OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  And steeled and wakened by the challenge of her tone--that challenge which one meets so often in people who have let their whole life go to hell, and lacking stamina for life's larger consequences insist on it for trivialities--he raised his head, looked at her with angry, bloodshot eyes, and said quietly:

  "Very well, I'll go. But I resent your asking it very much!"

  "All right, my dear," she said quietly. "If you resent it, you resent it--and that's that! Only, when you make a promise to your friends they expect you to live up to it."

  "Ace," said Starwick coldly. "Quite."

  "And now," she spoke more kindly, "why don't you go into the bathroom, Frank, and straighten up a bit? A little cold water across your head and shoulders would do you no end of good." She turned to Ann and said quietly: "Did you finish in there?"

  "Yes," said Ann curtly, "it's all right now. I've cleaned it up." For a minute she stared sullenly at the older woman, and suddenly burst into her short and angry laugh:

  "God!" she said, with a rich, abrupt, and beautifully coarse humanity. "I never saw the like of it in my life! I don't see where he put it all!" Her voice trembled with a full, rich, infuriated kind of humour. "Everything was there!" she cried, "except the kitchen sink!"

  Starwick flushed deeply, and looking at her, said, quietly, gravely: "I'm sorry, Ann. I'm terribly, terribly sorry!"

  "Oh, it's all right," she said shortly, yet with a kind of tenderness. "I'm used to it. Don't forget that I served three years' training in a hospital once. You get so you don't notice those things."

  "You are a very swell person," he said slowly and distinctly. "I'm terribly grateful."

  She flushed and turned away, saying curtly: "Sit down, Frank. You'll feel better when you have some coffee. I'm making it now." And in her silent and competent way she set to work.

  In these few commonplace words all that was strong, grand, and tender in Ann's soul and character was somehow made evident. Brusque and matter of fact as her words had been when she referred to the disgusting task just performed, their very curtness, and the rich and coarse humanity of her sudden angry laugh, had revealed a spirit of noble tenderness and strength, a spirit so strong and sweet and full of love that it had risen triumphant not only over the stale, dead and snobbish little world from which she came, but also over the squeamishness which such a task would have aroused in most of the people who made up that world.

  To Starwick, she symbolized certain divinities known to his art and his experience: Maya, or one of the great Earth-Mothers of the ancients, or the goddess of Compassionate Mercy of the Chinese, to whom he often likened her.

  But to the other youth, her divinity was less mythical, more racial and mundane. She seemed to fulfil in part his vision of the grand America, to make palpable the female quality of that fortunate, good, and happy life of which he had dreamed since childhood--to evoke the structure of that enchanted life of which every American has dreamed as a child. It is a life that seems for ever just a hand's-breadth off and instantly to be grasped and made our own, the moment that we find the word to utter it, the key to open it. It is a world distilled of our own blood and earth, and qualified by all our million lights and weathers, and we know that it will be noble, intolerably strange and lovely, when we find it. Finally, she was the incarnation of all the secret beauty of New England, the other side of man's dark heart, the buried loveliness that all men long for.

  LXXXIII

  The car which they had chartered for a four months' tour was brought round from a garage at nine o'clock. A few minutes later they were on their way to Rheims.

  Elinor drove; Eugene sat beside her; Ann and Starwick were in the rear seat. The car was a good one--a Panhard--and Elinor drove swiftly, beautifully, with magnificent competence, as she did all things, getting ahead of everybody else, besting even the swerve of the taxi-drivers in their wasp-like flight, and doing it all with such smooth ease that no one noticed it.

  They seemed to get through the great dense web, the monumental complication of central Paris by a kind of magic. As always, Elinor communicated to everyone and everything the superb confidence of her authority. In her presence, and under her governance, the strange and alien world about them became instantly familiar as the Main Street of one's native town, making even the bewildering and intricate confusion of its swarming mass wonderfully natural and easy to be grasped. Paris, in fact, under the transforming magic of this woman's touch, became curiously American, the enchantment beautifully like Eugene's own far-off visions as a child.

  It was astounding. The whole city had suddenly taken on the clear and unperplexing proportions of a map--of one of those beautifully simple and comforting maps which are sold to tourists, in which everything is charming, colourful, and cosy as a toy, and where everything that need be known--all the celebrated "points of interest"--the Eiffel Tower, the Madeleine, and Notre Dame, the Trocadéro, and the Arc de Triomphe, are pictured charmingly, in vivid colours.

  Paris, in fact, had this morning become a brilliant, lovely, flashing toy. It was a toy which had been miraculously created for the enjoyment of brilliant, knowing and sophisticated Americans like Elinor and himself. It was a toy which could be instantly understood, preserved and enjoyed, a toy that they could play with to their hearts' content, a toy which need confuse and puzzle none of them for a moment, particularly since Elinor was there to explain the toy and make it go.

  It was incredible. Gone was all the blind confusion, the sick despair, the empty desolation of his first month in Paris. Gone was the old blind and baffled struggle against the staggering mass and number of a world too infinitely complex to be comprehended, too strange and alien to be understood. Gone were all the old sensations of the drowning horror, the feeling of atomic desolation as he blindly prowled the streets among alien and uncountable hordes of strange dark faces, the sensation of being an eyeless grope-thing that crawled and scuttled blindly on the sea-depths of some terrible oceanic world of whose dimensions, structure, quality and purpose it could know nothing. Gone were all those feelings of strife, profitless, strange and impotent futility--those struggles that wracked the living sinews of man's life and soul with quivering exhaustion and with sick despair, the hideous feeling of being emptied out in planetary vacancy, of losing all the high hope of the spirit's purpose, the heart's integrity--of being exploded, emptied out and dissipated into hideous, hopeless nothingness where all the spirit of man's courage turned dead and rotten as a last year's apple, and all his sounding plans of work and greatness seemed feebler than the scratchings of a dog upon a wall--a horror that can seize a man in the great jungle of an unknown city and a swarming street and that is far more terrible than the unknown mystery of any Amazonian jungle of the earth could be.

  It was all gone now--the devouring hunger, and the drowning horror, and the blind confusion of the old, swarm-haunted mind of man--the fruitless struggle of the Faustian life--and in its place he had the glittering toy, the toy of legend and enchantment and of quick possession.

  The French, they were a charming race--so gay, so light, and so incorrigible--so childlike and so like a race of charming toys.

  Elinor made their relation to all these good people swarming in the streets around them wonderfully easy, dear, and agreeable. There was nothing strange about them, their ways were unpredictable, since they were French, but they were perfectly understandable. Her attitude, expressed in a rapid, gay and half-abstracted chatter--a kind of running commentary on the life around her as she drove--made the whole thing plain. They were a quaint lot, a droll lot, an incomparable lot--they were charming, amazing, irresponsible, a race of toys and children--they were "French."

  "All right, my dear," she would murmur to herself as a fat taxi-driver snaked recklessly in ahead of her and came to a triumphant stop--"have it your own way, my darling--have it your own way--I shan't argue with you--God!" she would cry, throwing her head back with a sudden rich burst of laughter--"look at the old boy with the whiskers
over there at the table--did you see him twirl his gay moustachios and roll his roguish eyes at that girl as she went by? Simply incredible!" she cried with another laugh, and bit her lips, and shook her head in fine astonishment. "Thank you!" she murmured politely, as the gendarme shrilled upon his whistle and beckoned with his small white club. "Monsieur l'Agent, vous êtes bien gentil"--as she smoothly shifted gears and shot past him.

  In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious shops and great cafés, an animated and beautiful design of a million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all filled with joy, all with something so vivid, bright, particular and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved itself into a thousand charming and brilliant pictures, each wonderful and unforgettable, and all fitting instantly into the single structure, the simple and magnificent clarity of the whole design.

  They swept through the huge central web of Paris, and were passing through the great shabby complication of the Eastern Quarters, the ragged, ugly sprawl of the suburbs.

  And now, swift as dreams, it seemed, they were out in open country, speeding along roads shaded by tall rows of poplars, under a sky of humid grey, whitened with a milky and soul-troubling light.

  Elinor was very gay, mercurial, full of sudden spontaneous laughter, snatches of song, deep gravity, swift inexplicable delight. Ann maintained a sullen silence. As for Starwick, he seemed on the verge of collapse all the time. At Château-Thierry he announced that he could go no farther: they stopped, got him into a little café, and fortified him with some brandy. He sank into a stupor of exhaustion, from which they could not rouse him. To all their persuasions and entreaties he just shook his head and mumbled wearily:

  "I can't!--Leave me here!--I can't go on!"

  Three hours passed in this way before they succeeded in reviving him, getting him out of the café--or estaminet--and into the car again. Ann's face was flushed with resentful anger. She burst out furiously:

  "You had no right to make him come along on this trip! You knew he couldn't make it; he's dead on his feet. I think we ought to take him back to Paris now."

  "Sorry, my dear," said Elinor crisply, with a fine bright smile, "but there'll be no turning back! We're going on!"

  "Frank can't go on!" Ann cried angrily. "You know he can't! I think it's a rotten shame for you to insist on this when you see what shape he's in."

  "Nevertheless, we're going on," said Elinor with grim cheerfulness. "And Mr. Starwick is going with us. He'll see it through now to the bitter end. And if he dies upon the way, we'll give him a soldier's burial here upon the field of honour. . . . Allons, mes enfants! Avancez!" And humming gaily and lightly the tune of Malbrouck, she shifted gears and sent the car smoothly, swiftly forward again.

  It was a horrible journey: one of those experiences which, by the grim and hopeless protraction of their suffering, leave their nightmare image indelibly upon the memories of everyone who has experienced them. The grey light of the short winter's day was already waning rapidly when they drove out of Château-Thierry. As they approached Rheims dark had almost come, the lights of the town had begun to twinkle, sparsely, with provincial dismalness, in the distance. No one knew the purpose of their visit; no one knew what the trip was for, what they were coming to see--no one had enquired.

  It was almost dark when they entered the town. Elinor drove immediately to the cathedral, halted the car, and got out.

  "Voilà, mes amis!" she said ironically. "We are here!"

  And she made a magnificent flourishing gesture towards the great ruined mass, which, in the last faint grey light of day, was dimly visible as a gigantic soaring monument of shattering arches and demolished buttresses, a lacework of terrific stone looped ruggedly with splinters of faint light, the demolished façades of old saints and kings and shell-torn towers--the twilight ruins of a twilight world.

  "Magnificent!" cried Elinor enthusiastically. "Superb!--Frank! Frank! You must get out and feast your eyes upon this noble monument! I have heard you speak so often of its beauty. . . . But, my dear, you must!" she said, answering with fine persuasion his feeble and dispirited groan. "You'd never forgive yourself, or me either, if you knew you'd come the whole way to Rheims without a single look at its cathedral."

  And, despite his wearily mumbled protests, she took him by the arm and pulled him from the car. Then, for a moment, as he stared drunkenly, with blind, unseeing eyes, at the great grey twilit shape, she propped him up and held him between herself and Eugene.

  Then they all got back into the car, and she drove them to the best café, the best hotel in town. Starwick almost collapsed getting out of the car. His knees buckled under him, and he would have fallen if Ann had not caught him, put her arm round him and held him up. His condition was pitiable. He could no longer hold his head up; it lolled and wobbled drunkenly on his neck like a flower too heavy for its heavy stalk. His eyes were glazed and leaden, and as they started into the café, he had to be held up. He lifted his feet and dragged them after him like leaden weights. The café was a large and splendid one. They found a table to one side. Starwick staggered towards the cushioned seat against the wall and immediately collapsed. From that time on, he was never wholly conscious. Ann sat down beside him, put her arm round him and supported him. He sank against her shoulder like a child. The girl's face was flushed with anger, she stared at Elinor with resentful eyes, but by no word or gesture did Elinor show that she noticed anything amiss either in Ann's or Starwick's behaviour.

  Rather, she chatted gaily to Eugene, she kept up a witty and high-spirited discourse with everyone around her, she had never been more mercurial, quick, gay and charming than she was that evening. And announcing gaily that she was the hostess that was "giving the party," she ordered lavishly--a delicious meal, with champagne from the celebrated cellars of the establishment. And everyone, spurred to hunger by the cold air and their long journey, ate heartily--everyone save Ann, who ate little and sat in angry silence, with one arm round Starwick's shoulders, and Starwick, who could not be roused from his deep stupor to eat anything.

  It was after nine o'clock before they got up to go. Elinor paid the bill, and still chatting as gaily and as lightly as if the whole wretched expedition had brought nothing but unqualified joy to all her guests, started for the door. Starwick had to be half-carried, half-dragged out by Ann and Eugene, under the prayerful guidance of several deeply troubled waiters. They put him in the car and got in themselves. Elinor, looking round lightly and crying out cheerfully, "Are we ready, children?" started the motor for the long drive back to Paris.

  That was a hideous and unforgettable journey. Before they were done with it, they thought that it would never end. Under the protraction of its ghastly horror, time lengthened out interminably, unbelievably, into centuries. It seemed to them at last that they would never arrive, that they were rolling through a spaceless vacancy without progression, that they were hung there in the horrible ethers of some planetary emptiness where their wheels spun futilely and for ever in moveless movement, unsilent silence, changeless change.

  From the very beginning they did not know where they were going. By the time they got out of Rheims they were completely lost. It was a cold night, late in February; a thick fog-like mist that grew steadily more impenetrable as the night wore on, had come down and blanketed the earth in white invisibility. And through this mist there were diffused two elements: the weird radiance of a submerged moon which gave to the sea of fog through which they groped the appearance of an endless sea of milk, and the bitter clutch of a stealthy, raw, and cruelly penetrating cold which crept into man's flesh and numbed him to the bone of misery.

  All through that ghastly and interminable night they groped their way across France in the milky ocean of antarctic fog. It seemed to them that they had travelled hundreds of miles, that Paris had long since been passed, lost, forgotten in the fog, that they were approaching
the outer suburbs of Lyons or Bordeaux, that presently they would see the comforting lights of the English Channel or that they had turned northwards, had crossed Belgium, and soon would strike the Rhine.

  From time to time the road wound through the ghostly street of some old village; the white walls of village houses rose sheer and blank beside the road, sheeted in phantasmal mist like ghosts, and with no sound within. Then they would be groping their way out through the open countryside again--but where or in what country, no one knew, none dared to say--and suddenly, low and level, beside them to the left, they would see the moon. It would suddenly emerge in some blind hole that opened in that wall of fog, and it was such a moon as no man living ever saw before. It was an old, mad, ruined crater of a moon, an ancient, worn, and demented thing that smouldered red like an expiring coal, and that was like the old ruined moon of a fantastic dream. It hung there on their left, just at the edge of a low ridge of hills, and it was so low, so level, and so ghostly-near, it seemed to them that they could touch it.

  Towards midnight they groped their way into a whited ghostly phantom of a town which Elinor at length, with the sudden recognition of a person who revisits some old scene of childhood, discovered to be Soissons. She had known the town well during the War: the ambulance unit, in which she had been for eighteen months a driver, had been stationed here. Starwick was half conscious, huddled into Ann's shoulder on the dark rear seat. He groaned pitiably and said that he could go no farther, that they must stop. They found a hotel café that was still open and half-carried, half-dragged him in. They got brandy for him, they tried to revive him; he looked like a dead man and said that he could go no farther, that they must leave him there. And for the first time Elinor's grave tone showed concern and sharp anxiety, for the first time her hard eye softened into care. She remained firm; gently, obdurately, she refused him. He collapsed again into unconsciousness; she turned her worried eyes upon the others and said quietly: