Thomas Wolfe, page 108
Meanwhile, all around the table people began to talk with that kind of feverish eagerness that follows a catastrophe of this sort, and Hunt resumed his arguments, but this time in a much quieter tone, and with a kind of jeering courtesy, accompanying his remarks from time to time with a heavy sarcasm directed toward Ten Eyck—“If I may say so—since, of course, Mr. Ten Eyck considers me a swine” or “if you will pardon such a remark from a swine like me”—or—“as Mr. Ten Eyck has told you I am nothing but a swine,” and so on.
The upshot of it was that Ten Eyck gulped down glass after glass of the strong wine, which raced instantly through his frail starved body like a flame.
He got disgracefully drunk, sang snatches of bawdy songs, screamed with maudlin laughter, and began to pound enthusiastically on the table, shaking his head to himself and shouting from time to time:
“You’re right, Hunt! . . . God-damn it, man, you’re right! . . . Go on! . . . Go on! I agree with you! You’re right! Everybody else is wrong but Hunt and Cram! . . . Words by Hunt, music by Cram . . . no one’s right but Hunt and Cram!”
They tried to quiet him, but in vain. Suddenly Miss Potter began to cough and choke and gasp, pressed both hands over her heart, and gasped out in a terror-stricken voice:
“Oh, my God, I’m dying!”
Miss Flitcroft jumped to her feet and came running to her friend’s assistance, and then while Miss Flitcroft pounded the old woman on her back, and the guests scrambled up in a general disruption of the party, Oswald Ten Eyck staggered to the window, flung it open, and looking out across one of the bleak snow-covered squares of Cambridge, screamed at the top of his voice:
“Relentless! . . . Relentless! . . . Juh sweez un art-e-e-este!” Here he beat on his little breast with a claw-like hand and yelled with drunken laughter, “And, Goddamn it, I will always be relentless . . . relentless . . . relentless!”
The cool air braced him with its cleansing shock: for a moment, the fog of shame and drunkenness shifted in his brain, he felt a vacancy of cold horror at his back, and turning suddenly found himself confronted by the frozen circle of their faces, fixed on him. And even in that instant glimpse of utter ruin, as the knowledge of this final castastrophe was printed on his brain, over the rim of frozen faces he saw the dial-hands of a clock. The time was seven-fifty-two: he knew there was a train at midnight for New York—and work, food, freedom, and forgetfulness. He would have four hours to go home and pack: if he hurried he could make it.
Little was heard of him thereafter. It was rumored that he had gone back to his former lucrative employment with Mr. Hearst: and Professor Hatcher smiled thinly when he heard the news; the young men looked at one another with quiet smiles.
And yet he could not wholly be forgotten: occasionally some one mentioned him.
“A strange case, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Grey. “Do you remember how he looked? Like . . . like . . . really, he was like some mediæval ascetic. I thought he had something. I thought he would do something . . . I really did, you know! And then—heavens!—that last play!” He tossed his cigarette away with a movement of dismissal. “A strange case,” he said with quiet finality. “A man who looked as if he had it and who turned out—all belly and no brain.”
There was silence for a moment while the young men smoked.
“I wonder what it was,” another said thoughtfully at length. “What happened to him? I wonder why.”
There was no one there who knew the answer. The only one on earth, perhaps, who could have given it was that curious old spinster named Miss Potter. For blind to many things that all these clever young men knew, that good grotesque old empress of confusion still had a wisdom that none of them suspected. But Miss Potter was no longer there to tell them, even if she could. She had died that spring.
Later it seemed to Gene that the cold and wintry light of desolation—the red waning light of Friday in the month of March—shone forever on the lives of all the people. And forever after, when he thought of them, their lives, their faces and their words—all that he had seen and known of them—would be fused into a hopeless, joyless image which was somehow consonant to that accursed wintry light that shone upon it. And this was the image:
He was standing upon the black and grimy snow of winter before Miss Potter’s house, saying good-bye to a group of her invited guests. The last red wintry light of Friday afternoon fell on their lives and faces as he talked to them, and made them hateful to him, and yet he searched those faces and talked desperately to see if he could find there any warmth or love or joy, any ring of hope for himself which would tell him that his sick heart and leaden spirit would awake to life and strength again, that he would get his hands again on life and love and labor, and that April would come back again.
But he found nothing in these cold and hateful faces but the lights of desolation, the deadly and corrupt joy that took delight in its own death, and breathed, without any of the agony and despair he felt, the poisonous ethers of its own dead world. In those cold hateful faces as that desolate and wintry light fell on them he could find no hope for his own life or the life of living men. Rather, he read in their pale faces, and in their rootless and unwholesome lives, which had come to have for him the wilted yellow pallor of nameless and unuseful plants such as flourish under barrels, a kind of cold malicious triumph, a momentary gleam in pale fox eyes, which said that they looked upon his desperate life and knew the cause of his despair, and felt a bitter triumph over it. The look on their cold faces and in their fox eyes said to him that there was no hope, no work, no joy, no triumph, and no love for such as he, that there could be nothing but defeat, despair and failure for the living of this world, that life had been devoured and killed by such as these, and had become rat’s alley, death-in-life forever.
And yet he searched their hated faces desperately in that cold red light, he sought frantically in their loathed faces for a ray of hope, and in his drowning desolation shameful words were wrenched from him against his will—words of entreaty, pleading, pitiful begging for an alms of mercy, a beggarly scrap of encouragement, even a word of kindly judgment on his life, from these cold and hateful faces that he loathed.
“But my work—this last work that I did—don’t you think—didn’t it seem to you that there was something good in it—not much, perhaps, but just enough to give me hope? . . . Don’t you think if I go on I may do something good some day—for God’s sake, tell me if you do?—or must I die here in this barren and accursed light of Friday afternoon, must I drown and smother in this poisonous and lifeless air, wither in this rootless, yellow, barren earth below the barrel, die like a mad-dog howling in the wilderness, with the damned, cold, hateful sneer of your impotent lives upon me?
“Tell me, in God’s name, man, is there no life on earth for such as I? Has the world been stripped for such as you? Have all joy, hope, health, sensual love, and warmth and tenderness gone out of life—are living men the false men, then, and is all truth and work and wisdom owned by rat’s alley and the living dead such as yourself?—For God’s sake, tell me if there is no hope for me! Let me have the worst, the worst, I beg of you. Is there nothing for me now but the gray gut, the sick heart, and the leaden spirit? Is there nothing now but Friday afternoon in March, Miss Potter’s parties, and your damned poisonous, sterile, cold, life-hating faces? For God’s sake tell me now if I am no good, am false while you, the living dead, are true—and had better cut my throat or blow my brains out than stay on longer in this world of truth, where joy is dead, and only the barren rootless lives of dead men live!—In God’s name, tell me now, if this is true—or do you find a rag of hope for me?”
“Ah,” the old composer Cram would answer, arranging the folds of his dirty scarf, and peering out malevolently underneath his sparse lank webs of dirty gray, as the red and wintry light fell hopelessly on his poisonous old face. “—Ah-h,” he rasped bitterly, “—my wife and I liked some things in that play of yours that Professor Hatcher put on in his Playshop. . . . My wife and I liked one or two speeches in that play,” he rasped, “but”—for a moment a fox’s glittering of malevolent triumph shone in his eyes as he drove the fine blade home “—no one else did!—No one else thought it was any good at all!” he cackled malevolently. “I heard people saying all around me that they hated it,” he gloated, “—that you had no talent, no ability to write, and had better go back where you came from—live some other kind of life—or kill yourself,” he gloated—“That’s the way it is, my boy!—Nothing but defeat and misery and despair for such as you in life! . . . That has been my lot, too,” he cackled vindictively, rubbing his dry hands in glee. “They’ve always hated what I did—if I ever did anything good I was lucky if I found two people who liked it. The rest of them hated it,” he whispered wildly. “There’s no hope for you—so die, die, die,” he whispered, and cackling with malevolent triumph, he rubbed his dry hands gleefully.
“Meeker, for God’s sake,” the boy cried, turning to the elegant figure of the clergyman, who would be carefully arranging around his damned luxurious neck the rich folds of a silk blue scarf—“Meeker, do you feel this way about it, too? . . . Is that your opinion? . . . Do you find nothing good in what I do?”
—“You see, old chap, it’s this way,” Meeker answered, in his soft voice, and drew with languor on one of his expensive straw-tipped cigarettes—“You have lots of ability, I am sure”—here he paused to inhale meditatively again—“but don’t you think, old boy, it’s critical rather than creative?—now with Jim here it’s different,” he continued, placing one hand affectionately on Hogan’s narrow shoulders—“Jim here’s a great genius—like Shelley—with a great gift waiting for the world”—Here Hogan lowered his pale weak face with a simpering smile of modesty, but not before the boy had seen the fox’s glitter of vindictive triumph in his pale dull eyes—“but you have nothing of that sort to give. Why don’t you try to make the best of what you have?” he said with hateful sympathetic urbanity and put the cigarette to elegant and reflective lips again.
“Hogan,” the boy cried hoarsely, turning to the poet,”—is that your answer, too? Have you no word of hope for me?—but no, you damned, snivelling, whining upstart—you are gloating at your rotten little triumph, aren’t you? I’d get nothing out of you, would I?”
“Come on, Jim,” said Meeker quietly. “He’s becoming abusive. . . . The kind of attack you make is simply stupid,” he now said. “It will get you nowhere.”
“And so raucous—so raucous,” said Hogan, smirking nervously. “It means nothing.”
And the three hated forms of death would go away then rapidly, snickering among themselves, and he would turn again, filled with the death of life, the end of joy, again, again, to prowl the wintry, barren, and accursed streets of Friday night.
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XXXVII
It had been almost two years since Eugene had last seen Robert Weaver, but now, by one of those sudden hazards of blind chance that for a moment bring men’s lives together, and in an instant show them more than years together could have done, he was to see the other youth again.
One night in his second year at Cambridge he was reading in his room at about two o’clock in the morning, at the heart and core of the brooding silence of night that had come to mean so much to him, and that had the power to stir him as no other time of day could do with a feeling of swelling and exultant joy. The house had gone to sleep long before and there was no sound anywhere: it was late in winter, along in March, and the ice and snow had been packed and frozen on the earth for months with a kind of weary permanence—with a tenacity that gave to winter a harsh and dreary reality, a protraction of gray days and grim gray light which made the memory of other seasons, and particularly the hope of spring, remote and almost unbelievable. The street outside was frozen in this living and animate silence of great cold: suddenly this still perfection of night and darkness was shattered by the engines of a powerful motor which turned into the end of the street from Massachusetts Avenue, and tore along before the house at drunken speed with a roaring explosion of sound. Then, without slacking its speed, the brakes were jammed on, the car skidded murderously to a halt on the slippery pavement, and immediately backed up at full speed until it came before the house again, skidded to a halt and was abruptly silent.
Some one got out with the same violent impatience, slammed the door, and then for a moment, he could hear him hunting along the street, swearing and muttering to himself, at length he came back to the house, started up the steps on which he slipped or stumbled and fell heavily, after which he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse and feverish discontent: “The God-damnedest place I ever saw. . . . Did they never hear of a light around here? . . . Who the hell would want to live in a place like this?”
He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene’s name at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist. Eugene went to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk, then he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out: “What time do you go to bed? . . . Do you stay up all night? . . . What do you do, sleep all morning?” . . . He looked around the room: the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered with pieces of paper on which he had been writing. Robert broke into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh: “The damndest place I ever saw!” he said. “Do you sleep on that thing?” he said contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall in one corner of the room.
“No, Robert,” he said, “I sleep on the floor. I use that for an ice box.”
“What’s that in the corner?” Robert asked pointing to some dirty shirts he had thrown there. “Shirts? . . . How long has it been since you sent anything to the laundry? . . . What do you do when you want a shirt, go out and buy one? . . . Do you ever take a bath? . . . Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?” He laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary movement, and said, “Lord! Lord! Lord! . . . The things I’ve done!” he shook his head mournfully. “Why it’s awful,” he said, and he started to shake his head again.
“Why don’t you try to talk a little louder?” Eugene suggested. “I think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven’t heard you yet.”
He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to time and saying, “Lord!”
It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years. Under the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked closely at him: he wore a derby hat that became his small lean head well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops. For the rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction he had always seemed to get into his clothes—there was always, even in his boyhood, a kind of formal dignity in his dress: he always wore a stiff, starched collar.
Robert’s face had grown thinner, he looked haggard and a good deal older: the lines of his sharp, incisive features were more deeply cut and his eyes, now injected and bloodshot from heavy drinking, were more wild and feverish in their restless discontent than they had ever been—he seemed to be lashed and driven by a savage and desperate hunger which he could neither satisfy nor articulate: he was being consumed and torn to pieces by a torment of desire and longing, the cause of which he could not define, and which he had no means to assuage or quench.
He had a bottle half filled with whiskey in the pocket of his fur coat: he took it out and offered Eugene a drink and after he had drunk, he put the bottle to his lips and gulped down all that remained in a single draught. Then he flung the empty bottle away impatiently on the table: it was obvious that the liquor, instead of giving him some peace or comfort, acted as savagely and immediately as oil poured on the tumult of a raging fire—it fed and spurred the madness in him and gave him no release until he had drunk himself into a state of paralysis and stupefaction. He was one of those men for whom alcohol was a fatal and uncontrollable stimulant: having once drawn the cork from a bottle and tasted his first drink he was then powerless to resist or stop: he drank until he could drink no more, and he would beg, fight, lie, cheat, crawl or walk or incur any desperate risk or danger to get more drink. Yet, he told Eugene that until his twenty-first year he had never tasted liquor: he began to drink during his last year in college, and during the two years that followed he had gone far on the road toward alcoholism.
Eugene asked him how he had found out where he lived and, still passing his hand across his forehead, he answered in an impatient and abstracted tone: “Oh . . . I don’t know. . . . Some one told me, I guess. . . . I think it was Arthur Kittrell,” and then he fell to shaking his head again, and saying, “Awful! awful! awful! . . . Do you know how much money I’ve spent so far this year. . . . Forty-eight hundred dollars. . . . So help me God, I hope I may die if I’m not telling you the truth! Why it’s awful!” he said, and burst into a laugh.
“Have you travelled around a lot?” Gene asked.
“Have I? My God, I’ve spent only one week-end in New Haven since the beginning of the year,” he said. “Why it’s terrible! . . . Do you know who I’m rooming with?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Andy Westerman,” he said impressively and then, as the name communicated none of its significance to Gene, he added impatiently: “Why you’ve heard of the Westermans, haven’t you? . . . My God, what have you been doing all your life? . . . You’ve heard of the Westerman vacuum cleaners and electric refrigerators, haven’t you? . . . Why, he’s worth $20,000,000 if he’s worth a cent! . . . The craziest man that ever lived!” he said, breaking suddenly into a sharp recollective laugh.
