The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  When he had finished this high piece of thumping rhetoric it was seventeen pages long, and as he read it over he felt a sense of vague but strong unhappiness and discontent. To inform a lady casually that he would be graciously pleased to see her again if she liked, but that if she didn't it was all one to him and didn't matter, was very well.

  But he felt that seventeen pages to express this casual disinterest was laying it on a bit thick. Assuredly he was not satisfied with it, for he rewrote it several times, striking out phrases here and there, condensing it, modifying some of the more truculent asperities, and trying to give the whole creation a tone of casual urbanity. The best he could finally achieve, however, was an epistle of some eleven pages, still pretty high in manner, and grimly declaratory of his resolve not to "truckle," but of a somewhat more conciliating texture than his early efforts. Having accomplished this, he sealed it, addressed it, started to drop it in the box--withdrew--began--withdrew--and wound up by thrusting the envelope morosely in his inner breast pocket and walking around with it a day or two, wearing it sullenly, so to speak, until the document was soiled and dog-eared from much use, and then, in a fit of furious self-contempt, thrusting it into a letter-box one night and banging down the lid--after which fatal and irrevocable clangor, he realized he had made a fool of himself, and wondered miserably why he had concocted this gaudy and pretending fanfaronade, when all that had been needed was plain speech.

  Whereat, his darkened mind got busily to work upon this painful mystery--how he had done this thing before in letters to his family or friends, and how a man could feel so truly and yet write so false. It made the heart sink down to see how often in such ways he had been self-betrayed and had no one but himself to blame.

  But, of such is youth. And he was young.

  19

  The Ride

  THE PHONE RANG NEXT MORNING BEFORE HE WAS OUT OF BED. HE WOKE, rolled over drowsily, reached for the instrument, and, as consciousness began to dawn, grunted with the unpleasant awareness of a man who has done something the night before which he would like to for get, and which he knows he will presently remember plainly. In another moment he sat bolt upright, taut as a wire, and listening--he had heard her voice upon the phone: "Hello!... Oh, hello!..."

  Even in the electric thrill of recognition, he was conscious of a feeling of disappointment and regret. Over the phone her voice seemed sharper than he had remembered it. It was, he saw, a "city" voice, a little cracked, impatient, and a trifle shrill.

  "Oh--" she said less loudly, when she was sure that she had reached him. "Hello.... How are you?" She seemed a little nervous now, and ill at ease, as if some memory of their last meeting had now come back to embarrass her in this plain work-of-morning style. "I got your letter," she went on quickly and a little awkwardly. "I was glad to hear from you.... Look!" after a brief pause, she spoke abruptly, "How'd you like to see the show tonight?"

  The friendly words both reassured him and relieved him, and also gave him the vague shock of disappointment and disillusion he had felt before. He did not quite know why, but probably he had expected something more "romantic." The rather sharp voice, the sense of awkwardness and constraint, and the homely sound of "How'd you like to see the show tonight?" were not what he had expected at all.

  But all the same he was overjoyed to hear from her, and he stammered out that of course he would like to see the show.

  "All right, then," she said, concluding the matter rapidly, with a suggestion of relief. "Do you know where the theatre is?... Do you know how to get there--hah?" Before he had a chance to answer, she had gone right on with her directions, telling him what to do. "And I'll meet you there at twenty after eight.... I'll have a ticket for you.... I'll meet you there in front of the theatah"--even in his excitement he noticed her quick, neat pronunciation of the last word. Then, after quickly repeating her instructions, and, even while he was still blundering out his thanks, she said quickly, nervously, and impatiently, as if somehow eager to conclude the matter before anything more could be said: "Well, then... good... I'll be expecting you.... Will be nice to see you again"--and before he could say anything else, she had hung up.

  That day was to be forever after printed on his memory as a day that was divided in two moments--one in the early morning, one at night. Of what happened in between he later on would have no recollection. Presumably, he got up and dressed and went about the business of the day. He met his classes and he did his work, he wove his way among the million others of the never-ending streets--but all these things, these acts, these tones and lights and weathers, all these faces, were later as blank and as unmemoried as if they never had occurred.

  Curiously, he was later to remember with a poignant and haunting vividness the details of the ride he took that evening as he went to meet her.

  The theatre, one of those little theatres that had their inception as a kind of work of charity, as a sort of adjunct to "settlement work" among "the poor classes," was supported largely by the endowments of wealthy females, and had grown quite celebrated in recent years.

  In the beginning, no doubt, its purposes had been largely humanitarian. That is to say, certain yearning sensitivenesses had banded together in a kind of cultural federation whose motto might very well have been: "They've got to cat cake." At the inception, there was probably a good deal of nonsense about "bringing beauty into their lives," ennobling the swarming masses of the East Side through the ballet, "the arts of the dance,"

  "the theatre of ideas," and all the rest of the pure old neurotic ïstheticism that tainted the theatre of the period.

  As the years had passed, however, these aspirations had undergone a curious and ironic transformation. The ideals were much the same, but the personnel had changed. The most considerable portion of the audiences that now packed this little theatre nightly were, it is true, from the East Side, but the East Side had now moved uptown, and the struggling masses were derived from the fashionable apartment houses of that district. They arrived in glittering machines in which large areas of bare back and shirt front were visible, and although the masses still struggled, their struggles were now largely confined to get ting in--"Six for tonight down front, if you've got them--and this is Mr. Mïcenas Gotrox speaking."

  Yes, the Community Guild had moved uptown, although it still did business in the same old place. It had grown fashionable, and it was thriving on its blight. It still did "finer things," of course, but it did them with eye cocked on the boiled-shirt trade. And the boiled-shirt trade was ready--nay, was eager--to be eyed. Indeed, the fashionable success of the little theatre in the last year or two had been so great that it was now in the comfortable position to which the Lady Harlot always aspires when she is having a run of luck--she could pick and choose, fix her own price, and roundly sneer at all her victims even as she took their money--which is to say, that for all its fine pretenses, its cultural programs, its "brave experiments," and all the rest of it, the Painted Jade was sitting in the saddle, in the playhouse, and from the look of things the Painted Jade had come to stay. For Fashion cracked the whip, and Fashion had decreed that trips into the lower East Side were now not only in order but compulsory; there could be no dinner talk hereafter without an excursion to the lower East.

  And yet a trip down to the lower East Side was always a curiously memorable and moving experience, and the young man felt this more than ever as he was driven there this evening at the appointed time.

  It had always seemed to him, he did not know why, the real New York--for all its poverty, its squalor, its swarming confinement, the essential New York; by all odds the richest, the most exciting, the most colorful New York that he had known. And now, upon this evening, the thrilling reality and vitality of the great East Side was revealed to him as it had never been before. The taxicab wheeled swiftly along the almost deserted pavement of lower Broadway, turned east along an intersecting street, and at length turned south again on Second Avenue. Here, it seemed that one had entered into
another world. The street was, in the phrase of the city, "a little Broadway"-- "the Broadway of the whole East Side." It seemed to him that the description did not do justice to the street. If it was a Broadway, it was, he thought, a better Broadway--a Broadway with the warmth of life, the thronging sense of the community, a Broadway of a richer and a more secure humanity.

  It is just this quality that makes the lower East Side of Manhattan so wonderful, and tonight he was able to define it for the first time.

  Suddenly he understood that this, of all the sections of the city, was the only one where the people seemed to belong, where they were "at home." Or, if it was not the only one, it was preeminently and dominantly the first. The great salmon--hued apartment houses of the fashionable uptown districts lacked humanity. One look at them-- the clifflike walls of Park Avenue, the ceaseless flight of motor cars, the cheaper bourgeois gaudiness of the great faïades along the Drive -brought a sense of desolation. They brought into the soul of man the heartless evocations of a ruthless world--a world of lives that had no earth in them, a world of burnished myrmidons, each with the same hard polish, the varnish of the same hard style--lives that had come from God knows where, and too often were trying to conceal the places where they did come from, and lives that were going God knows where--a rattle of dry rice along the pavement, a scamper of dead leaves along the barren ways, a handful of smooth gravel flung against a wall--oh, call it anything you like, but it was not a Place.

  Place!. That was the word he had needed, and now that single, simple word defined the image of his thought. The East Side was a Place--and that was the thing that made it wonderful. It was a Place that people came from, where men were born and lived and worked and sweated and died. God knows, in so many hard and different ways it was not a pleasant Place, not a lovely Place, not an easy Place in which to live. It was a Place in which there had been crime and poverty, squalor and disease, violence and filth and hate and hell and murder and oppression. It was a Place into which the rulers of the Great Land of Canaan had taken millions of the oppressed, the stricken, the suffering, and the fleeing of mankind who had been drawn hither by the hope of their own desperate need, and had here confined them, here exploited them, here betrayed them, here distilled their blood into the golden clink of profit, here compelled the creatures of their fellow flesh and blood to eat the bread of misery and to dwell in habitations that were unfit for swine.

  And the East? Had it been beaten in this bloody moil? Had all the life been taken from the East? Was the great East now wrecked and riddled utterly? No--for suddenly he looked, and for the first time there "saw the East," and knew the heart of the East was in vincible; and that, for some inscrutable past of irony, the masters of the East had grown barren on their stolen fat, and the East had grown stronger on the blood it bled.

  It was as if, somehow, every drop of blood that ever had been shed here in the East, every drop of sweat and every cry, every step of every weary way, the whole huge and intolerable compost of poverty, violence, brutal work, and human wretchedness--yes, and every cry that was ever shouted in the East, in the crowded streets, every burst of laughter, every smile, and every song--the whole vast fellowship of need, of hardship, and of poverty that bands the stricken of the earth together with its living nerves had got into the very substance of the East, had given it a thrilling life and warmth and richness that no other Place that he had seen had had.

  Call it an old saddle, worn by an old rider and sweat-cured by an old horse; call it an old shoe, a battered hat, a worn chair, the hollowed roundness of an old stone step that has been worn by seven centuries of feet--in these things you will find some of the qualities that made the East. Each drop of sweat, each drop of blood, each song, each boy's shout, each child's cry, had worked its way into the lintels of the East, had got into each dark and narrow hallway, was seasoned there into the creaking of each worn step, the sagging of each spare rail, had gotten somehow, God knows how again, into the rusty angularity of those bleak architectures in the East, the facades of those grim and grimy tenements, the very texture of the stone- yes, even the very color of the old red brick that was so thrilling, so wonderful, that just to look at it was enough to touch the heart with an electric thrill, to knot and catch the throat in a sudden clutch of nameless and unknown but powerful excitement. Yes, all of this had got into the East, and because of all of this the East had got to be a Place. And because it was a Place, the East was wonderful.

  Second Avenue was swarming with its nocturnal life. The shops, the restaurants, and the stores were open; the place was charged with the real vitality of night, a vitality that is not happy but that is burn ing with an insatiable hope, a feeling of immediate expectancy, the overwhelming sense that the thrilling, the exciting, the wonderful thing is just there within touch, and may be grasped at any moment.

  In this way again, the street was most American, and it occurred to the young man that the true cleavages, differences, and separations in American life are not really those of color, race, section, or class distinction, but simply those of kind; and that in all its essential elements this street was an "American" street in its nocturnal excitement, its love of nighttime, the thrilling expectancy that night arouses in all of us, closely akin to the essential life of any American street--of a street on Saturday night in a Colorado town when the farmers, the Mexicans, the big sugar workers have come in, to life in a town in South Carolina, or in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, when the farmers and cotton planters have come in, or in a Piedmont mill town when the mill hands throng the street and crowd the aisles of the 5-and-10-cent stores, or of a Pennsylvania Dutch town, or of any town throughout the length and breadth of the whole country where people go "downtown" on Saturday night--expecting "it" to happen, thronging around, milling around, waiting for- nothing.

  Well, this was "it." He knew it, had seen it, lived it, breathed it, felt its strange and nameless thrill, its sharp, throat-gathering excitement, like an ache there in the throat, ten thousand times, in his own small town. Yes, this was "it"--but unmistakably itself, in its own way--Saturday night here every night and all the time--but just the same "American"--the real American--with the everlasting hope in darkness that never happens but that may arrive. Here was the American hope, the wild, nocturnal hope, the hope that has given life to all our poetry, all our prose, all our thoughts, and all our culture--the darkness where our hope grows, out of which the whole of what we are will be conceived. The Place was simply boiling with the heart, the hope, the life of nighttime in America; and in this way--yes, even to its rusted cornices, its tenemented surfaces, its old red brick, it was American--"a damn sight more American," so he phrased it, than Park Avenue.

  They turned the corner, they were in between the tenements again, they halted to a stop--and there, beside him at the corner curb, were a battered, rusty ash can, the splintered lathings of a broken box, the crackling whippings of a fire, and, sharp playing, leaping with uneven legs, a group of tough street urchins; and suddenly he sensed the sharpness in the air, the wild, dark hope, the sadness, and the knowledge that October was soon here--that October would come back again, would come again. It was all so quick, so thrilling, and so wonderfully complete--fire, crackle, flame, rusty can, curb, corner, the thrilling, fitful red of flame-lit, tenemented brick, and wild and fitful fire across the urchins' faces--the whole of it was there--and there is nothing more of it to say, except that this was never any place except America.

  Meanwhile, the flame-lit urchins knotted their debate: there was a dark Italian, with his raven chief, a Jew, a little tousled Irishman, pug-nosed and freckled, lengthy in the upper lip--the small pack faces, and the hard, small bodies, compact as a ball, and tightened in debate--young, tough, a little hoarse, unmusical, but righteously in dignant--thus the Celt: "Dere is tool Dere is so! Dere is a chorch deh!"

  "Ah-h, you're wise!"

  And this was all--the shifting of the gears, and darkness, and the tenemented street again.

>   20

  The Theatre

  HE FOUND HER WAITING FOR HIM, AS SHE HAD SAID, IN FRONT OF THE theatre. It was a handsome little building, bathed in light, and the red brick, the thrilling, harsh facdes, of the old tenements was all around. There was a throng of business--expensive-looking people driving up and getting out of expensive-looking cars--but for him she stood there nakedly, projected on the grey curb and into his memory. She had come out of the theatre and was waiting for him. She was coatless, hatless, and she looked like a busy person who had just come out from a place where she had been at work. She was wearing a dress of dark red silk, and on the waist and bosom it had a lot of little winking mirrors wrought into the fabric. The dress was also a little wrinkled, but somehow he liked it because it seemed to go with her. It was one of the wonderful saris which women in India wear, and which she had made into a dress. He did not know this then.

  She wore small velvet shoes, with plain, square buckles of old silver. Her feet were small and beautiful, like her hands, and had a look that was like the strength of an arch of a wing. Her ankles, too, were delicate and lovely, and well-shaped. Her legs, he thought, were rather ugly. They were too thin and straight, the calves were knotted up too high. Her dress, square-cut at the neck and shoulders, revealed her warm neck; he noticed again that her neck was a little worn and had small lines and pleatings in it. Her face was ruddy and healthy-looking, but her eyes were somewhat worn and worried, as of a person who led a busy life, and whose face was marked by the responsibility of work. Her hair, which was lustrous, dark, and of a rather indefinite quality, was parted on the side, and he noticed a few coarse strands of grey in it. She was waiting for him with one foot tilted to one side, giving the impression of her delicate ankles and her rather thin, nervous-looking lower legs. She was slipping the ring rapidly on and off her finger with one hand; her whole appearance was one of waiting, of slight impatience, even of perturbation.