The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  His uncle's phrase, he knew, was figurative. The greenness of the grass was metaphorical. And the metaphor was not wholly pastoral.

  For, in America--and again, his mind was touched with irony--even the greenness of the grass was reckoned in terms of its commercial value.

  And that was what had hurt. That was where the hook had gone in deep.

  So he sat there scowling at the letter--a young man driving through the grassless main at twenty knots an hour, truculently defiant over just whose grass was green.

  The youth, if not the type and symbol of the period, was yet a symptom of it. He was single, twenty-four years old, American. And, if not like millions of others of his own age and circumstance, at least, like certain tens of thousands of them, he had gone forth to seek the continental Golden Fleece; and now, after a year of questing, he was coming "home" again. Therefore again, the scowl, the hard lip, and the scornful eye.

  Not that, by any means, the insides of our scornful hero were so assured, so grim, so resolutely confident in their high defiance, as the young man's outer semblance might have led one to believe. He was, to tell the truth, a sullenly lonely, frightened, and unhappy young animal. His uncle's letter had advised him bluntly to come on "home."

  Well, he was coming "home," and the rub was there. For suddenly he realized that he had no home to come to--that almost every act of his life since his sixteenth year had been a negation of the home which he had had, an effort to escape from it, to get away from it, to create a new life of his own. And now he realized that it would be all the more impossible to return to it.

  His family, he knew, was even more bewildered by his conduct than he was. Like most American families of their class, they were accustomed to judge conduct and accomplishment only in terms of its local and accepted value. And according to these standards his own behavior was absurd. He had gone to Europe. Why? They were astounded, a little awed, and also a little resentful of it. None of his people had ever "gone to Europe." Going to Europe--so now his lacerated pride gave language to their own opinion--was all very well for people who could afford it. Humph! They just wished they could afford to go "flying off" to Europe for a year or so. Did he think that he--or they--were millionaires? For "going to Europe" was, he knew, in their eyes an exclusive privilege of the monied class. And, although they would have resented any suggestion that they were "not as good" as anybody else, still, according to the moral complex in America, they also accepted without question that there were some things that it was moral for a rich man to do, but immoral for a poor man. "Going to Europe" was one of these.

  And the knowledge that his people felt this way, and the baffled and infuriated sense that he had no reasonable argument to oppose to it- only a rankling sense of outrage and injustice which was all the stronger because his conviction that he was somehow "right" could find no articulate reason to oppose to what were, he knew, the standards of accepted fact--increased his own feeling of solemn arrogance and hostility, his aching sense of homesickness, which was acute, and which derived even more from the feeling that he had no home than from the feeling that he had one.

  Here, too, he was a familiar symptom of the period--a desperately homesick wanderer returning desperately to the home he did not have, a shorn Jason, still seeking and still unassuaged, returning empty handed with no Golden Fleece. Reviewed with the superior knowing of a later time, it is easy to deride the folly of that pilgrimage, easy to forget the merit of the quest. For the quest was really livened with the Jason touch, blazoned with the Jason fire.

  For this youth, and for many others of his kind, it had not been merely a voyage of easy and corrupt escape, like those with which the rich young people sought diversion and employment for their idleness.

  Nor had it been like those expeditions of the eighteenth century, the celebrated "Grand Tours," with which young gentlemen of wealth rounded out their education. His pilgrimage had been a sterner and more lonely one. It had been conceived in the ecstasy of a wild and desperate hope; it had been carried on in the spirit of a desperate ad venture, a fanatical exploration that had no resource of strength or of belief except its own lonely and half-tongueless faith. Not even Columbus could have dared the unknown with such desperate resolution or such silent hope, for he at least had had the company of wild adventurers, and the backing of imperial gamblers--these young men had none. Columbus, too, had had the pretext of a Northwest Passage, and he had returned with a handful of foreign earth, the roots and herbage of unknown flowers, as token that perhaps indeed there was beyond man's hemisphere the promise of another paradise.

  And these? Poor, barren these--these young Columbuses of this latter time--so naked, lonely, so absurd--and with no tongue, no language of their own to meet the jabs, the scorn, the stern reproof of their own kind, or the easy scathing of a later ridicule--this uncertain, famished little crew that had been so unsure even of its own purposes, so defiant in its desperate hope, that it did not even dare to utter it- this desperate little crew had lacked even the security of its own con sent, had forborne, through pride and fear, to reveal itself even to its own small company--had gone forth, each by each, in his frail scallop shell of hope, to battle stormy seas alone, to reap there in the unknown world the magic of his own discovery--there, from the leaden vacancy of foreign skies to derive the substance of his own America--and, losing home, to find anew the home that he had lost--so naked, home less, yet not utterly forlorn--here to return, still tongueless, still unfound, and still seeking--still seeking home.

  And yet not utterly forlorn. Not utterly forlorn. The shorn Jason turned into the West again. The young Columbus was sailing home again without even the clink of a golden coin in his worn pocket, and not even a hand's breadth of the earth of his America. It was a sorry figure that he cut. And yet--he was not utterly forlorn.

  As the young man sat there at his table he was joined presently by another man who had just entered the smoking room, and who now, after speaking to the youth, took a seat across from him and signaled to a waiter. The newcomer was a man of thirty years or more. He was of somewhat stocky build, with reddish hair, and with a florid, fresh complexion which, although it gave him a healthy "outdoors" kind of look, also showed traces of alcoholic stimulation. He was well-dressed, and his well-cut and even fashionable costume had a kind of easy casualness that can only be achieved through long custom and through association with the most expensive tailors. He might perhaps be best described as a "sporting" type, the type of man one often sees in Eng land, whose chief interest in life seems to be sport--golf, hunting, horses--and the consumption of large quantities of whiskey. By the same token, indefinably and yet unmistakably, this man belonged to the American branch of the family. One could almost call him "post collegiate." It was not that he actually seemed to be trying to be young beyond his years. As a matter of fact, his reddish hair was already growing thin on top, he had a bald spot, and more than a suggestion of a paunch about his waist, but he seemed to be cheerfully and healthily unconcerned with either. It was only that, having presumably finished his college years, he seemed never to have graduated into responsibilities of a maturer and more serious manhood. Thus, if he was not an old college boy, he was obviously the kind of man that college boys are often attracted to. One might have inferred from looking at him that he was the kind of man who habitually, and perhaps unconsciously, associated with men somewhat younger than himself--and this inference would have been correct.

  Jim Plemmons was, as a matter of fact, one of those men that one can always find on the outskirts of the more fashionable universities.

  He was just over thirty--a kind of hangover from one of the recent college generations--and he was still getting his living and his life out of the college life and the association of college men. Usually such men have a somewhat rusty axe to grind. Their means are devious and unsure. They are kept employed by some business or other as a kind of extra-curricular bond salesman--their value to the business presumably lying in
the "contacts" they can make: their personal agreeableness, their ability to "mix," their acquaintanceship with students, and their familiarity with the more fashionable ways of student life being relied upon to grease the skids of commerce with the oil of fellowship. In this capacity they serve a varied enterprise. Some work for fashionable tailors or purveyors of men's clothing. Some sell auto mobiles, some tobacco. Plemmons himself was employed by a sporting goods concern.

  He was skilled, as men of his type often are, in the arts of "going along" with people of superior wealth. He had, as a matter of fact, a wide and extensive acquaintanceship among the passengers in the first-class cabins, and a large part of his time since coming aboard had been spent "up there." Monk suspected he had been there now.

  "Oh, here you are," said Plemmons with an air of casual discovery as he came up and dropped into a chair. He fumbled in his pocket for his pipe and an oiled tobacco pouch, and, pausing briefly, said, "What's yours?" as the steward approached the table.

  Monk hesitated just a moment: "Oh--scotch and soda, I suppose."

  "Two," said Plemmons briefly, and the steward departed. "I have been looking for you out on deck," said Plemmons as he stuffed his pipe and lighted it. "Where have you been all morning? I didn't see you."

  "No. I slept until eleven. I just came up."

  "You should have been with me," the older man remarked. "I looked for you. I thought you might like to come along."

  "Why? Where have you been?"

  "I went up and took a swim."

  He did not say where "up" was. There was no need to. "Up" meant first-class, and for a moment the younger man felt a touch of anger at the calm assurance with which the other took possession of all the perquisites of wealth and luxury while paying only for the modest accommodations of the poor. And perhaps that moment's anger was touched with just a trace of envy, too. For the younger man perceived in Plemmons a social assurance which he himself certainly did not have, and although he more than suspected that there was a good deal of shoddy in the older man's life--a good deal of pretense for which he must inevitably pay at times at the cost of his self-respect--he found himself more than once impressed by this show of easy manners and by this assumption of monied privilege which his own pride and constraint would prevent him from taking. Moreover, to his occasional annoyance, he found himself at times responding unconsciously to Plemmons' casual manner--playing up to it, assuming himself an air of easy knowingness which he was far from feeling, and acting in a way that was false and unnatural to him. And the base of the whole thing--what he really resented--was the implied arrogance of it.

  Plemmons treated his entire existence among the third-class passengers as a kind of jolly slumming expedition. Not that he acted as if he thought himself in any way superior to it. On the contrary, he took pains to make himself agreeable to everybody. He was the "life" of the table at which both of them were seated in the dining salon. His full-blooded geniality dominated the whole group, that humble and familiar little group which included an old Jew, an Italian laboring man, a German butcher, a little middle-class English woman married to an American--just an average slice of third-class humanity, the kind of people one sees everywhere, upon the streets and in the subways, plying their humble traffic across the great seas on visits home, the whole dense weft and web of plain humanity everywhere that weave the homely threads of this great earth together. All these, of course, were delighted with Plemmons. There was an air of expectancy at the table before he came: he always arrived, of course, a half-hour late, but it is likely that they would have waited for him anyway through the course of a full meal, just for the pleasure that he gave them. He represented for them all, perhaps, the embodiment of some warmer, gayer, and more care-free life--the kind of life they would themselves have liked to lead if they could have afforded it, if the hard, sheer needs of poverty, family, and employment had permitted them. Already he was a kind of semi-legendary figure among them--a type of the rich young man without a care, or, if not a rich young man, almost the same thing, a fellow who went with rich young men, who spent his money like a rich young man, who was himself so much a part of that distant and enchanted world of wealth that he felt and acted "rich."

  There was no doubt about it, he was a fine fellow, generous, genial, "democratic"--just like "all the rest of us"--and yet, as anyone could see, a gentleman. So it was no wonder that the humble, hodden little gathering at his dining table always waited for him expectantly, with a sense of pleasure and of glee--always looked forward happily to his arrival a half-hour behind but four good drinks ahead. They wouldn't have missed him for the world: the whole table was on the grin as he approached. He radiated so much ruddy warmth, so much cheerful casualness, such care-free, pleasant, slightly bibulous good spirits.

  But now, in spite of all these engaging qualities--or perhaps because of them--Monk was conscious of a moment's flare of quick resentment, a feeling that this genial "democracy" of his companion which most of these simple people found so charming, and into which, to his own chagrin, he felt himself betrayed when in the company of Plemmons, was at bottom a spurious and rather shoddy thing, and all of its aspects, really, so far from being what it pretended--a feeling of real fellowship and of true respect for one's fellow man--no such thing at all; but, essentially, the shabby self-indulgence of a snob.

  And yet, he too was conscious of a pleasant warmth in the man's persuasive charm as Plemmons tamped his pipe and lighted it, and in a moment, puffing comfortably, said casually: "What are you doing tonight?"

  "Why--" a little puzzled, the other considered for a moment--"nothing, I suppose.... Of course," he grinned a little, "there's a ship's concert, isn't there? I suppose I'll go to that. Are you going?"

  "Yes." Plemmons puffed vigorously for a moment until he drew his pipe into a steady glow. "As a matter of fact," he continued, "that's what I came to speak to you about. Are you going to be free?"

  "Yes, of course. Why?"

  "Because," said Plemmons, "I have just come down from first. And I have two friends up there." He was silent for a moment, puffing at his pipe, and then, his ruddy face suffusing with a pleasant humor, and with a twinkle in his eye, he glanced quickly at the younger man and chuckled quietly. "If I may say so--two extremely beautiful and lovely ladies. I have been telling them about you," he said, and made no further explanation, although the other wondered what the man could "tell" about him that could possibly be of any interest to two utter strangers--"and they would like very much to meet you." Again he gave no explanation to this eagerly mysterious desire, but, as if sensing the other's quick, inquiring look, he went on rapidly: "I am going up there again tonight to meet them. I told them about the ship's concert down here, and all the people, and they said they would like to come down. So if you are not doing anything, I thought you might like to come along with me." He said all this quickly, and very casually.

  But now he was silent for a moment, and then, looking seriously towards the younger man, he said quietly and with a note of paternal kindliness: "I think I would do it if I were you. After all, if you are trying to write, it won't hurt you to know people. And one of these women is a very fine and talented person herself, who takes a great interest in the theatre and knows all kinds of people in New York that you might like to know. I wish you would meet her and talk to her. What do you say?"

  "Of course," the other said, and was instantly conscious of a thrill of pleasure and excitement as, boylike, his imagination began to build glowing pictures of the two lovely strangers he was going to meet that evening. "I'd be delighted. And it is awfully nice of you to ask me, Plemmons." And sensing the genuine kindliness of the act, he felt a warm feeling of affection and gratefulness for the other man.

  "Good," said Plemmons quickly and with an air of satisfaction.

  "We'll go up after dinner. You don't need to dress of course," he said quickly, as if to relieve any apprehension in the other's mind. "I'm not going to. So come just as you are."

&
nbsp; As this moment the gong rang for luncheon and the noisy groups of people at the tables began to get up and leave the room. Plemmons raised his hand and signaled to the steward: "Two more," he said.

  Shortly after half-past eight of the same evening the two young men made the venturesome expedition "up to first." The crossing of the magic line proved very simple: it was achieved merely by mounting a flight of steps that led to an upper deck, vaulting across a locked gate, and trying a door that Plemmons knew from past experience would be unlocked. The door yielded instantly: the two young men stepped quickly through and, for the younger man at least, into the precincts of another world.

  The change was instant and overwhelming. Not even Alice in her magical transition through the looking glass found a transformation more astounding. It was not that the essential materials of the two worlds had changed. Both had been wrought out of the same basic substances of wood, of iron, of steel, of bolted metal. But the difference was dimensional. The effect upon the explorer from the other world was one of miraculous enlargement. The first thing that one felt was a sense of tremendous release--a sense of escape from a world that was crowded, shut-off, cluttered, and confined, into a world that opened up with an almost infinite vista of space, of width, of distance, and of freedom. They had emerged upon one of the decks of the great liner, but to the younger man it was as if they had stepped sud denly into a broad and endless avenue. There was a sense of almost silent but tremendously vital dynamic energy. After the fury of the storm, and the incessant jarring vibration that never ceased below, one had here the feeling of a world as solid and as motionless as a city street. There was almost no vibration here, and no perceptible motion of the ship.

  The sense of space, of silence, and of secret and mysterious power was enhanced by the almost deserted appearance of the deck. Far away, ahead of them, a man and woman, both attired in evening dress, were pacing slowly, arm in arm. And the sight of these two distant, moving figures, the slow and graceful undulance, the satiny smoothness of the woman's lovely back, gave to the whole scene a sense of wealth, of luxury, and of proportion that nothing else on earth could do. A little page, his red checks shining above the double rows of brass on his jacket, moved briskly along, turned in at an en trance way, and disappeared. A young officer, with his cap set at a jaunty angle on his head, walked past, but no one seemed to notice them.