OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  The great cupboards were crowded with huge stacks of gleaming china ware and crockery, enough to serve the needs of a hotel. And the long kitchen table, as well as the chairs and woodwork of the rooms, was white and shining as a surgeon's table: the sinks and drains were blocks of creamy porcelain, clean scrubbed copper, shining steel.

  It would be impossible to describe in detail the lavish variety, the orderly complexity, the gleaming cleanliness of that great room, but the effect it wrought upon his senses was instant and overwhelming. It was one of the most beautiful, spacious, thrilling, and magnificently serviceable rooms that he had ever seen: everything in it was designed for use, and edged with instant readiness; there was not a single thing in the room that was not needed, and yet its total effect was to give one a feeling of power, space, comfort, rightness and abundant joy.

  The pantry shelves were crowded to the ceiling with the growing treasure of a lavish victualling--an astounding variety and abundance of delicious foods, enough to stock a grocery store or to supply an Arctic expedition--but the like of which he had never seen, or dreamed of, in a country house before.

  Everything was there, from the familiar staples of a cook's necessities to every rare and toothsome dainty that the climates and the markets of the earth produce. There was food in cans, and food in tins, and food in crocks, and food in bottles. There were--in addition to such staple products of the canning art as corn, tomatoes, beans and peas, pears, plums and peaches--such rarer relishes, as herrings, sardines, olives, pickles, mustard, relishes, anchovies. There were boxes of glacéd crystalline fruits from California, and little wickered jars of sharp-spiced ginger fruit from China: there were expensive jellies green as emerald, red as rubies, smoother than whipped cream; there were fine oils and vinegars in bottles, and jars of pungent relishes of every sort and boxes of assorted spices. There was everything that one could think of, and everywhere there was evident the same scrubbed and gleaming cleanliness with which the kitchen shone, but here there was as well that pungent, haunting, spicy odour that pervades the atmosphere of pantries--a haunting and nostalgic fusion of delicious smells whose exact quality it is impossible to define, but which has in it the odours of cinnamon, pepper, cheese, smoked ham, and cloves.

  When they got into the kitchen they found Rosalind there: she was standing by the long white table drinking a glass of milk. Joel, in the swift and correct manner with which he gave instructions, at once eager, gentle and decisive, began to show his guest round.

  "And look," he whispered with his soft and yet incisive slowness, as he opened the heavy shining doors of the refrigerator--"here's the ice-box: if you find anything there you like, just help yourself--"

  Food! Food, indeed! The great ice-box was crowded with such an assortment of delicious foods as he had not seen in many years: just to look at it made the mouth begin to water, and aroused the pangs of a hunger so ravenous and insatiate that it was almost more painful than the pangs of bitter want. One was so torn with desire and greedy gluttony as he looked at the maddening plenty of that feast that his will was rendered almost impotent. Even as the eye glistened and the mouth began to water at the sight of a noble roast of beef, all crisp and crackly in its cold brown succulence, the attention was diverted to a plump broiled chicken, whose brown and crackly tenderness fairly seemed to beg for the sweet and savage pillage of the tooth. But now a pungent and exciting fragrance would assail the nostrils: it was the smoked pink slices of an Austrian ham--should it be brawny bully beef, now, or the juicy breast of a white tender pullet, or should it be the smoky pungency, the half-nostalgic savour of the Austrian ham? Or that noble dish of green lima beans, now already beautifully congealed in their pervading film of melted butter; or that dish of tender stewed young cucumbers; or those tomato slices, red and thick and ripe, and heavy as a chop; or that dish of cold asparagus, say; or that dish of corn; or, say, one of those musty fragrant, deep-ribbed cantaloups, chilled to the heart, now, in all their pink-fleshed taste and ripeness; or a round thick slab cut from the red ripe heart of that great water-melon; or a bowl of those red raspberries, most luscious and most rich with sugar, and a bottle of that thick rich cream which filled one whole compartment of that treasure-chest of gluttony, or--

  What shall it be now? What shall it be? A snack! A snack!--Before we prowl the meadows of the moon tonight and soak our hearts in the moonlight's magic and the visions of our youth--what shall it be before we prowl the meadows of the moon? Oh, it shall be a snack, a snack--hah! hah!--it shall be nothing but a snack because--hah! hah!--you understand, we are not hungry and it is not well to eat too much before retiring--so we'll just investigate the ice-box as we have done so oft at midnight in America--and we are the moon's man, boys--and all that it will be, I do assure you, will be something swift and quick and ready, something instant and felicitous, and quite delicate and dainty--just a snack!

  I think--now let me see--h'm, now!--well, perhaps I'll have a slice or two of that pink Austrian ham that smells so sweet and pungent and looks so pretty and so delicate there in the crisp garlands of the parsley leaf!--and yes, perhaps, I'll have a slice of this roast beef, as well--h'm now!--yes, I think that's what I'm going to do--say a slice of red rare meat there at the centre--ah-h! there you are! yes, that's the stuff, that does quite nicely, thank you--with just a trifle of that crisp brown crackling there to oil the lips and make its passage easy, and a little of that cold but brown and, oh!--most--brawny gravy--and, yes, sir! I think I will, now that it occurs to me, a slice of that plump chicken--some white meat, thank you, at the breast--ah, there it is!--how sweetly doth the noble fowl submit to the swift and keen persuasion of the knife--and now, perhaps, just for our diet's healthy balance, a spoonful of those lima beans, as gay as April and as sweet as butter, a tomato slice or two, a speared forkful of those thin-sliced cucumbers--ah! what a delicate and toothsome pickle they do make--what sorcerer invented them--a little corn perhaps, a bottle of this milk, a pound of butter and that crusty loaf of bread--and even this moon-haunted wilderness were paradise enow--with just a snack--a snack--a snack--

  He was aroused from this voluptuous and hypnotic reverie by the sound of Rosalind's warm sweet laugh, her tender and caressing touch upon his arm, and Joel's soundless and astonished mouth, the eager incandescence of his gleeful smile, his whole face uplifted in its fine and gentle smile, his voice cast in its frequent tone of whispering astonishment:

  "Simply incredible!" he was whispering to his sister. "I've never seen such an expression on any one's face in all my life! It's simply diabolical! When he sees food, he looks as if he's just getting ready to rape a woman!"

  "Do you, darling?" said the girl, with her warm, sweet tolerance of humour. "I'm so glad to know that someone else likes food. I like it, too," she said with a warm plainness; "when I am married and start having babies I shall eat and eat and eat to my heart's content--as much as I want to, all the things I ever wanted, till I'm satisfied. . . . It's so wonderful to find someone who will eat! You don't know how hard it is to have a brother who's a vegetarian--and who tells me that I'm getting disgustingly fat--and what a horrible thing it is to eat dead animals--like eating corpses. . . . Wouldn't Joel be wonderful if he ate roast beef," she added with her warm and gentle humour, as she put her arm around her brother's waist--"he looks so thin and starved, poor thing--like a religious ascetic--doesn't he?--But then, he's such a saint as he is--isn't he?--if he liked food, as well, he'd just have everything--he'd be too perfect."

  "No, sir," Joel whispered, shaking his head and laughing with his curiously boyish, almost clumsily naïve, but beautifully engaging good nature--"Not I! . . . The rest of you can eat all the dead animals you like--but you don't catch me doing it! . . . I'll stick to spinach," he whispered radiantly. "That's good enough for me."

  "I know, darling," she said with a gentle and tolerant sarcasm. "You and Bernard Shaw: if he said baled hay was good for you, you'd believe him, wouldn't you?"

  He laughed in hi
s soundless, enthusiastic and beautifully generous way, his gaunt starved face lighting up with the gleeful, almost diabolically brilliant radiance of his wonderful selfless good-nature.

  Then, turning swiftly to his firmer manner of incisive severity--the direct and earnest concision with which he whispered his instructions--he said abruptly:

  "And look, Gene . . . when you finish eating put the lights out: the switch is on the right hand by the door as you go out. . . . And stay up as long as you like, go wherever you like, do as you please--you'll bother no one," he whispered, ". . . and a good walk," he continued abruptly after a moment's pause, "--is down the road--the way you went with Ros' tonight--except that you keep on--"

  "Past the cows, darling," said Rosalind gently. "Past all the lovely cows and barns and meadows of the moon."

  LXII

  The two young people stopped talking instantly as Eugene came in, Joel got up and shut the door behind him, indicated an easy leather chair, where the author could read his play most comfortably, and sitting down again beside his sister, waited for the play to begin.

  Eugene began to read haltingly, with the difficulty and embarrassed constraint of a young man just beginning to test his powers, exhibiting his talents to the public for the first time, and torn by all the anguish, hope, and fear, the proud incertitude of youth.

  It was a play called "Mannerhouse," a title which itself might reveal the whole nature of his error--and its subject was the decline and fall and ultimate extinction of a proud old family of the Southern aristocracy in the years that followed the Civil War, the ultimate decay of all its fortunes and the final acquisition of its proud estate, the grand old columned house that gave the play its name, by a vulgar, coarse and mean, but immensely able member of the rising "lower class."

  This theme--which, in its general form and implications, was probably influenced a good deal by The Cherry Orchard of Chekhov--was written in a somewhat mixed mood of romantic sentiment, Byronic irony, and sardonic realism. The hero was a rather Byronic character, a fellow who concealed his dark and tender poetry under the mask of a sardonic humour; the love story was coloured by defeat and error and departure, and the hero's final return "years later," a lonely and nameless wanderer, battered by the world and the wreckage of his life, to the old ruined house in which already the rasping note of the wrecker's crew was audible, was tempered by the romantic gallantry of Cyrano. The final meeting with the girl--the woman that he loved--their ultimate gallant resignation to fate and age and destiny--was wholly Cyranoic; and the final scene, in which the gigantic faithful negro slave--now an old man, almost blind, but with the savage loyalty and majesty of a race of African kings from whom he is descended--wraps his great arms around the rotting central column of the old ruined house, snaps it in two with a last convulsion of his dying strength, and brings the whole ruined temple thundering down to bury his beloved master, his hated "poor white" enemy the new owner, and himself, beneath its ruins--was obviously a product of the Samson legend.

  In spite of this, there was good stuff in the play, dramatic conflict, moving pageantry. The character of the hard, grasping but immensely able materialist of "the lower class," the newer South, was well realized--and had been derived from the character of the youth's own uncle, William Pentland. The scenes between the hero and his father--the leonine and magnificently heroic "General"--were also good; as were those between the hero and Porter, the poor-white capitalist. Even in these romantic, grandly-mannered scenes he had already begun to use some of the powerful and inimitable materials of life itself and of his own experience: the speech of Porter was the plain, rich, pungent, earthly, strongly coloured speech of his mother, of his uncle William Pentland, and of the Pentland tribe.

  But the scenes between the hero and the girl were less successful: the character of the girl was shadowy and uncertain--a kind of phantasmal combination of the characters of Roxane in Cyrano, and Ophelia--and her sweet romantic loveliness, the yearning tenderness of her pure love, did not provide a convincing foil and balance for the sardonic humour, the bad and almost brutal volume of wit, with which the hero marked his pain and love and bitterness and repulsed her advances. (This scene, by the way, was undoubtedly influenced a great deal by the Hamlet and Ophelia situation.)

  Likewise--in various and interesting ways, what he had read and seen and actually experienced had shaped the tone and temper of his play: the character of the pompous and banal old "Major"--the "General's" contemporary and friend and the father of the heroine--and his conversations with the hero, in which his conventional and pompous character is made the butt for the biting and sardonic gibes of the latter, were also evidently strongly coloured with the influence of Polonius and Hamlet. But there was good stuff in these scenes as well; considerable originality and naturalness were shown in the characterization of the old "Major": he was, for example, trying to support the tottering fortune of a small military school which his family had established several generations before, and whose gigantic futility, amid this decline of a ruined order and a vanquished system was, in the years after the war, ironically apparent. There was, in fact, much telling satire in this situation, and on the whole it was well managed. Moreover, its "modern" implications were evident: it suggested, for example, the Southerner's pitiable devotion to a gaudy uniform and military trappings, the profusion of ugly, trivial, cheap and brutal little "military schools" that cover the whole South, even to the present day, like an ugly rash, and whose "You furnish the boy--we send back the man" philosophy is nauseous in its hypocrisy, dishonesty, and cheap pretence.

  There was much more that was good and pungent and original in these scenes between the "Major" and the hero: a great deal of the falseness, hypocrisy and sentimentality of the South was polished off in these episodes, and "the war"--the Civil War--was used effectively as a stalking-horse to satirize the great World War of modern times. There was, for example, a good, and original--on the whole, a very true--variation of the Youth-and-Age, Old Man-Young Man conflict that was evident at that period, and that provided the material of so many books and plays and poems of the time.

  In these scenes, it was very forcefully and amusingly shown that the conflict between youth and age had in it an element of mutual hypocrisy, a kind of mutual acceptance of a literary game about youth and age which both young and old knew in their hearts was false, but which both played.

  Thus when the old "Major" would heave a melancholy sigh, and shaking his beard with a doleful and hypocritical regret would say:

  "Ah yes, my boy! . . . We old men have made a sad mess of this world. . . . We have betrayed our trust, and shown ourselves unworthy of the confidence you young men have reposed in us. . . . We were given the opportunity of making the world a better place in which to live and we have left nothing but ruin, poverty, and misery wherever we went--we have left the world in ashes. . . . Now it is for you young men of the world--for youth--glorious, brave and noble-hearted youth--"

  "Ah, youth, youth," the hero would murmur at this point with a sardonic humour that of course went unnoticed by the pompous old fool to whom it was uttered--and the Major would nod his head in agreement and go on--

  "Yes, youth--brave, generous and devoted youth--it remains for youth to repair the damage that we old men have done, to bind up the nation's broken wounds, to see to it that the world be made into a fit place for their children to live in, to see that--"

  "Government of the people, by the people and for the people," the hero would sardonically supply.

  "Yes," the old Major would agree, "--and that the children of the coming generation may not look at you, as you can look at us, and say--'What have you done, old men, with your inheritance? What kind of world are you leaving behind you for us young men to inherit? How can you look us in the eyes, old men, when you know that you have been unworthy of your sacred trust--that the young men of the world have been foully tricked, betrayed, dishonoured by you old men'--"

  "Why, Major!" the hero woul
d now cry, in mock astonishment, as he ironically applauded. "--This is eloquence! Hear hear! . . . And you are right! Major, you are right! The young men of the world have been betrayed and tricked! Not only tricked--but tr-r-ricked! . . . And by whom?" he would inquire with sardonic rhetoric. "Why, by these false, lying, greedy, hypocritical old men who have had the whole world in their keeping and who have reduced it to a shambles for our inheritance! . . . Major, who made the war? Who sent us forth to war? . . . Why, these old, false, lying, greedy men, of course! . . . And who fought the war? . . . Why, these brave, gallant, devoted, noble-spirited young men, of course! . . . And why did you old men send us forth to war, Major? . . . Why, to further your own rapacity, to protect your own ill-gotten wealth, to conquer, ravage, and invade for your own enrichment. . . . And how did we go to war, Major? Why, with faith and trust and the purity of a high conviction. . . . And how did we come back from war? With hell in our eyes. . . . We young men always go to war with faith and trust and the purity of a high conviction. . . . And we always come back with hell in our eyes! Why, Major? . . . Why, because you false, lying, greedy, selfish, and hypocritical old men of the world have lied to us. . . . You always lie to us. And how, Major, in what way do you lie to us? . . . Why, Major," he said solemnly, "you tell us that war is beautiful, ideal, and heroic--that we are going forth to fight for pure ideals, noble faith. . . . And what do we find, Major? Why," he said, as his voice sank to an ironically solemn whisper--"we find that war is really ugly--is really cruel--horrible--base. . . . Why, Major, do you know what we young men find when we go to war? We find that men in war actually kill one another. . . . Yes, sir," he would whisper solemnly, ". . . they shoot one another--they blow one another's brains out--that's what they do--why, it's murder, Major--sheer cold-blooded murder--it's not what you said it was at all--and all of it because you old greedy, lying, selfish men who make the wars have lied to us and tr-r-ricked us all along!"