The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Aye, lad," he said simply, "on time--or thereabouts. She will not miss it much tonight, I reckon."

  But already the great train was gone in a hurricane of sound and speed. The sound receded into silence, leaving the quiet moors as they had always been, leaving them to silence, the creaking of the gulls, the low droning of the giant mosquitoes, the melancholy and funereal pyres of burning trash here and there, and to the lonely fisher of the moors and his young son. For a moment, the old man and the lad regarded the receding projectile of the train with quiet eyes. Then, silently, they resumed their work upon their nets again. Evening was coming, and with it the full tide, and, with the coming of the tide, the cray. So all was now as it had always been. The train had come and gone and vanished, and over the face of the flats brooded as it had always done the imperturbable visage of eternity.

  Within the train, however, there was a different scene, a kind of wakening of hope and of anticipation. Upon the faces of the passengers there might have been observed now all the expressions and emotions which the end of a long journey usually evokes, whether of alert readiness, eager constraint, or apprehensive dread. And on the face of one, a youth in his early twenties, there might have been observed all of the hope, fear, longing, exultancy, faith, belief, expectancy, and in credible realization that every youth on earth has always felt on his approach for the first time to the enchanted city. Although the other people in the coach were already restless, stirring, busy with their preparations for the journey's end, the boy sat there by a window like one rapt in dreams, his vision tranced and glued against the glass at the rushing landscape of the lonely moors. No detail of the scene escaped the ravenous voracity of his attention.

  The train rushed past a glue factory. With the expression of one drunk with wonder the young man drank the pageant in. He saw with joy the great stacks, the glazed glass windows, the mighty furnaces of the enormous works; the pungent fragrance of the molten glue came to him and he breathed it in with rapturous appeasement.

  The train swept on across a sinuous stream, itself an estuary of the infinite and all-taking sea, itself as motionless as time, scummed richly with a moveless green; the sheer beauty of the thing went home into his mind and heart forever.

  He raised his eyes as men against the West once raised their eyes against the shining ramparts of the mountains. And there before him, at the edges of the marsh, rose the proud heights of Jersey City--the heights of Jersey City blazing forever to the traveler the smoldering welcome of their garbage dumps--the heights of Jersey City, raised proudly against the desolation of those lonely marshes as a token of man's fortitude, a symbol of his power, a sign of his indomitable spirit that flames forever like a great torch in the wilderness, that lifts against the darkness and the desolation of blind nature the story of its progress -the heights of Jersey, lighted for an eternal feast.

  The train swept on and underneath the crests of yon proud, battle mented hill. The hill closed in around the train, the train roared in beneath the hill, into the tunnel. And suddenly darkness was upon them. The train plunged in beneath the mighty bed of the unceasing river, and dumbness smote the youth's proud, listening cars.

  He turned and looked upon his fellow passengers. He saw wonder on their faces and something in their hearts that none could divine; and even as he sat there, dumb with wonder, he heard two voices, two quiet voices out of life, the voices of two nameless ciphers out of life, a woman's and a man's.

  "Jeez, but I'll be glad to get back home again," the man said quietly.

  For a moment the woman did not answer, then, in the same quiet tone, but with a meaning, a depth of feeling, that the boy would never after that forget, she answered simply, "You said it."

  Just that, and nothing more. But, simple as those words were, they sank home into his heart, in their brief eloquence of time and of the bitter briefness of man's days, the whole compacted history of his tragic destiny.

  And now, even as he paused there, rapt in wonder at this nameless eloquence, he heard another voice, close to his cars, a voice soft, low, and urgent, sweet as honey dew, and suddenly, with a start of recognition and surprise, he realized the words were meant for him, for him alone.

  "Is you comin', boss?" the soft voice said. "We'se gettin' in. Shall I bresh you off?"

  The boy turned slowly and surveyed his dark interrogator. In a moment he inclined his head in a slight gesture of assent and quietly replied: "I am ready. Yes, you may."

  But even now the train was slowing to a halt. Grey twilight filtered through the windows once again. The train had reached the tunnel's mouth. On both sides now were ancient walls of masonry, old storied buildings, dark as time and ancient as man's memory. The boy peered through the window, up as far as eyes could reach, at all those tiers of life, those countless cells of life, the windows, rooms, and faces of the everlasting and eternal city. They leaned above him in their ancient silence. They returned his look. He looked into their faces and said nothing, no word was spoken. The people of the city leaned upon the sills of evening and they looked at him. They looked at him from their old walls of ancient, battlemented brick. They looked at him through the silent yet attentive curtains of all their ancient and historic laundries. They looked at him through pendant sheets, through hanging underwear, through fabrics of a priceless and unknown tapestry, and he knew that all was now as it had always been, as it would be tomorrow and forever.

  But now the train was slowing to a halt. Long tongues of cement now appeared, and faces, swarming figures, running forms beside the train. And all these faces, forms, and figures slowed to instancy, were held there in the alertness of expectant movement. There was a grinding screech of brakes, a slight jolt, and, for a moment, utter silence.

  At this moment there was a terrific explosion.

  It was New York.

  There is no truer legend in the world than the one about the country boy, the provincial innocent, in his first contact with the city. Hack neyed by repetition, parodied and burlesqued by the devices of cheap fiction and the slap-stick of vaudeville humor, it is nevertheless one of the most tremendous and vital experiences in the life of a man, and in the life of the nation. It has found inspired and glorious tongues in Tolstoy and in Goethe, in Balzac and in Dickens, in Fielding and Mark Twain. It has found splendid examples in every artery of life, as well in Shakespeare as in the young Napoleon. And day after day the great cities of the world are being fed, enriched, and replenished ceaselessly with the life-blood of the nation, with all the passion, aspiration, eagerness, faith, and high imagining that youth can know, or that the tenement of life can hold.

  For one like George Webber, born to the obscure village and brought up within the narrow geography of provincial ways, the city experience is such as no city man himself can ever know. It is conceived in absence and in silence and in youth; it is built up to the cloud-capped pinnacles of a boy's imagining; it is written like a golden legend in the heart of youth with a plume plucked out of an angel's wing; it lives and flames there in his heart and spirit with all the timeless faery of the magic land.

  When such a man, therefore, comes first to the great city--but how can we speak of such a man coming first to the great city, when really the great city is within him, encysted in his heart, built up in all the flaming images of his brain: a symbol of his hope, the image of his high desire, the final crown, the citadel of all that he has ever dreamed of or longed for or imagined that life could bring to him? For such a man as this, there really is no coming to the city. He brings the city with him everywhere he goes, and when that final moment comes when he at last breathes in the city's air, feels his foot upon the city street, looks around him at the city's pinnacles, into the dark, unceasing tide of city faces, grips his sinews, feels his flesh, pinches himself to make sure he is really there--for such a man as this, and for such a moment, it will always be a question to be considered in its bewildering ramifications by the subtle soul psychologists to know which city is the real one
, which city he has found and seen, which city for this man is really there.

  For the city has a million faces, and just as it is said that no two men can really know what each is thinking of, what either sees when he speaks of "red" or "blue," so can no man ever know just what another means when he tells about the city that he sees. For the city that he sees is just the city that he brings with him, that he has within his heart; and even at that immeasurable moment of first perception, when for the first time he sees the city with his naked eye, at that tremendous moment of final apprehension when the great city smites at last upon his living sense, still no man can be certain he has seen the city as it is, because in the hairbreadth of that instant recognition a whole new city is composed, made out of sense but shaped and colored and unalterable from all that he has felt and thought and dreamed about before.

  And more than this! There are so many other instant, swift, and accidental things that happen in a moment, that are gone forever, and that shape the city in the heart of youth. It may be a light that comes and goes, a grey day, or a leaf upon a bough; it may be the first image of a city face, a woman's smile, an oath, a half-heard word; it may be sunset, morning, or the crowded traffics of the street, the furious pinnacle of dusty noon; or it may be April, April, and the songs they sang that year. No one can say, except it may be something chance and swift and fleeting, as are all of these, together with the accidents of pine and clay, the weather of one's youth, the place, the structure, and the life from which one came, and all conditioned so, so memoried, built up into the vision of the city that a man first brings there in his heart.

  That year there were five of them. There were Jim Randolph and Monty Bellamy, a South Carolina boy named Harvey Williams and a friend of his named Perce Smead, and then Monk Webber. They were all living together in an apartment they had rented up at 123rd Street.

  It was on the down slope of the hill that leads from Morningside towards Harlem; the place was on the very fringes of the great Black Belt, so near, in fact, that borders interwove--the pattern of the streets was white and black. It was one of the cheap apartment houses that crowd the district, a six-story structure of caked yellow, rather grimy brick. The entrance hall flourished a show of ornate gaudiness. The floors were tile, the walls were covered halfway up with sheets of streaky-looking marble. On either side, doors opened off into apartments, the doors a kind of composition of dark-painted tin, resembling wood but deceiving no one, stamped with small numerals in dry gilt.

  There was an elevator at the end, and, by night, a sullen, sleepy looking negro man; by day, the "superintendent"--an Italian in shirt sleeves, a hard-working and good-humored factotum who made repairs and tended furnaces and mended plumbing and knew where to buy gin and was argumentative, protesting, and obliging. He was a tire less disputant with whom they wrangled constantly, just for the joy his lingo gave them, because they liked him very much. His name-

  "Watta the hell!"--was Joe. They liked him as the South likes people, and likes language, and likes personalities, and likes jesting and pro testing and good-humored bicker--as the South likes earth and its humanity, which is one of the best things in the South.

  So there were the five of them--five younglings from the South, all here together for the first time in the thrilling catacomb, all eager, passionate, aspiring--they had a merry time.

  The place, which opened from the right as one went in that marble hall, ran front to rear, and was of the type known as a railroad flat.

  There were, if counted carefully, five rooms, a living room, three bed rooms, and a kitchen. The whole place was traversed from end to end by a dark and narrow hall. It was a kind of tunnel, a sort of alleyway of graduated fight. The living room was at the front and had two good windows opening on the street; it was really the only room that had any decent light at all. From there on, one advanced progressively into Stygian depths. The first bedroom had a narrow window opening on a narrow passageway two feet in width that gave on the grimy brick wall of the tenement next door. This place was favored with a kind of murky gloom, reminiscent of those atmospheres one sees in motion pictures showing Tarzan in the jungle with his friends, the apes; or, better still, in those pictures showing the first stages in the ancient world of prehistoric man, at about the time he first crawled out of the primeval ooze. Just beyond this was a bathroom, whose Stygian darkness had never been broken by any ray of outer light; beyond this, another bedroom, identical with the first in all respects, even to the properties of light; beyond this, the kitchen, a little lighter, since it was larger and had two windows; and, at the end, the last and best bed room, since it was at the corner and had a window on each wall. This room, of course, as fitted a prince of royal blood, was by common and tacit agreement allotted to Jim Randolph. Monty Bellamy and Monk had the next one, and Harvey and his friend Perce shared the other.

  The rent was $80 a month, which they divided equally.

  In the bathroom, when the electric light was not burning, the illusion of midnight was complete. This illusion was enhanced in a rather sinister and clammy fashion by the constant dripping of the bathtub faucet and the perpetual rattling leakage of the toilet. They tried to cure these evils a dozen times; each of them made his own private experiments on the plumbing. The results, while indicative of their ingenuity, were not any particular tribute to their efficiency. It used to worry them at first when they tried to go to sleep at night. The clammy rattling of the toilet and the punctual large drip of the faucet would get on someone's nerves at last, and they would hear him curse and hit the floor, saying: "God-damn it! How do you expect a man to get to sleep with that damn toilet going all night long!"

  Then he would pad out and down the hall and flush the toilet, pull off the lid and fume and fuss with the machinery, and swear below his breath, and finally put the lid back on, leaving the empty bowl to fill again. And he would come back with a sigh of satisfaction, saying he reckoned he got the damn thing fixed that time all right. And then he would crawl into bed again, prepare himself for blissful slumber, only to have that rattling and infuriating leak begin all over again.

  But this was almost the worst of their troubles, and they soon got used to it. It is true, the two bedrooms on the hall were so small and cramped they couldn't get two single cots in them, and so had to fall back on their old college dormitory expedient of racking them boat wise, one upon the other. It is also true that these little bedrooms had so little light that at no time of the day could one read a paper without the aid of electricity. The single window of each room looked out upon a dingy airshaft, the blank brick surface of the next-door building. And since they were on the ground floor, they were at the bottom of this shaft. Of course this gave them certain advantages in rent. As one went up, one got more light and air, and as one got more light and air, one paid more rent. The mathematics of the arrangement was beautifully simple, but none of them, coming as they all did from a region where the atmosphere was one commodity in which all men had equal rights, had quite recovered from their original surprise at finding themselves in a new world where even the weather was apportioned on a cash basis.

  Still, they got used to it very quickly, and they didn't mind it very much. In fact, they all thought it pretty splendid. They had an apartment, a real apartment, on the fabulous Island of Manhattan. They had their own private bathroom, even if the taps did leak. They had their kitchen, too, where they cooked meals. Every one of them had his own pass key and could come and go as he pleased.

  They had the most amazing assortment of furniture Monk had ever seen. God knows where Jim Randolph had picked it up. He was their boss, their landlord, and their leader. He had already had the place a year when Monk moved in, so the furniture was there when he ar rived. They had two chiffonier-dressers in the best Grand Rapids style, with oval mirrors, wooden knobs, and not too much of the varnish scaling off. Jim had a genuine bureau in his room, with real bottoms in two of the drawers. In the living room they had a big, over-stuffed chair
with a broken spring in it, a long davenport with part of the wadding oozing out, an old leather chair, a genuine rocking chair whose wicker bottom was split wide open, a book case with a few books in it and glass doors which rattled and which sometimes stuck together when it rained, and--what was most remarkable of all--a real upright piano.

  That piano had been to the wars and showed it. It looked and sounded as if it had served a long apprenticeship around the burlesque circuit. The old ivory keys were yellowed by long years of service, the mahogany case was scarred by boots and charred by the fags of count less cigarettes. Some of the keys gave forth no sound at all, and a good number of the sounds they did give forth were pretty sour. But what did it matter? Here was a piano--their piano--indubitably and undeniably a genuine upright and upstanding piano in the living room of their magnificent and luxurious five-room apartment in the upper portion of the fabulous Island of Manhattan. Here they could entertain their guests. Here they could invite their friends. Here they could cat and drink and sing and laugh and give parties and have girls and play their piano.

  Jim Randolph, to tell the truth, was the only one who could play it.

  He played it very badly, and yet he played it rather wonderfully, too.

  He missed a lot of notes and smashed through others. But his power ful hands and fingers held in their hard stroke a sure sense of rhythm, a swinging beat. It was good to hear him play because it was so good to see and feel him play. God knows where he learned it. It was an other in that amazing list of accomplishments which he had acquired at one time or another and at one place or another in his journeyings about the earth, and which included in its range accomplishments as wide and varied as the ability to run 100 yards in less than eleven seconds, to kick a football 80 yards, to shoot a rifle and to ride a horse, to speak a little Spanish, some Italian and some French, to cook a steak, to fry a chicken, or to make a pie, to navigate a ship, to use a typewriter--and to get a girl when and where he wanted her.