummery of the front was all forgotten. The truth of the matter was, "the illusion of the stage" did not elude him. It never had. He had never been able to fool himself into believing that the raised platform before him, with one side open, was really Mrs. Cartwright's drawing room, or that the season, as the program stated, was September. In short, "realism" in the theatre had never seemed very real to him, and it got less real all the time.

  His was increasingly the type of imagination which gains in strength as it grows older because it is rooted to the earth. It was not that since his childhood he had grown disillusioned, nor that the aerial and en chanted visions of his youth had been rubbed out by the world's coarse thumb. It was now just that Pegasus no longer seemed to him to be as interesting an animal as Man-O'-War--and a railroad round house was more wonderful to him than both of them. In other words, as he grew older his efforts to escape were directed in instead of out. He no longer wanted to "get away from it all," but rather to try "to go get into it all"--and he felt now powerfully, as he stood there in the wings, that here again he was in contact with the incredible, the palpable, the real, the undiscovered world--which was as near to every man alive as a touch of his hand, the beat of his heart, and farther away from most men's finding than the rivers of the moon.

  Mrs. Jack was now in the center of her universe. She was no longer smiling. Her manner, as she stood there in the wings, rapidly snap ping the old ring on and off her finger, taking in every detail of that confused but orderly activity with an experienced eye, was serious, quietly concerned. And again he noticed a rather worn look about the woman's eyes and head that he had observed when he first saw her that evening, waiting for him on the curb.

  Above her, on a kind of raised platform, one of the electricians was manipulating a big spotlight that was to do service in the next act.

  In her quick and intent inspection of the stage she had not seemed to notice him at all, but now she looked up quickly, and said: "No.

  Up." As she spoke the words, she raised her hand a little. "You want it up more."

  "Like this?" he said, and raised it.

  "A little more," she said, and watched. "Yes, that's better."

  At this moment, the stage manager came up to her with an air of haste.

  "Mrs. Jack," he said, "you've got that new backdrop too small.

  There is that much left," he measured quickly with his hands, "be tween it and the wings."

  "Oh, no," she said impatiently, "there's not, either. The thing's all right. I made the measurements myself. You've got the wing too far out. I noticed it tonight. Try bringing it in a bit."

  He turned and shouted to two shifters. They moved the wing in, and the scene closed up. She studied it a moment, then she and the man walked out upon the stage, stepped over a tube of insulated wiring, and turned, facing the set, in the center of the curtain. For a moment they both looked at it, she turned and said something to the man, he nodded his head curtly, but in a satisfied way, then turned away and began to give orders. Mrs. Jack came back into the wings, turned, and began to watch the stage again.

  The appearance of the stage from this position--behind the proscenium--was wonderful. To one side there was a complication of great ropes that extended far up into the vaulted distance overhead.

  Looking up, one saw suspended a series of great drops which some how gave a sense of being so perfectly hung in balance that they could drop or rise swiftly and without a sound. On the other side there was the dynamic complication of the switchboard. A man was manipulating the switches, keeping his eye upon the row of foot lights. Mrs. Jack watched this intently for a moment: the lights brightened, softened, suffused, changed, and mixed with a magic fluency. She said: "A little more blue, Bob--no, towards the center more--no, you've got too much now--there!" She watched them while that magic polychrome of light like a chameleon changed its qualities, and presently, "Hold it there," she said.

  In a moment she turned and, smiling, touched the young man lightly on the arm and led him back into a little corridor and up a flight of stairs. Some of the performers, costumed for the new act, were clattering down the steps. All called out greetings to her as they passed, in the same casual and affectionate way he had observed before.

  Upstairs, there was a row of dressing rooms, and as he went by he could hear the voices of the performers, excited, busy, occasionally laughing.

  They mounted another flight of stairs that led up to the third floor, and entered a large room that opened at the end of the corridor. The door was open and the room was lighted.

  This was the costume room. Compared to the sharp excitement, the air of expectation and of hurried activity which he had observed in other parts of the theatre, the atmosphere of this room was quiet, subdued, and even, after so much electric tension, just vaguely melancholy. The room had in it the smell of goods and cloth; it had also the kind of gentle warmth that goes with women's work--with the hum of sewing machines, the sound of the treadle, and the quiet play of busy hands--an atmosphere that is apparently a happy one for a woman, but that is likely to be a little depressing to a man. To the youth, the room, although a large one, and on the scale of ordered enterprise, nevertheless evoked somehow an instant memory of all these other more domestic things. Long rows of costumes were hung on hooks from the walls, and on two or three long tables, such as tailors use, were strewn other garments, dresses, jackets, bits of lace or trimming, the varied evidence of work and of repair.

  There were three women in the room. One, a small, plump, dark young woman, wearing glasses, was seated cross-legged at one of the tables, with a piece of cloth spread out across her knees and sewing quickly. She was a wonderfully deft and nimble-fingered person; her small, plump hands were busy as a pair of beavers, and one could see the needle flashing through the air like a flight of arrows. Facing them under a bright light and seated at a sewing machine, was a woman stitching a piece of cloth. Seated farther away, behind these two women, was a third. She also was working on a piece of goods and had a needle in her hand. She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, and these emphasized the lean and sunken s
ilence of her face. Even seated as she was, engaged in homely work and somberly attired in a dress of dark material, the woman gave an impression of fastidious elegance. Perhaps this was partly due to her costume, which was so sober that a man would not even notice it, and yet so perfectly correct that he would not forget it later. But, even more, the impression was probably due to the sunken quietness of the woman's thin yet not unattractive face, the thinness of her figure which looked rather tired and yet capable of constant work, and the movement of her white and rather bony hands.

  As they entered the room, the woman at the sewing machine looked up and stopped her work; the other two did not. As they approached, she smiled and called out a greeting. She was somewhat younger than Mrs. Jack, and yet, by some indefinable token, she was also an "old maid." She immediately conveyed to one, however, a sense of warmth and humor, and of kind good nature. She was certainly not pretty, but she had beautiful red hair; it was fine-spun as silk, and it had all kinds of wonderful lights in it. Her eyes were blue and seemed full of wit, of shrewdness, and of humor, and her voice had this quality also. She got up as she spoke to them, and came around her machine and shook hands with the young man. The two other women acknowledged the introduction simply by raising their heads and speaking, and then returned to their work again. The little plump one seated cross-legged at the table seemed almost sullen in the muttered brevity of her response. The other woman, whom Mrs. Jack introduced as her sister, Edith, simply looked up for a moment through her bony spectacles, regarding him with her large, somewhat sunken, and army silent eyes, said, "How do you do," in a voice so toneless that it halted all communication, and then returned to her work again.

  Mrs. Jack turned to the red-haired woman and for some moments they talked to each other about the costumes. It was evident, just by the unspoken affection and intimacy of the conversation, that they were good friends. The red-haired woman, whose name was Mary Hook, paused suddenly in her conversation, and said: "But you two had better be getting back, hadn't you? The act has started."

  They listened. All below was silent. The actors had departed for the stage. All here was now silent, too, and yet waiting. All life had for the moment been here withdrawn; but meanwhile, it had all concentrated there. Meanwhile, here waited and was still.

  Mrs. Jack, after a startled moment, said quickly: "Yes--oh, well then--we must go."

  They hurried down the stairs, along the corridor, and out to the now-deserted lobby. When they got back into the theatre, the house was dark again, the curtain had gone up. They slipped into their seats and began to watch.

  This act was better than the first. At the conclusion of each scene, Mrs. Jack leaned forward in her seat and whispered bits of information to her guest about some of the performers. One of them, a tough yet dapper little fellow, was a tap dancer who moved his legs and shot his feet out with astonishing agility, and scored a great success.

  She bent forward and whispered: "That's Jimmy Haggerty. We won't be able to keep him after this season. He's going on." She did not explain what she meant by "on," there was no need to: it was evident she meant that his star was now in its ascendency.

  In another scene, the star performer was a young girl of twenty.

  She was not pretty, but her quality of sexual attractiveness was such that, in Mrs. Jack's own phrase, "it hit you in the eye." It was shocking and formidable in its naked power. When the act was over and the girl walked forward to acknowledge the storm of applause, there was an arrogant and even insolent assurance in the way she received it. She neither bowed nor smiled, nor gave any sign that she was pleased or grateful. She simply sauntered out and stood there in the center of the stage with one hand resting lightly on her hip, and with a sullen and expressionless look on her young face. Then she strolled off into the wings, every movement of her young body at once a provocation and a kind of insult, which seemed to say, "I know I've got it, so why should I thank anybody?"

  Mrs. Jack bent forward in her seat, and, her face flushed with excitement and laughter, whispered: "Isn't it awful! Did you ever see such a brazen, sexy little trollop?

  And yet--" her face grew thoughtful as she spoke--"she's got it too.

  She'll make a fortune."

  He asked her about one or two of the others, about Roy Farley, the comedian.

  "Oh, Roy," she said--and for a moment her face showed regret.

  "I don't know about Roy." She spoke now with a trace of difficulty, looking away, as if she knew what she wanted to say but was having trouble in finding words to phrase it: "Everything he does is just- just--a kind of imitation of someone else, and so he's having a kind of--vogue--right now--but--"she turned and looked at him seriously--"you've got to have something else," she said, and again her low brow was furrowed by that line of difficulty between the eyes as she sought for an answer. "I don't know--but--it's something that you've got to have yourself--inside of you--something that is yours, and that no one else has. Some of those others had it--even that little slut with her hand on her hip. It may be cheap, but it's hers- and its kinda wonderful." For a moment longer she was silent, looking at him. "Isn't it strange," she whispered, "and wonderful--and- and sort of sad?" She paused, and then said very quietly: "It is just the way things are. Just something you can't help, and that no one can do anything about, and that nothing can make better." Her face was touched for the moment with sadness, and then, irrelevantly it seemed, she said: "Poor things." And the quiet pity in those words did not need a definition.

  When the show was over, they went out again into the lobby. Here some more people greeted her, and others said good-bye, but the place was clearing swiftly now as the cabs and motors drove away, and soon the house was almost empty. She asked him if he would go uptown with her, and invited him to come with her while she got her coat and hat and some costume drawings which she had left in what she called her "work room." Accordingly, they went backstage again. The stage hands were quickly dismantling the set, stowing the flats, the sections, and the properties away into the dim and cavernous reaches of backstage. The performers had all hurried off to their dressing rooms, but as they mounted the stairs again they could hear their voices, this time gayer and more noisy, with a sense of release.

  Mrs. Jack's "work room" was on the third floor, not far away from the costume room. She opened the door and went in. It was a place of ordinary dimensions with two windows at one end. There was no carpet on the floor, and, save for a drawing table near one of the windows, a chair and locker, there were no furnishings. Behind the table, a sheet of tracing paper with some geometric designs of a set had been pinned against the wall with thumb tacks, and beside this, hanging from a nail, was a T-square. Against the whitewashed wall it looked very clean, exact, and beautiful. Upon the table, which was a level sheet of white, beautifully perfect wood, a square of drawing paper had also been pinned down to the board by means of small brass-headed tacks. This sheet was also covered with designs, and else where on the table were other sheets that were covered with swift, sketchy, and yet beautiful costume drawings. These little drawings, so full of quickness and sureness, were remarkable because, although they did not show the figure they were destined to portray, yet it seemed as if the figure was always there. There would be just the jaunty sketching of a jacket, an elbowed sleeve, or perhaps just the line and pleating of the skirt. Yet the sketches could not have been more eloquent and moving in their portraiture of life if a whole gallery of men and women had been drawn in. There was also a little cardboard model of a setting, pressed and folded into shape, a row of drawing pencils, each sharpened to the perfection of a point, of equal length, and perfectly in line, a little jar containing long-stemmed brushes, feathery as hair, and a little white fat pot, full of gold paint.

  She began to put some drawings and some tracing sheets into a brief case; then she opened her pocketbook and fumbled about in it, as women do, until she found her key. She laid the key down on the table, and then, before she closed her purse, she took
out something white and crumpled that had been smoothed out and folded carefully, and just for a moment she held it against her bosom and patted it affectionately, at the same time looking at him with a childlike smile.

  "My letter," she said proudly, and patted it again with her gloved hand.

  For a moment he stared at her, puzzled; then, as he remembered what accursed nonsense he had written her, his face flamed red, and he started around the table after her.

  "Here, give me that damn thing."

  She moved quickly away, out of his reach, with an alarmed expression, and at the other end she paused again, and, holding it against her breast, she patted it with two hands now.

  "My letter," she said softly again, and in an enrapt tone that a child uses, but speaking to herself, she said, "My beautiful letter where he says he will not truckle."

  The words were deceptively innocent and for a moment he glared at her suspiciously, baffled. And then, like a child repeating to her self the sound of a word that fascinates her, she murmured: "He does not truckle.... He is no truckler...."

  She slipped quickly around the table as he started after her again, his hand outstretched, his face the color of a beet: "Here, if you don't give me that damn-----"

  She slipped out of reach, across to the other side, and, still holding that damning piece of folly to her breast, like a child absorbed by some nonsense rhyme of its own fashioning, she murmured, "Britons never will be trucklers...."

  He chased her around the table in dead earnest now. Her shoulders shaking with laughter, she tried to escape from him, shrieking faintly.

  But he caught her, forced her back against the wall, and for a moment they struggled for the letter. She tried to keep it away from him, thrust it behind her back. He pinioned her arms and slid one hand down over hers until he had his hand upon the letter. Finding her self captured, and the letter being forced out of her grip, she paused and looked at him, and said reproachfully: "Ah--you wouldn't be so mean! Give me my letter--please."