Thomas Wolfe, page 144
“Hm,” he muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Yes,” he whispered, “I see what you mean. . . . I hadn’t thought about the pavilion being out of key—perhaps you’re right. . . . But,” he whispered, smiling his radiantly gentle and good-natured smile, “I don’t agree with you about the background, Madge. . . . I think you’re wrong: I’d like to argue with you about that.”
“All right,” she answered crisply and good-naturedly. “I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll have it out. . . . But,” she shook her head, and spoke with a crisp but obstinate conviction, “Joel, I know I’m right! . . . That whole screen is out of proportion. It won’t do. . . . You’ll have to do the whole thing over again.”
They debated in this fashion of art-talk for some time, and presently the young men rose to go. As they departed, Miss Telfair returned to her former tone of crisp and casual friendliness, saying:
“What is Ida doing tonight? Is she going to the Pastons’ for the fireworks?”
“Yes,” Joel whispered. “We’re all going; can’t you come along?”
“No, thank you,” she said, smiling. “Not this time. They’re very lovely—and very awe-inspiring—and all that—but about once every five years is my limit. I would not get into that mob tonight, as hot as it is, for a million dollars. . . . Tell Ida I expect her here for lunch tomorrow: Irene will be here. . . . And now, goodbye,” she said, turning to the other young man, and giving him a bright china smile, a swift cool pressure of her little china hand. . . . “Come up again to see us, won’t you? . . . And bring your play along. And try going to bed some night at ten o’clock. . . . Really!” she said with a crisp cool irony, “—you miss very little by doing so.”
As they walked away along the road towards Joel’s house, Joel whispered with his radiant and admiring astonishment:
“She’s simp-ly incredible! . . . Don’t you think so? . . . . She knows everything,” he went on, without defining more exactly that large specification. “It’s simply stupendous the things she knows! . . . And she’s such a nice person,” he said quietly. “One of the nicest people that I ever knew—just what an old maid ought to be—don’t you think so?”
“Yes. But why is she an old maid? Why did she never get married?”
“Hm,” said Joel thoughtfully, looking down the road with a detached, abstracted stare. “I can’t say. . . . She’s awfully rich,” he whispered. “Enormously rich—she has loads of money—she’s been able to do just as she pleased all her life—she’s been everywhere—all over the world—and I suppose that’s the reason that she never married. She never found any one that she liked well enough to give up the kind of life she had. . . . But she’s an amazing person. . . . Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” the other said.
They walked on down the road, and presently they saw the great white shape of Joel’s house, framed in the trees before them, and below them in the light and distance of a westering sun, the shine and wink of the great river. They entered the house.
[¬]
LXV
The Paston estate, like the Pierce estate, was situated upon the river, but several miles farther north. To reach it, they drove through the eastern entrance of the Pierce place and through the little Dutch Colonial village of Leydensberg, of which Joel’s father was the mayor and which the Pierce family largely owned.
“It’s a pity Pups never went into politics,” Joel whispered, as they drove through the old leafy village, with its pleasant houses among which a few of the lonely white houses of the Colonial period still remained. “The people around here worship him: he could have anything he wanted if he ran for office.”
It was the first time he had spoken of his father: with a feeling of sharp surprise, the other youth now remembered that he had not seen Mr. Pierce since his arrival: he wondered where he was, but did not ask. He also now remembered that Joel’s references to his father had often been marked by a note of resignation and regret—the tone a person uses when he speaks of some one who has possessed talents and wasted opportunities, and whose life has come to nothing.
Their road led northward from the village: they sped swiftly along a paved highway bordered by trees and fields and woods, by houses here and there, and presently by the solid masonry of a wall that marked the boundaries of another great estate. It was the Paston place, and presently they turned in to an entrance flanked by stone markers, and began to drive along a road arched by tall leafy trees. Night had come, the moon was not yet well up, but from time to time, there was beside the road the gleam of steel, and at times as they passed a cleared space he could plainly see the rail pattern of a tiny railway, complete in all respects—with roadbed, rock-ballast, grades, and cuts, embankments, even tunnels, but all so small in scale that it suggested a gigantic toy more than anything else. He asked what it was and Joel answered:
“It’s Hunter’s railway.”
“Hunter’s railway?” he asked in a puzzled tone. “But why does he need a railway here? What does he use it for?”
“Oh, he really doesn’t need it for anything,” Joel whispered. “It’s of no use to any one. He just likes to play with it.”
“Play with it? But—but what is it? . . . Isn’t it a real railway?”
“Yes, of course,” Joel answered, laughing at his astonishment. “It’s really quite marvellous—complete in every way—with tunnels, stations, bridges, signals, round-houses, and everything else a regular railway has. Only everything is on a very small scale—like a toy.”
“But the engine—the locomotive? . . . How does that run? Do you wind it up, as you do a toy, or run it by electricity, or how?”
“Oh, no,” Joel answered. “It’s a regular locomotive—not over two or three feet high, I should say—but runs by steam, just like a real locomotive. . . . It’s really quite a fascinating thing,” he whispered. “You ought to see it some time.”
“But—but how does he run it? Is he able to get into anything as small as that?”
“He can, yes,” said Joel, laughing again. “But usually he just runs along by the side. It’s pretty cramped quarters for a grown man.”
“A grown man! . . . Do you mean that Mr. Paston built this little railway for himself?”
“But, of course!” Joel turned, and looked at his friend with a surprised stare. “Who did you think I was talking about?”
“Why, I—I thought when you said—‘Hunter’ you meant one of his children—a boy—some child in his family who——”
“No, not at all,” Joel whispered, laughing again at the astonished and bewildered look upon his companion’s face. “It may be for a child, but the child is Hunter Paston himself. . . . You see,” he said more quietly and seriously after a brief pause, “he’s crazy about all kinds of machinery—locomotives, airplanes, motor-boats, automobiles, steam-yachts—he loves anything that has an engine in it—he always has been that way since he was a boy—and it’s such a pity, too,” he whispered, in the same regretful tone he had used when speaking of his father—“It’s a shame he was never able to do anything with it. . . . If he hadn’t had all this money, he would have made a swell mechanic—he really would.”
But now there was a row of lights through the trees, the murmurous hum of many voices, the glittering shapes of parked machinery. They were approaching the Paston house: it was a rather gloomy-looking mansion of old brown stone, square in shape and immensely solid and imposing in its grimy magnificence, and of that style of architecture which was borrowed from France, but which went through curious and indefinable transformations on the way, so that any native grace and lightness which the style may once have had was lost: it was lumpish, ugly and involved, and somehow looked like one of the children of the New York Post Office.
A broad verandah ran around the house on all four sides, and on the side that faced the river, a large number of the friends and guests of the Paston family were now assembled. Seated on the great lawns that swept away before the house on the river side there was another larger audience composed of the people of the near-by town, and people employed on the Paston estate and the other great estates in the vicinity.
But over both groups, not only the wealthier and smaller group upon the porch, but the larger one spread out upon the lawn, there was evident a spirit of gay, happy, eager and child-like elation and expectancy that united every one in a curiously moving and high-hearted way. From the dark sweep and mystery of the lawn there rose the murmur of hundreds of excited and happy voices, all talking at once, and little bursts of laughter, sudden stirs and flurries of eager and mysterious interest.
The same spirit, the same feeling—a spirit and a feeling of plain democracy, warm friendliness, simple, eager hope and expectancy—animated the people on the porch. They were, as a group, fine-looking people: many of the young men were tall, handsome, strong and comely-looking, the girls were lovely, and many of the women were beautiful. Most of them also had a look of dignity, assurance, and character. They represented, he knew, that small group of the fabulously wealthy whose names were household words throughout the nation—and yet, whether it was due to the innate democracy of the occasion, the almost childish pleasure and anticipation which the Fourth of July and its fireworks renewed in them, and the grand and natural warmth and spaciousness of the scene—their native earth, or whether the quality of their lives was really warm and free and friendly, there was nothing at all arrogant, haughty, cold or insolently “societified” about these people. Their gathering together here upon the front porch of this gloomy old Victorian house had exactly the same quality that these summer front-porch gatherings had always had for him everywhere in little towns; with a feeling of incredulous recognition he found that the scene was instantly familiar to him, and he almost expected to hear old familiar voices—his father’s voice among them, as he had heard it on the porch at home so many times, and now so long ago.
Every one in the crowd knew the Pierce family and instantly welcomed them in an eager, laughing, and excited babel of affectionate greeting. Rosalind and Joel and Mrs. Pierce went about among the crowd shaking hands and greeting people all about them, and when the greetings were over, simply and naturally found their place among those persons to whom each was most akin by virtue of friendship, age, or temperament—Mrs. Pierce among men and women of her own generation and among the older people, and Joel, Rosalind, George Thornton, and Carl Seaholm among the younger people of the gathering.
Joel introduced him quickly, casually, with his infinite grace and consideration, to several people—to several of his younger friends and to certain of the older ones who were obviously among the best-liked and most respected people there. He was introduced to Mrs. Paston, a tall and beautiful young woman, very slender, blonde, and lovely-looking: a kind of exquisite blonde icicle, and with no more human warmth or passion than an icicle of any sort would have. She gave him a few cool words of greeting, a swift cool clasp of her swift cool hand, a swift, glacial, yet not unfriendly smile, and so dismissed him, not unkindly, turning with the same cool, smiling and glacial detachment to her other guests.
Suddenly the fireworks started. Far away, at the end of the great lawn, in the obscuring darkness of the night, and among the obscuring shadows of the shrubs and trees above the hill that swept down towards the river, there was a terrific detonation—the deafening bang and flare of a gigantic rocket that whizzed up into the air in a small hurtling point of light, and exploded, illuminating heaven with a constellation of enchanted falling stars. There was a long-drawn “Oh-h!” of excitement, eagerness, and expectant joy from the crowd gathered on the lawn, the same from the people gathered on the porch, who quickly scrambled into chairs; and instantly from all the people there was utter silence, a thrilled and fascinated attentiveness, broken now and then by gasps of wonder, joy, surprise and rapture, as one giant rocket followed another in unending series, in constantly growing magnificence, until the whole universe of night was blooming with flowers of fire, alive with constellations of enchanted stars—green, red, and yellow, blue and violet and gold, that burst softly in the night with spreading glory, falling slowly to the earth like some great parachuted blossom, and cracking, puffing, bursting softly, to flower, spread, again develop in great blooms of star-enchanted fire.
Everything had the same familiar quality of America that he had always remembered, and known as a child. It brought back to him again the quiet voices of people on their summer porches, the street-car grinding to a halt on the corner of the hill above his father’s house, his father’s voice in darkness on the porch, and the red lifted flare of his cigar, and those Thursday nights in summer when his father took him on the street-car to the little park along the river three miles away, where there were outdoor moving-pictures on an island; later, fireworks and across the river the great flare, the receding thunder of a train. Now, curiously, that whole memory came back to him with all its vivid and unutterable poignancy: he could remember the little artificial lake there at the park—that lake just three feet deep that had seemed so vast and thrilling to him, and the boat-house with lake-water lapping at the piers, the clank of oarlocks and the dull bump and dry knocking of the boats together as they collided in the darkness, and the people, gathered there in darkness, with their dim faces upturned to the great silver dance and flicker of the moving-picture screen which was set on a little island on the lake—an island that was dense with trees and foliage, and that had seemed to him as mysterious and illimitable as the jungle. And opposite the island, on the shore, looking over the heads of the people in the boats, the greater part of the audience sat on wooden benches, all thirsty, silent, and insatiate, the petals of five hundred dim white faces all lifted to the flickering magic of the screen.
It all came back to him now as he sat there on the porch of this splendid mansion with Mrs. Pierce and Joel and the other guests, and though the place was splendid, wealthy and luxurious beyond dreams, the happy, warm, and friendly gaiety of the people, their eager looking-forward to fireworks and the Fourth of July, something free and warm and simple in their relation, recalled again those glorious expeditions of his youth to the little park upon the river, and the crowded streetcars going home, and friendly voices, laughter, and the slamming of a door, and then his father’s voice upon the porch and sleep and silence—it all came back now in tones of unutterable brightness, and the Hudson River lay below him in the great fall and hush of evening light that fell across America, and even as he thought these things, a train rushed by below them on the bank of the river, was hurled instantly past in a projectile flight—a thunderbolted speed, was hurled past them citywards, and was gone at once, leaving nothing behind it but the sound of its departure, a handful of lost echoes in the hills, and the river, the mysterious river, the Hudson River in the great fall and hush of evening light, and all somehow was just as it had always been, and just as he had known he would find it, as it would always be.
[¬]
LXVI
Later that night, when the other people in the house had gone upstairs to bed, and as he was in the quiet library, making a final, longing, hungrily regretful survey of the treasure-hoard of noble books that walled the great room in their rich and mellow hues from floor to ceiling, Joel came in.
“Look,” he whispered, in his abrupt and casual way, “I’m going to bed now: stay up as long as you please and sleep as late as you like tomorrow morning. . . . And look,” he whispered casually—and quickly again—“what are you going to do? Do you think you have to go back to the city tomorrow?”
“Yes, Joel: I think I’ll have to—I have an early class the first thing Monday morning, and if I’m going to meet it, I ought to be back by tomorrow night: I think that will be best.”
“It’s been nice having you,” Joel whispered. “It was swell that you could come. And if you really like the place,” he said simply, “I’m glad. . . . I think it’s a grand place, too. . . . And Look!” he whispered quickly, casually, looking away “—I meant what I said yesterday—about that house, the gatekeeper’s lodge, I mean—If you like the place, and think you’d care to live there, or come up whenever you feel like it, I wish you’d take it,” he whispered. “I really do—It’s no use to any one the way it stands, and we’d all be delighted if you’d come and live in it. . . . Just let me know when you are coming, just say the word, and I’ll have everything ready for you—And we wish you would,” he whispered earnestly, with his radiant smile, as if asking the other youth to do him a favor—“it would be swell.”
“It’s—it’s pretty fine of you, Joel, too——”
“All right, sir,” Joel whispered quickly, hastily, with a smile, avoiding skilfully the embarrassment of thanks: “And look, Eugene—of course I’ll see you Tuesday when I get back to town—I’ll be right there at the hotel the rest of the summer—except for week-ends when I come up here—but I wanted to ask you if you had made up your mind yet about going to Europe?”
“Yes, I have, Joel. At least, that’s what I want to do—what I’d like to do. If I can manage it, I intend to set sail—” the two words had a glorious magic sound to him, and his pulse beat hot and hard with joy and hope as he spoke them—“to set sail in September when my work at the university is over!”
“Gosh! That’s swell!” Joel whispered enthusiastically, his face lighting with radiant eagerness as if the news had given him some great and unexpected happiness—“And Frank Starwick will be glad to hear it, too. You know he’s going over at the end of August; I had a letter from him just the other day.”
“Yes, I know: he wrote me too.”
“And he’ll want to see you when he comes to town: we must all try to get together before he goes. . . . And look,” he said quickly, abruptly, casually again—“if you go, how long will you be gone? How long do you intend to stay away?”
“I don’t know, Joel. I’d like to go for a whole year, but I don’t know if I can manage it. They’ve offered me an appointment for another year at the university. They want me to come back for the new term that begins in February, and maybe that’s what I’ll have to do. But I’d like to stay away a year!”
