by Thomas Wolfe
“Isn’t it the most horrible—” Miss Mandell whispered: the word, as she pronounced it slowly and with laughing emphasis, sounded almost like “how-w-rible.” She had lived in England for a year or two, and she had acquired, or affected, a thick British accent.—“The most awful!”—Mrs. Jack faintly chuckled, then taking another look into the wreckage of the living room, and the creature on his kneepads still fondly forcing entrails from the insides of his doll, with a smile of idiot pertinacity, she was overcome again, pressed her handkerchief to her trembling mouth, and squeaked hysterically: “God!”
At this moment, the sculptor, Krock, who from the beginning had paid no attention to the circus, but had devoted himself exclusively to a methodical effort at seduction of every attractive woman in the gathering, approaching each in turn, and rubbing his legs, while he whispered intimate details concerning the condition of his varicose veins, now came up to Mrs. Jack, and whispered softly:
“I’m a great admirer of your work. … I should so much like to see you sometime and talk it over with you.” During all this time while he whispered to her in this silly and repulsive whisper, he had been coming closer to her, meanwhile tenderly rubbing the insides of his heavy thigh, and now saying plaintively:
“I am very tired of standing up. I have varicose veins, and when I stand it hurts me—I wish we could go off to a quiet place and sit and talk!”
She had not caught the exact meaning of his whispered words, but their purport was plain because he had sidled up to her all the time until he was now almost straddling her. She looked around quickly with an alarmed glance and saw the face of her young lover, saw that it had now grown fierce and dark with passion, and that his fist had closed tightly in a menacing knot, and moving hastily away, she murmured: “Oh, yes, thank you Mr. Krock”—although she had not heard what he had said.
She put one hand quickly, warmly, upon the arm of the young man, and another upon the arm of Lily Mandell, and smiling, said in a soft and gentle tone, that had an almost rapt and brooding quality, as if she were speaking hypnotically to herself:
“These are the best! The best. The two I love, and both of them the best.”
As she uttered these words, she drew them together and closed their hands in a gesture of friendship. Lily Mandell responded timidly, with an almost frightened look, and the young man flushed deeply, awkwardly and with uneasy constraint. Just for a moment he had looked up and caught the eyes of Hale, of Ernie, and of several other people fixed on him in a hard attentive stare, in which curiosity was mixed with cynical amusement. And so caught, so revealed, in all the anguish of his youth, his passion, and his jealousy, he suddenly felt naked and ashamed. It was the old look of the city that he knew so well. It was not wholly unaffectionate, but it was jaded, worn, and wearily experienced. It had in it also a touch of quick and eager curiosity, such as an old worn-out man might display in the hot passions, the quick and sensual heats, of hasty youth, but it was also wearily amused and jaded as if it knew that such ardours as love, or hate, or scalding jealousy were youthful follies which the years would cure.
He turned away, his face deeply, darkly flushed, clumsily holding Lily Mandell’s hand. And she, too, awkwardly self-conscious, ill at ease, looked at him helplessly with an expression that, in contrast to her customary arrogance, was timid, frightened, almost child-like.
Even as they stood there, holding hands with this awkward constraint, Lawrence Hirsch came up and joined them, saying in a tone of casual puzzlement:
“A curious performance, isn’t it? I mean, I really can’t quite make out—”
She turned on him almost furiously, so quickly and fiercely that he recoiled. His eyes had the look of a whipped dog.
“Esther” she cried, turning to her friend in a tone of yolky complaint, “If I don’t get away from this—”
She did not say what “this” was, but her meaning was so evident that Hirsch winced involuntarily, then turned away with a look of naked anguish in his eye, at the same time saying casually:
“Oh, these are some of your latest designs, aren’t they, Esther?” He strolled over to the wall and bending, examined them with professional curiosity:
“How interesting! Hm! I hadn’t seen these. I wish you’d—”
Miss Mandell regarded him with a look of loathing, then turned toward her friend:
“Honestly, if I don’t get some place! … These awful worms!” she muttered; then, kindly, in a tone of yolky protest she murmured vaguely, and to no one in particular:
“Why can’t they go off and die—or something!—Oh, darling!” She turned impulsively to Mrs. Jack—“When you’re so lovely!—Why do they have to bother you?” she said.
Mrs. Jack received this indefinite commiseration with a rapt and tender smile. Surveying both her lover and her friend with a soft and tender look, she took their hands in hers again, and said gently:
“These two! My two! The best. The best.” She turned to the young man and said: “Lily is one of the finest and most beautiful people I have ever known.” And turning to Miss Mandell, holding her lover by the hand and patting it as she spoke, she said in a low voice that glowed and rose with an exultant pride: “And he—he is the best! The highest and the best!” she said, in a kind of chant, “He is my music and my joy—my great angel—my great George!—the one I love the most in all the world!—Oh, Lily, he is meat, drink, bread, and wine to me—he fills my life until without him there is nothing in it—my demon, my great genius, my child!—Oh, Lily, if you knew him as I do!—You two,” she murmured now softly as before, “If only you each knew the other better—Oh, you must!”
They stared at each other for a moment helplessly—the lover and his love’s voluptuous friend: they stared at each other almost with strong terror, the woman with a frightened and yet wildly eager look, he fiercely, with all the anguish, all the repulsion of desire: he broke from her almost desperately, turned furiously upon his mistress and cried bitterly:
“Oh, you! In the name of God what are you trying to”—and then was baffled, maddened, and defeated, as he always was by the rose-sweet innocence of that trusting face, enigma of that guileless guile, that dew-fresh flower of baleful night and dark sophistries, so hued with innocence and morning—Oh thorny paradox! By that whole complex of this ancient and chameleon world, so much too old, too wise, too subtle, too mercurially woven of deceptive lights, of all the ancient troubling weathers of man’s soul, to be here fathomed, here defined, by youth’s harsh light, its fierce antitheses of light and shade, of truth and evil, good and bad—too hard, too complex, and too subtle for the fierce hurt, the anguish, madness, hope, and pride and faith and desperate love of youth.
“My two! The two I love,” said Mrs. Jack raptly as before. “Now you must talk together—get to know each other as I know you both—I want to share my love for both of you with both.”
“Oh, Esther,” Mr. Hirsch, who had been examining the drawings on the wall, now called out in a tone of aroused excitement, “—I think this one here is simply”—
“Oh, where?” cried Lily desperately. “Can we never get away from him?” she muttered. “Is there nowhere we can go?”—
“Darling, why don’t you two go in Edith’s room. You can talk there: You’ll be quiet.”
Miss Mandell looked at the young man with desperate frightened eyes: at the door of the room they stood awkwardly for a moment, regarding each other helplessly. Then, instinctively they turned and looked in the direction of Mrs. Jack, as if seeking there some confirmation or some aid. And she, still following them with her rosy smiling little face, nodded her head affirmatively and happily, and again said softly, raptly, like a child: “My two.”
“Oh, Esther,” said Mr. Hirsch again, who had moved down nearer in his inspection of the drawings on the wall—just for a moment his naked look, full of terror, pain, and anguished pleading, met Miss Mandell—“I wonder if you could tell me—”
“Oh, that fool!” Miss Mandell
muttered furiously, and went into the room. “Why can’t these awful people—these—these worms—Why don’t they die, or something?”—she murmured yolkily, with brooding disinterest, as before.
“He’s after you, I guess,” the young man said. “He doesn’t seem to follow you, but he’s always there.”
“Oh—the worm!” she muttered. “I’d like to step on him!”
“I guess he wants you pretty bad,” the young man said.
“It’s—it’s—” For a moment he paused, then grinned—“It’s like a hot hound after a—”
“Stop!” she shrieked faintly. “You’re terrible!”
“But is it.” And, after a brief pause: “Are you going to marry him?”
“Him?” A whole lexicon of scorn was packed into that little word. “That—that worm.” Then slowly, painfully she muttered:
“That greasy Kike”—
“No, Lawrence.”—Mrs. Jack’s voice, explanatory, sweetly patient, was nearer now: Mr. Hirsch was coming down the hall—“I did these last year:—You remember when the League was doing a show? They were going to follow it with Hedda—”
“Oh, but Esther! She’s so lovely!” Lily Mandell said. They were facing each other now, close together—
“She’s—she’s the most beautiful!—the most glorious!—Oh, she loves you so!”—Her voice broke yolkily, half hysterically, as she spoke the words, and her hand came out instinctively upon his arm. Still standing apart, they were holding each other now clumsily, their hands resting on each other’s arms, regarding each other with a desperate, searching, and half-frightened look—“If anything should happen to her!”—she whispered, breathing quickly now—“I mean, she is too beautiful!—If anything should hurt her!”
Her wheaten belly was against him now, they were holding to each other tightly: his own breath was coming hoarse and hard, he spoke thickly, furiously, caught there in a trap of lust and loathing, of sweltering desire and his own self-shame. He fairly grated through his teeth: “Oh she!—she!—” Then bitterly, desperately—“She sent us here! She put us here!”—Then furiously, as every torturing doubt of the whole tormenting complex returned to catch him in the web, and baffle him, he cried:
“—Oh, she must have known!—She’s not so innocent as that!—She’s planning something!—You—You people!” This in a strangling gasp, then savagely: “Oh damn you! Damn you!—Now, by God!—” They were locked together now in a fierce clasp, devouring each other with passionate kisses; they seemed to grow together, to become a single animal: locked lip to lip, and tongue to tongue, they consumed each other, her amorous belly passionately undulant into the hard thrusting cradle of his loins.
“You bitch!” he panted. “—You lovely bitch!—By God!” His grip about her tightened savagely. “—I’ll”—
“—Don’t hurt me!” she whimpered like a frightened child. “Oh darling, I’m so little. I’m afraid—don’t hurt me. Oh, darling, darling, darling, darling—Not here!” she panted, widening to his knee—“Not here!—Oh darling, darling, darling.” They fell over on the bed, locked together in the fierce undulations of the embrace, her breast, round, melon-heavy, nippled like a bud, was in his hand, her dress came up above her knees, his fierce fingers were gripped bruisingly in the sensual opulence of her creamy, slightly yellow thighs, and all the while her wild dark head rolled on the pillow, tossed like storm, she cried out weeping bitterly—“Oh God! God!—All that beauty—All that pain—That loveliness inside me—God! God! God!—”
Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully, but he could wait.
* * * * *
“—Oh, Esther!—What is this?—How very interesting—” The voice was very close now, casual, anguish-laden, they could fairly hear him sweating blood. The voice came close: panting, they scrambled to their feet—“Oh, Esther”—breathing heavily, wildeyed, disarranged, they stood erect, reeling, stupidly staring at the door—
“What have you here?”—The casual tone was cracking underneath the strain as Mr. Hirsch approached that fatal door. His gloom cropped face of agony peered in, the eyeballs shot with lacings of bright red, the whole glance pleading like a beaten dog’s—“Oh a room. Hm, now—Yes—Oh, hello, Lily—I didn’t know you were in here—”
Panting, she regarded him with a black look of smouldering contempt.
“But how very interesting, Esther!”—More himself again, he turned to her, and she looked at him, at them, at everyone with that rosy smile of trustful innocence. “I had no idea there were so many of them—”
And the climax of that grotesque comedy—so mixed of loathing, anguish, broken faith, the hot lust of animals so obscenely fuming underneath its undeceptive mash of skilled urbanity—was over. And the chase was on: the actors in the play were on their way again.
THE GUESTS DEPARTING
• • •
THE FIRE
• • •
But now there was the sound of voices in the living room. The performance had ended and there was a ripple of perfunctory applause when Mr. Logan finished. The fashionable young people of his own group clustered around him, chattering congratulations, and then, without paying attention to any of the other guests, or without a word of thanks to their hostess, they began to leave.
Other people now gathered around Mrs. Jack and made their farewells. Meanwhile, Mr. Logan was busy with his enormous valises, his wire dolls, the general wreckage he had created. People began to leave singly and in pairs and groups until presently there was no one left except those intimates and friends who are usually the last to leave a big party, Mrs. Jack and her family, her lover, Miss Mandell, Amy Van Leer and Mr. Logan. Already a curious and rather troubling change was apparent in the atmosphere of the whole place. It was an atmosphere of completion, of absence, of departure: it was the atmosphere one feels in a house the day after Christmas, or the hour after a wedding or when most of the passengers have disembarked from a great liner at one of the channel ports, leaving only a small, and rather sorrowful remnant who know the voyage is really over, and who are now just marking time for a few hours until their own destination is reached.
Mrs. Jack looked at Piggy Logan and at the wreckage he had made of a large part of her fine room with an air of bewilderment, then turned doubtfully and with a questioning look to Lily Mandell. The two women looked at each other for a moment, then Mrs. Jack shrugged her shoulders in a protesting, helpless way as if to say: “Can you understand all this? What has happened?”—
And then, catching her friend’s expression of drowsy arrogance, her own face suddenly flushed crimson, she cast her head back and laughed helplessly, hysterically, saying: “God!”
Meanwhile the others looked at Mr. Logan, who seemed absorbed with the litter that surrounded him, utterly and happily oblivious of their presence, with varied expressions of bewilderment, and amusement, and irony. Mr. Jack, who had been unable to stand the full protraction of the performance now appeared again, stared in at the kneeling figure of Mr. Logan and at all the wreckage of which he was the author then turning to his wife and son with a protesting gesture he said: “What is it?” Then he retired again, leaving everybody helplessly convulsed with hysterical laughter.
Amy Van Leer stretched herself out flat on the carpet beside Ernie with her hands beneath her head and began to talk to him in her rapid, eager, excited, curiously husky voice. Miss Mandell surveyed Mr. Logan with looks of undisguised distaste. Meanwhile the maids were busily clearing up the debris of the party—glasses, bottles, bowls of ice, and so on, and Molly was quietly and busily engaged putting the books back on their shelves. The other people looked on rather helplessly at Mr. Logan and his work, obviously at a loss what to do, and waiting evidently for the young man’s departure.
The happy confusion, the thronging tumult of the party had now ended. The guests had departed, the place had grown back into its wonted quiet, and the unceasing city, like an engine of immortal life and movement which had been for the moment forgotten
and shut out, now closed in upon these lives again, pervaded these great walls: the noises of the street were heard again.
Outside, below them, there was the sound of a fire truck, the rapid clanging of a bell. It turned the corner into Madison and thundered excitingly past the big building. Mrs. Jack went to the window and looked out. Other trucks now appeared from various directions until four or five had gone by.
“I wonder where the fire can be,” she remarked presently in a tone of detached curiosity. Another truck roared down and thundered into Madison. “It must be quite a big one, too—six trucks have driven past: I wonder where it is. It must be somewhere in this neighborhood.”
For a moment the location of the fire absorbed the idle speculation of the group, but presently they began to look again at Mr. Logan. His labors were now, apparently, at long last, almost over. He began to close his big valises and adjust the straps.
At this moment Lily Mandell turned her head with an air of wakened curiosity in the direction of the hall, sniffed sharply, and suddenly said: “Does anyone smell smoke?”
“Hah? What?”—said Mrs. Jack with a puzzled air. And then, suddenly and sniffing sharply, she cried excitedly: “But yes! There is quite a strong smell of smoke out here. I think it would be just as well if we got out of the building until we find out what is wrong.”
Mrs. Jack’s rosy face was now burning with excitement. “But isn’t it queer?” she appealed to everyone, in a protesting and excited tone—“I mean, it is so strange after the party and—to think that it should be in this building—I mean—” She was evidently not quite certain what she meant and looked around her rather helplessly. “Well, then—” she said indefinitely, “I suppose we’d better, until we find out what it is. Oh, Mr. Logan!—” She lifted her voice as she spoke to him, and in a moment he lifted his round and heavy face with an expression of inquiring and cherubic innocence—“I say—I think perhaps we’d all better get out, Mr. Logan, until we find out where the fire is. Are you ready?”
