OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Yes, darling," she said in her warm, sweet tone that always had something maternal and tolerantly amused in its humour, "--and in Copenhagen and Stockholm and Bucharest and Madrid--even in Pogo Pogo or in China or Peru--wherever they choose to send us. We'll be two international hoboes, darling--that's the kind of life we'll have to lead."

  "God!" he said bluntly. "It sounds wonderful! What a thing to happen to anyone!--and to happen to you at your age! . . . But won't if make all this--this place here--seem awfully far away, and very strange--when you think back on it?"

  "Yes," the girl said quietly, and added so softly that she seemed to breathe the words--so softly that he could scarcely hear her, "--and quite impossibly lovely!"

  He stared at her in blank astonishment for a minute: she had clasped her hands against her breast in a natural and simple gesture, the moon had made an aureole of magic around the silken strands of her brown hair, and suddenly he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears.

  "Very, very far away," she said in a low tone, "and enormously beautiful. . . . You see," she said simply, "this is my home. . . . I was born here, and I love it." She was silent for a moment longer, and then she said quietly but in a more matter-of-fact way:

  "Don't you think our place--this country here--is beautiful?"

  He did not answer her for a moment: at first he was not even conscious that he had heard her. He kept staring at her with a comical expression of gape-jawed and hypnotic fascination. He was conscious of a queer, bewildered and inappropriate feeling of surprise--a kind of numb, absurd wonder that if he had read all the books and poems in the world, and then tried to imagine for himself something as impossibly lovely as this girl and the whole scene around her, he could never, by any soaring stretch of the imagination, have come within a million miles of it.

  Behind her head the moon was making its spun aura of enchanted light, the dress she was wearing was of some sweet gossamer stuff of light moon-blue that seemed spun out of the very substance of the moon itself--to float, to move like some aerial fume of magic smoke, but the girl herself was lovely, sweet and strong as the whole earth around her. She was herself no creature of elves' fantasy, she was not lithe and slender, fleeting as a nymph: she was a warm, strong-bodied girl, wide in the hips for children, a nature warm and soft and gentle as a cow, but radiant and lovely with fair girlhood, too, and full of sweetness, strength, and tender, jolly humour.

  She stood there in the middle of the white, empty road with the enchanted radiance of the moon upon her, and he stared at her unbelievingly, like a man who meets some vision in a dream and does not know if he is dreaming or awake, and yet knows all the time that it is real. Then he would take his fascinated gaze away from her, and look down at the moon-white road, and stamp it with his foot, and kick and scurf the ground of the moon-white road to see if it was real, and then lift his head and look at her again, and turn and see the great, sweet fields and meadows dreaming in the moonlight, and cows down upon their knees, facing toward him with their strange and silent stare, or faced one way and grazing towards him through the moon pastures with sweet, wrenching pull of teeth; and then he would see the dark and sleeping woods of night, with all their mystery and loveliness and wild and solemn joy, and secret terror, and all the grand and casual folds and convolutions of the sleeping, moon-enchanted earth, and far away the moon-blaze and wink, the herring glamour, and the dancing scallop fires and all the darkness, coolness, and the velvet-breasted mystery of the strange and silent river, the haunted river, the great Hudson River, drawing on for ever from the dark and secret earth the sources of its depthless tides, and in the night-time, in the dark, with soundless movings of its tide, drawing on for ever like time and silence past the strange and secret land, the mysterious earth, the sleeping cities and the lost and lonely little towns of dark America.

  It was all so strange, so impossibly lovely, so hauntingly familiar--the grand and casual landscape of America--and it seemed past words and past belief, to be so much a part of this girl's life, and she a part of it, that all the haunting mystery of the secret earth, the silent river, and all its sweetness, fragrance and fertility, its casual homeliness, and its unuttered loveliness had entered into her, had fed her life, had shaped her to its special quality, and like a solemn music was mixed into the conduits of her blood and life and soul for ever, so that now he could not bear to see her taken from it, he felt a cruel and ruinous loss and waste in this destructive separation--a loss that touched not only this girl's life, but the life of the great earth and all America as well--a loss as if a rare and glorious flower were brutally uprooted from the only earth that could produce or nurture it and which would henceforth be, by reason of its treasured loss, bereft. And feeling so, a blind and bitter resentment surged up in his heart, his whole life and spirit were set against her going, and in his soul an unforgiving and protesting voice kept saying doggedly:

  "Why has she got to go? Why must she be lost? Why does she have to go and marry that damned Swede?"

  In the great moon-drenched field beside the road, the cows were moving towards them slowly, grazing, pulling the fragrant meadow grass of night with sweet, cool wrenching, with rustling stir, and with whisking of dry tails.

  The girl walked over to the wire fence, and one of the cows, after regarding her with its grave, gentle stare, moved slowly towards her, rattling the fence wires as it thrust its gentle, bending head across the fence and nuzzled her soft palm.

  "She seems to know you," said the youth.

  "Yes," the girl answered. "I know them all by name, they all know me. I gave them all their names: this one's Brindle. Aren't they lovely creatures?" she said quietly, as she stroked the cow. "Such--such--gentle pets," she said, "with their kind looks and great, soft eyes. They all know me, and will come to me when I call their names."

  The other cows, indeed, were now standing still, faced toward her, looking at her with slow, gaunt and gentle heads. Now, slowly, they started to move toward her, making a cool, sweet rustling through night grasses as they came. The moonlight burst upon their short, curved horns, it burst upon the rich bright patches of their mottled hides, upon their stringy, dung-bespattered rumps, their soft eyes, and the slow, gentle wonder of their long, gaunt heads.

  And it was all so wonderful--the sleeping woods, the moon-enchanted fields, the slow, light grazings of the moonlit cows, and all the fragrance of the night, the grass, the clover and the meadow spells, and the magic warmth and loveliness of the girl, and her sweet, low voice beside him in the moonlight--that it seemed to him that all his life had been a prelude and a preparation to this wonder. He did not know what he could say, it came swelling up in a wild flood of tenderness and passion, he felt that he must tell her somehow, and he had no words for saying it; he seized her hands and stammered:

  "Look here--if I live to be a million years I'll never--the way the river was tonight, the moon, and the way Joel met me and then finding you and your mother and your friends there in the moonlight--and the river down below--and now this walk with you--this road--the field--and all these cows there in the field--and you here--why, by God!" he cried thickly, incoherently, "you are the finest girl I ever saw in all my life!--this place--tonight here--the most wonderful--"

  "Come on," she said quietly, with her warm, young laugh, and took him by the arm again. "We must be going back:--the others will be waiting for us--but it has been lovely, hasn't it?"

  "Why," he muttered thickly and seized her hand again, "--why! By God! By God!"

  When they got back to the house the guests had risen for departure, but were standing in an interested group around George Thornton, who was showing them gymnastics.

  "Another thing," he was saying, in his very quiet, pleasant, toneless voice, "--another thing that you can try is this." With these words he stretched his slight and graceful figure--which was as tough as hickory and as flexible as a whip--flat out upon the bricked floor of the terrace.

  "Try this some time," he con
tinued in his quiet, even tone that had a curiously hushed, still and almost sombre penetration in the deep moon-silence of the night. "Try lying flat out on your back some time--like this." And he lay there, small, graceful, beautifully lithe, completely relaxed.

  "And then what?" said Mrs. Pierce in an interested tone. "What do you do then, George?"

  "Nothing," he said with toneless quiet. "You just lie there--it relaxes you: a Hindu showed me how to do it."

  "Oh, but anyone could do that!" Howard Martin protested, in his mannered and rather effeminate voice. "Even I could do that, George."

  "It's not as easy as you think," George said. "You see," he went on quietly, "it's really a greater effort to be relaxed than most of us realize. Most of us are all tied up in a knot--so much more tense than we know we are. The thing you've got to do," he went on with his quiet and fatal tonelessness, "is to relax--utterly relax--just let everything relax. You've got to lie so that everything--the back of your head, your shoulders, your spinal column--the whole thing--lies flat upon the floor. Like this," he said, and just lay there, small, fragile, beautifully lithe and strong, and utterly, quietly, "relaxed"--his voice coming with a quiet and strange penetration from a figure that seemed inanimate. "--It's not easy to do, but you can master it if you try."

  "Oh, let me see! I'm going to try!" little Howard Martin cried with the good-natured and unselfconscious eagerness that was really one of his attractive and appealing qualities. And completely unruffled by the laughter of the group, he immediately lay down and stretched himself out beside George, his dapper little figure looking indescribably comical as he tried to follow George's instructions and imitate his posture:

  "How's that, George?" he said presently, without moving. "Have I got it?"

  George turned and observed him keenly for a moment.

  "No," he said quietly, "you haven't got it yet, Howard. You see, you've got to flatten out completely. You've just got to let everything go limp--relax--so that your whole back is flat upon the ground."

  "But I am flat! I am flat!" little Howard protested in such a mincing and comical tone of protest that everyone burst out in hearty laughter, and even George smiled his fine, rare, and grave smile. "My God!" Howard said in an agonized tone when the laughter had subsided, "if I was any flatter I'd feel like a pancake."

  "No, Howard," George Thornton said quietly after another moment of observant silence. "You haven't got it yet. You see, your back is really arched--you're not relaxed--your back is not upon the floor--the thing is to make yourself lie out as flat as a board--like this," and with the fingers of his strong, small, bronzed hand he gently but firmly pushed Howard's stomach down towards the floor. Howard grunted protestingly, but lay there after George had taken his hand away, and George, after looking at him closely for a moment, nodded approvingly and said:

  "Yes, that's better. You're getting it now. But you've really got to practise every day. It looks easy, but it's hard to do."

  "But, George," Mrs. Pierce broke in, as Howard scrambled to his feet, "--what I'm interested in knowing is how you keep that beautiful, strong athlete's figure that you've got! And that dancer's waist! My dear sir, that is the curse of a woman's life: so if you can tell me what to do to take it off around the waist and hips I'll be eternally grateful to you."--She was, as a matter of fact, herself as lean and well-conditioned as a race-horse, but George, still lying flat upon the floor, answered quietly:

  "Did you ever try this, Ida? I think you'll find it very useful for keeping the waist down.--You lie flat on your back--like this. You keep your arms flat at your sides--you mustn't raise them or lift your head. You keep your legs straight--you mustn't bend them at the knees--and then," slowly, and with a sense of infinite, hard-muscled power and lean endurance, he suited the action to the words, "you raise your legs to right angles with your body--straighten out again--raise--straighten--raise--straighten--raise--straighten--if you do that a hundred times a day, when you get up and when you go to bed, I don't think you'll ever be troubled by fat around the waist," he concluded quietly.

  "I know," Joel whispered, nodding with vigorous agreement. "I've tried that. That's a good one. But a hundred times is a lot! It's more than most people can do at first."

  "Yes," said George quietly. "But you get used to it if you do it every day! I can do it a hundred times with no difficulty whatever," he concluded quietly.

  "Oh, of course!" Joel whispered instantly. "But then, you're hard as a rock, George. You can do anything."

  "But that doesn't look hard," Howard said again with blithe confidence. "Oh, I just know that I can do that one," he said mincingly. And without further ado, while everyone laughed, he stretched himself out again, extended his dapper flannelled legs as George instructed him, and then slowly raised them, lowered them, raised them again with such a painful grunt that everyone burst out again in hearty laughter. After the fourth effort he was through, admitting defeat with a painful "Gosh! If I had to do that for a hundred times I'd be ready for the undertaker," and scrambled to his feet again.

  "Then," said George in his quiet, pleasant tone, "I think you'll find this one good, Ida, for strengthening the muscles of the back and stomach. You arch," he said, "you arch with the neck and feet--like this," and instantly his strong, frail, beautifully proportioned figure was arched as lithely and gracefully as a bow, "--you come down slow like this," he said, and sank slowly toward the ground, "you arch again like this"--again the light and graceful human bow.

  "Oh, but that looks terribly hard to do, George!" Mrs. Pierce protested. "I could never learn to do that: it's a regular circus stunt."

  "No," he said in his quiet and toneless fashion, "you could do it, Ida. Of course, it is hard at first, but it would come with practice. . . . It makes you very strong," he went on with a completely detached matter-of-factness. "Do you see that?" He arched his whip-cord body again and held it in that posture--"I could keep that up indefinitely--it makes you hard as nails," he went on quietly, and without an atom of vanity or self-consciousness. "I could support the whole weight of a man's body there without any difficulty--and lift him, too."

  "Not really!" Joel whispered in an astounded tone. "Simply incredible!"

  "But not at all," said George quietly. "It's the easiest thing on earth if you're used to it. Come here, Howard," he said quietly, without moving from his arched position. "Sit down on me."

  "Sit down on you?" said Howard, in a comically bewildered tone. "Where, George?"

  "On my stomach," George replied. "Go on," he said, smiling his fine, grave smile at sight of Howard's hesitation. "It's all right. You won't hurt me at all. Sit down."

  "Like--like this?" said Howard, and squatted gingerly and gently, settling down finally upon George's arched stomach and looking about with such a comically troubled and inquiring expression that everyone burst out in hearty laughter again. "Is that all right?" he said, turning anxiously and looking down at his supporter.

  "Yes, perfectly," said George. "Now draw your knees up and hold them with your arms so that your whole weight is on me. . . . Good! . . . Now! Are you ready? . . . One, two . . . One, two . . . One, two," his lithe, whip-cord figure rose and fell, arched and straightened, with little Howard sitting on top of him, and looking around with the expression of a frightened, huddled mannikin. When the demonstration was finished, both young men got to their feet, and Joel's face could be seen raised in an expression of radiant admiration, his voice could be heard in an astounded whisper, saying:

  "Simply incredible!"

  And Mrs. Pierce, her voice stronger, more powerful, and penetrating, in slow, decisive declaration:

  "George! I--think--that--is--the--most--astonishing--I think--that--is--the--most--"

  Words failed her, and as she looked at him, standing quietly composed before her, with all his beautiful, lithe grace and stillness, he smiled his grave, rare smile, and displayed his only playful raillery of the evening:

  "But really, Ida," he said quietly,
as he smiled his fine, slow smile at her, "if you're worried about that girlish figure you ought to try this some time." With these words he bent over backward, as lithe and limber as a whip, and with his fingers arched upon the floor, suddenly, with effortless grace and speed, and without moving an inch from his position, whirled off a dozen brilliant cartwheels that would have done credit to a circus tumbler.

  He came gracefully, unweariedly erect again, to standing posture, amid an ovation of breathlessly uttered wonder, frank applause.

  But now the time had come for parting: there was the sound of a motor in the drive before the house, in a moment a maid-servant came quietly out upon the terrace and informed Miss Telfair that her car had come. She gathered her evening cloak about her fragile, ivory shoulders--that were somehow like a piece of her own rare porcelain--thrust her hand out towards Mrs. Pierce in swift and firm farewell, and turned, saying in her crisp, incisive voice: "Well, children, I'm departing. . . . Joel," she said, pausing a moment as she went, "I shall expect you and your young friend at my house for tea tomorrow."

  "And are you coming to the pool tomorrow morning, Margaret?" Mrs. Pierce called after her.

  "That, my dear, I couldn't tell you," she said, going. "If I do not get a call from town. We shall see what we shall see--good night, all," and she went through the moonlit door into the house.

  LXI

  Mrs. Pierce stood at the foot of the stairs surveying this young stranger from the outside world with a tolerant but glacially detached smile of impersonal curiosity:

  ". . . . Joel tells me that you like to stay up all night and prowl around. What do you do on these prowling expeditions?"

  He wanted to answer her with simple eloquence and grace and warmth, he wanted to paint a picture of his midnight wanderings that would hold her there in fascinated interest, but the glacial impersonality of the woman's smile, the proud and haughty magnificence of her person, froze all the ardours of enthusiasm and conviction with which, he felt, he might have spoken; it even seemed to numb and thicken the muscles of his tongue, and he stood there gaping at her awkwardly, cutting a sorry figure, and flushing crimson with anger and vexation at his lame, stupid, halting tongue, and stammered out, replying: