The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  John and Beata sat on the bench in the plague-stricken town. They looked at the sunlight on the water. They spoke little. Any words but the most commonplace would disturb the mounting music that filled them.

  “. . . ? a wonderful morning!”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  We fashion our lives by the operation of our imaginations, or—as Goethe said—“Beware what you long for in your youth, for you will get it in your middle age,” by which we presume he meant that we shall get it or some botched caricature of it. John Ashley’s imagination was limited in some areas, but not in this: he wanted to be a husband and the father of many children; he wanted to be married by the age of twenty-two so that his older children would be passing through the teens before he was forty; he wanted to live at a distance from the Atlantic coast in a large house surrounded by verandahs—a house somewhat untidy, perhaps, because of the tumult of life within it, all those young boys and girls; he wanted a workshop near the house, filled with the proper tools and equipment, in which he could perform his experiments and make his useful and useless inventions. It never occurred to him to wish for wealth (sufficient means to maintain a family came of themselves to any serious-minded and diligent young man), fame (being well-known must waste a lot of a man’s time), learning (he had never discovered much to interest him in books), wisdom, “philosophy,” spiritual insight (things like that also came of themselves as one grew older, presumably). He had a fairly clear picture of his future wife: she would be beautiful and very nearly perfect—that is, without vanity, envy, malice, or deference to the opinion of others. She would be an exemplary housewife. She would be, like himself, slow to speak, but endowed with a beautiful speaking voice—that of his doting mother managed to be both nasal and flat.

  There were other elements in Ashley’s picture of his future that were less clear to him, but he was in no doubt about the first steps. He would lead his classes, thereby being enabled to select on graduation the job that most suited him. He would be married on the day after that graduation. As he was to reside in Hoboken for four years he resolved to search for a wife in the community. On his trips to New York he kept his eyes well open. The girls in the city seemed to him to be invested with a fatiguing vivacity; they never stopped talking; they laughed too loudly in public and they waved their hands about in the air. A small-town boy himself, he wished to marry a small-town girl.

  “. . . ?’t’s so peaceful!”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  John Ashley led all his classes and was president of his fraternity, but he took little interest in his fellow students. (He resigned from the house in his senior year and moved into private lodgings.) He was naturally endowed for sports, but did not engage in them. He lacked any competitive sense and appeared to lack ambition. But he was never idle; he explored the laws of mechanics and electricity, and he hunted women.

  He intimidated his professors. Some had known gifted pupils, but none had ever seen a student who approached mechanics in the spirit of play. They gave him enlarged space in the laboratory and furnished him with expensive equipment. The energy it engendered rang bells (they played “’Nita, Juanita”) and threw numerals and letters on a grid from a clavier. He came near killing himself a number of times; he blew out windows, blackened ceilings, and almost reduced the laboratory to ashes; but grave accidents do not befall young Ashleys. His special laboratory privileges were regretfully withdrawn. As graduation approached the Dean and a number of his advisers discussed inviting the young man to join the faculty, but voices were raised against the appointment. “Inventors” were suspect and it was obvious that Ashley was of that sort. However, they hung his mechanical drawings in the school’s corridors—they were of unprecedented clarity and beauty and remained there for years—and wrote handsome letters of recommendation on his behalf. Ashley also played with mechanics at his lodgings. His room resembled some eccentric scientist’s cavern in a novel by Jules Verne. When, at dawn, the hands of his clock reached five-thirty a pillow fell from the ceiling on his face; in cold weather a long steel arm lowered the window, another lit a burner under a tea kettle. He played with mathematics. There were always six to ten card games in progress at his fraternity house. He drew up charts analyzing the probabilities governing whist, Jack Gallagher, and pinochle. Since he had no competitive sense, no malice, and no need of money, his interest in the card games was limited to preventing any one member of the group from winning overmuch.

  If these activities reflected the spirit of play, his search for a wife was very serious indeed. He was interested only in girls of strict upbringing. An earnest hunter studies the terrain, observes the habits, runs, and feeding grounds of his quarry; he fits himself out with appropriate equipment and arms himself with patience. Soon after his arrival in Hoboken he began laying his plans. He enrolled as a student of the German language. He attended the Lutheran church. It was a general rule among the prosperous German families that their daughters would have nothing to do with the students at the Institute, and it was common knowledge at the Institute that the girls of Hoboken were heavy-footed “Dutchies,” unworthy of a lively young man’s attention. But John Ashley never waited to form his opinions on those of his contemporaries; his aims were above their vision and his methods beyond their patience. He followed girls on the street and learned their names and addresses. He was welcomed at the church. Introduction led to introduction. He was invited to Sunday dinners. He, in turn, invited girls (and their mothers) to lectures with lantern slides—“Our December Sky,” “Goethe und die Tiere”—and to minstrel shows. At the close of these entertainments there was much shaking of hands in the aisles and further introductions. There were dances and balls in Hoboken long before dancing was accepted in similar communities elsewhere. He threw a wide net. Girl led to girl. He was tracking a great prize before he knew that she existed. He stalked by faith. The hunt was time consuming, but we all have time to expend on what is essential to our nature. Finally—late, when he had almost given up hope, in the second quarter of his senior year—he saw Beata Kellerman. A month later he was introduced to her. Three months later he eloped with her.

  Mysterious are the laws of sexual selection. Ashley chose Beata to be his wife much as his son Roger was to choose his life’s career—by elimination. He was a favorite with the mothers and younger sisters; the fathers and brothers found him uninteresting. Naturally, he kept a score card. Trude Gruber and Lisl Grau liked him very much, but they could not restrain themselves from laughing at him. Everyone could see that the other Grau twin, Heidi, was a little in love with him, but she was given to saying that she hated cooking and sewing and “all those stupid Hausfrau things.” Gretchen Hofer (he knew four Gretchens) couldn’t imagine how a girl would want to leave Hoboken to live in the West where there were nothing but Red Indians and rattlesnakes. In his third year it seemed to him that he had found what he was looking for—Marianne Schmidt. On Sunday afternoons they sat on the benches and watched the ships entering and leaving New York Harbor. Marianne was seventeen, beautiful, slow to speak, and thoughtful. She possessed the unusual ability to make Ashley talk. She wanted to know what he was learning at the Institute. Finally she confided that she wished to go to Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts to study chemistry. She planned to be a “lady doctor” to treat children. She had read that in Germany and France a woman could become a doctor—a real doctor, like a man. Ashley listened to her for a while, then ventured a reply. Marianne was unable at first to understand what he was saying. She couldn’t believe her ears. It seemed that he thought it wasn’t healthy to work among sick people all the time.

  “Then who’d do it?”

  “Well . . . ? There are enough doctors who are paid to do it. Somebody’s got to do it, but not you, Marianne.”

  Marianne drew circles on the ground with the tip of her parasol. Presently she rose. “Let’s go home, John. . . . ? John, sometimes I think that you’re just plain ignorant—or rather that something was left ou
t of you. You haven’t any—imagination! You haven’t any—!”

  That eliminated Marianne Schmidt.

  Lottchen Bauer had a beautiful speaking voice and was a famous cook. One day he took her skating on the Turnverein’s rink. They skated together with such elegance that the crowd left the ice to watch them. When at the end of the afternoon he was taking off her skates he looked up and found that she was weeping.

  “Why, Lottchen! What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Life’s awful! I had an awful quarrel with Father and Mother this morning and I’m going to have another one tonight.—John, you said you thought I sang beautifully.”

  “You do. You’re the best home singer I ever heard.”

  “Well, I want to be an opera singer and I’m going to be an opera singer and nothing in the wide world will stop me!”

  “But, Lottchen!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you’d have a very good family life, if you were an opera singer. I mean: you’d have to be away evenings a lot. And I guess they must have to practice on the afternoons before the show.”

  Lottchen wept some more, but from prolonged laughter. That eliminated Lottchen Bauer.

  He was taken to the annual concert given by the pupils of Hoboken’s foremost teacher of the piano, Mrs. Kessel. Music, application, and composed nerves came naturally to these girls. Pupil followed pupil. The evening drew toward its close with exhibitions by the more advanced students, including the three Misses Kellerman. Ashley had seen these young ladies, but had never met them. Their mother Clotilde Kellerman, geborene von Diehlen, regarded herself as superior to the other matrons in the town and held her daughters in closer rein. Beata played last. Ashley had no way of discerning that her performance was the most brilliant but the least innately musical of the evening. It reflected not her beauty but her stony advance to the piano and her withdrawn salute to the audience. In the middle of it—her memory failed her. The public was electrified. This was a scandal and a disgrace and would be talked about for years. Ashley was more electrified by what followed. Beata did not recommence the work; she did not grope about among the keys for an issue. She gazed tranquilly before her, her hands raised. Then she rose and bowed to her listeners, unabashed. She left the stage with the carriage of a world-famous artist who has exceeded all expectations. The applause was generous, but did not cover the indignant comments of Ashley’s friends.

  “She did it on purpose!”

  “Her mother will die!”

  “She’s an awful stuck-up girl and everybody knows it! She hasn’t got any friends and she doesn’t want any.”

  “She did it to spite her mother. She’s impossible to her mother.”

  “No, she didn’t do it on purpose. When she recited on Schiller’s birthday she forgot the words, too.”

  What was it in Beata that so strongly attracted Ashley from these first moments? Was it her fortitude and imperturbability? Did he have sufficient imagination to capture in the air the cry as of one shipwrecked and drowning? Was his attention quickened toward her because of the malicious glee in the audience? (He was tending to believe that community opinion is always wrong.) Did he see himself as a Perseus and St. George whose mission it had been to rescue a beautiful maiden in distress? Or was it in his nature to seek a girl who—for reasons in her nature—would love him all-absorbedly, him alone?

  He stalked her. The family generally attended church in New York and spent the whole Sunday there. They seldom patronized the entertainments in Hoboken. He learned that in school she had been a formidably bright student; she knew “oceans” of German poetry by heart; she and her sisters spoke impeccable French (their mother directed that only French be spoken in the home on Fridays—which left their base-born father out in the cold). She was widely disliked. She was cruelly teased by her brothers and sisters—for her aloofness, for her disdain of boys, for her large feet. The matrons lowered their voices with assumed sympathy to declare that she was “unmarriageable.”

  Once a year—sturdy Protestants though they were—the brewers of Hoboken gave a great pre-Lenten ball (their Fasching, their Mardi Gras) in honor of King Gambrinus, the inventor of beer. John Ashley, the hunter, attended with the Gruber family. He never failed to be attentive to the mothers and it was through Mrs. Gruber that he was introduced to Beata, who had been dancing with her brothers. She refused his invitation to dance. An hour later he sat down by the great Mrs. Kellerman. He talked of the weather and of the band. By luck he happened to mention that he had recently crossed the river to attend a performance of Der Freischütz at The Academy of Music. The Kellermans had held a Saturday-afternoon subscription to the opera for twenty years. Mrs. Kellerman unbent. She invited him to dinner on the following Thursday night. She wanted him to meet her sons, one of whom was thinking of enrolling in the engineering school. Ashley again asked Beata to dance and was refused. (Later she told him that she had been aware of his following her and that she had “hated” him.) On Thursday evening, Beata was indisposed and did not join the family at dinner. Her father and brothers thought him uninteresting; her sisters thought him ridiculous. Mrs. Kellerman liked him very much. He had beautiful manners. He liked her. He listened appreciatively to her account of her childhood home in Hamburg, the great balls she had attended, the royalties to whom she had been presented. Two days later he went to New York and bought a keepsake edition of Heine’s Buch der Lieder, bound in coral velvet, stamped with forget-me-nots. He had consulted his German professor on this important matter. He brought it to her door. Hunters leave cakes of salt in the forest. For three weeks he received no reply. Despair defends itself. Finally he was invited to coffee. That thicket of briars through which Beata groped her life away vanished into thin air.

  Why? How?

  He made no jokes. He didn’t allude to anything in mockery. He spoke of her loss of memory at the piano. He said he understood that perfectly: that beautiful music was one thing, but that a lot of people sitting in little gold creaky chairs listening to their relatives play was another. He bet that she played perfectly when she was alone or with just one or two people she trusted. Ashley, who so seldom talked, talked. He told her he planned to leave the East Coast and to work in the West where he didn’t know anybody. He lowered his voice to confess that he loved his father and mother, but they didn’t really have the same ideas that he had.

  He dropped into German: “I get along pretty well here. I get along pretty well wherever I am. But I have the feeling that I want to get away from everything that I’ve known. I want to start a whole new life. Do you sometimes feel like that?”

  Beata was unable to speak.

  “The Constitution of the United States says that we have a right to be happy. I’ve been happy—whenever I stayed at my grandmother’s farm in upper New York State. But she died. I could be happy with you. You could make me happy. I could try to make you happy.”

  She gazed at him unblinkingly—blue eyes into blue. A hoarseness came into her beautiful speaking voice. She said, “I couldn’t make anyone happy.”

  He smiled. Slowly a smile filled his face that so seldom smiled.

  “Well,” he said, “we could think about it.”

  Here begins a history of the maternal grandparents of the notorious Ashley children.

  There is a theory—the folk wisdom of many countries has condensed the observation into a proverb—that gifted children inherit from their grandparents, that talents skip a generation. Some maintain that that is all nonsense: energy of mind (for good or ill) in persons and nations is primarily the result of a mixture of contrasting traits in the inheritance—a turbulent clash. The Ashley children and the Lansing children certainly had energy of mind, but the Ashley children had something more: a quality of abstraction, an impersonal passion. Where did that come from—that freedom from self-reference?

  Friederich Kellerman and his bride Clotilde, geborene von Diehlen, arrived in
America from Hamburg twenty-five years before this beautiful and soundless morning in Hoboken. Kellerman had risen from apprentice to journeyman to master in the art and science of brewing. He was stout, amiable, pusillanimous, and musical.

  His wife was of another metal. She had a straight back, the carriage of a royal guardsman. Her intimidated neighbors said she looked like a weather vane, or like the figurehead on a ship—allusions to her high coloring, to her red cheeks, tufted orange eyebrows and braids, eyes of sapphire en cabochon. She entered public gatherings like a beadle directing a state funeral. She had been brought up in a household where parents and children (and their grandparents before them) were breathlessly absorbed in improving their social position. Her father had held a position on the administrative staff of Hamburg’s Marine Institute, without being Professor or even Doktor; he was merely paymaster and superintendent of buildings and grounds. At some time in the eighteenth century—when many were doing it—his family had picked up a von to which they were not entitled. The von Diehlens were occasionally given cards to academic and municipal balls at which Exalted Personages were present. Young Clotilde had laid her eyes on royalties and had made her “Knix.” She and her sisters had been taught by their mother with a sort of ferocity to imitate those Exalted Personages. They were made to ascend and descend staircases with Beethoven’s Sonatas or atlases on their heads, to rise from a curtsy without an audible cracking of their knees, and to waltz entire evenings without reversing. Snobbery is a passion. It is a noble passion that has gone astray amid appearances. It springs from a desire to escape the trivial and to be included among those who have no petty cares, no tedious moments, among those whose very misfortunes are lofty. On starry nights the geese around the ponds below our barns hear in the upper airs the song of their migrant cousins. They imagine that all their diversions are magical; they never experience self-distaste and boredom. Clotilde’s marriage to Friederich Kellerman had been a disappointment to her family and was soon to be one to her. She could not forgive herself for having married a brewer, for having followed him to a remote continent where her quality was seldom discerned, for having been betrayed by love into joining her life with that of a handsome young workman possessed of a resounding baritone voice and an easy assurance that he would be a success—one who spoke a deplorable German and one who would never, never, look well on horseback. Clotilde Kellerman, however, held her head high and looked straight ahead. She sustained the pretense of deference to the head of the house. Her children were not deceived. Perhaps the principal reason for Beata’s revolt against her mother was that lady’s tacit but sufficiently evident disparagement of the man she had married.