Thomas Wolfe, page 149
The last outrageous episode that had brought Morison in to his present position of guilt “upon the carpet” was rarely named by name or given a description. Rather, as if affronted decency and aristocratic delicacy could not endure discussion of an unmentionable offense, his fault was indicated briefly as “that sort of thing” (or simply “sort of thing,” spoken fast and slurringly)—and all the other passions and emotions of anger, contrition, stern condemnation and reproof, and, at length, of exhausted relief and escape, were conveyed in a series of broken and jerky exclamations, such as: “After all!” “It’s not as if it were the first time you had played the bloody fool!” “What I mean to say is!” “Damn it all, it’s not that I mind the wine-woman-song sort of thing—young myself once—no plaster saint—never pretended that I was—man’s own business if he keeps it to himself—never interfered—only when you do a thing like this and make a bloody show of yourself—you idiot!—sort of thing men can understand but women!—it’s your mother I’m thinking of!” and so on.
Morison’s own speech, in fact, was largely composed of phrases such as these: he blurted them out so rapidly, scarcely moving his lips and slurring his words over in such a broken and explosive way, that when one first met him it was hard to understand what he was saying:—his speech seemed to be largely a series of blurted-out phrases, such as “sort of thing,” “after all!” “what I mean to say is!” and so on. And yet this incoherent and exclamatory style was curiously effective, for it seemed to take the listener into its confidence in rather an engaging manner which said: “of course there’s no need to go into detail about all this, because I can see you are a man of the world and the same kind of fellow as I am. I know we understand each other perfectly, and the truth of what I am saying must be so self-evident that there’s no point in discussing it.”
In stature, he was a little below the middle height, and rather fleshy. In fact, although his jaunty and impetuous manners gave him an air of boyishness, he was already getting fat around the waist, and his neck was fat and there was a fold of flesh beneath his chin. His face was very ruddy, smooth, a little alcoholic, and he had a small blonde mustache with waxed ends. Finally, his hair was thick, sleek, of a dark taffy-colored blond which shaded off into roots of fine silken blondish white at the edges of his temples.
He could almost have passed for the average Oxford youth if it had not been for the roll of fat beneath his chin, and the blurred, veinous, and yellowed look of his eyes, and he could almost have passed for the dashing gentleman whose lineaments he could so deftly and cleverly sketch in a few boldly casual strokes had it not been that there was something spurious in his character that gave him away in everything he did or said.
And yet Eugene never knew just what this spurious quality was. He felt at once that the man was fraudulent and unfortunate, and that all he told about himself was fraudulent, and yet everything he told was not only natural and credible enough but even plausible. All he said was that he had been a lieutenant in the flying corps, and had recently resigned, and had been given an appointment in the Colonies and been sent to Oxford for a course in Colonial Administration, and that later he would be sent to Africa.
Later on, Eugene understood that all of this was probably true, but at the time it sounded like a lie. Or, if it was not a lie, he thought that there was something discreditable and shameful behind it. He thought that if Morison had been in the army flying service, as he said, he had resigned not from choice, but because he had to—because he had been caught cheating at cards, or had not paid his debts, or had been mixed up in some unwholesome mess with a woman. And he thought that if Morison was now going out to Africa it was not so much from choice as by compulsion—because he had to go. In the years that followed Eugene saw that these suspicions were probably unfounded and unjust, but that was the way Morison made him feel.
There was about him somehow the look of the ruined adventurer—shabby and run-down—the face of the actor shining through its mask of deft gentility, the face of the charlatan looking through its visage of sincerity, and the old veined yellow eyes of ruin, hopelessness, and loss looking through all his attitudes of youth, infectious spontaneity, and grace. And for this reason, somehow, the man seemed pitiably gallant, and Eugene liked him.
He and Morison would go to different pubs and drink until the closing time. Morison was using him vilely, and Eugene knew it, and did not care. Not only was he paying for three drinks of every four they drank, but he knew that Morison also sought his companionship because he thought it gave him some immunity from the college proctors, when they made their visits to a pub. And this, in fact, he admitted very frankly, and with a disarming gleefulness.
“You see,” he said, “if I came in here by myself I’d get progged, but as long as I’m with you I’m probably all right.”
“Why?”
“Oh,” he said, with an exultant little chuckle, “because they don’t know what to make of it! They’ve got their eye on me, all right,” he laughed. “They’ve been giving me some very fishy looks—but when they see you here, they can’t be sure—they don’t know what to make of it!”
“Why don’t they?”
“Oh,” he said, “they’re puzzled about me, but they know about you—they don’t dare to bother you because they know you’re not in the university.”
“How do they know it?” he said resentfully. “I look as much like a student as these Rhodes scholars that you see—yes, and a damned sight more than most of them!”
“Yes, I know,” he said tolerantly. “Still, they know you’re not. They’ve got a way of telling.”
“A way of telling! Good God, Morison, how have they got a way of telling? Do you mean to say they memorize the names and faces of all the students here, the day the term commences?”
“No, it isn’t that. You see, old boy, you don’t belong to them—I don’t know what it is, but they have a way of their own of knowing.”
“Do you mean that there’s some damned mystery about it?—that they’ve got some supernatural gift of intuition that tells them when you’re a student and when you’re not.”
“Quite!” he said. “That’s just it. That’s just the way they do it!” And he looked at Eugene for a moment with his blurred, veinous eyes, and laughed softly, good-naturedly, a little mockingly. “Curious, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than curious. It’s a miracle!”
But it seemed that he was right. For sometimes the proctors would come into a pub where they were drinking, speak amicably to every one, and in a moment more go out again, but Morison would grow very quiet while they were there, and lean upon the bar, and look down at his drink until they left. And as they left they would look curiously at both men again, and their eye would pass Eugene swiftly and indifferently, and for a moment fix on Morison with a fishy and suspicious look. When they were gone he would look up again at the grinning bar-tender and, his ruddy face suffused with laughter, say exultantly:
“Oh, priceless! Did you see him when he looked at me?”
“I did,” the man behind the counter said. “He didn’t half know what to make of it, did he? The other gentleman is not a student, is he?”
“No!” Morison fairly shouted, his face crimson, as he pounded on the bar. “That’s just the point! And they don’t know what to make of it when they see me with him! They can’t be sure!” he choked. “They can’t be sure!”
And it was Morison who found the house out on the Ventnor road, took lodgings there himself, and gave Eugene the address.
[¬]
LXX
In the fall that year, Eugene lived about a mile out from town in a house set back from the Ventnor Road. The house was called a “farm”—Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that—but it was really no farm at all. It was a magnificent house of the weathered gray stone they have in that country, as if in the very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick gray of time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down forever on you—and enriching everything it touches—grass, foliage, brick, ivy, the fresh moist color of the people’s faces, and old gray stone, with the incomparable weathering of time.
The house was set back off the road at a distance of several hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by means of a road bordered by rows of tall trees which arched above the road, and which made Eugene think of home, at night when the stormy wind howled in their tossed branches. On each side of the road were the rugby fields of two of the colleges and in the afternoon he could look out and down and see the fresh moist green of the playing fields, and watch young college fellows, dressed in their shorts and jerseys, and with their bare knees scurfed with grass and turf as they twisted, struggled, swayed, and scrambled for a moment in the scrimmage-circle, and then broke free, running, dodging, passing the ball as they were tackled, filling the moist air with their sharp cries of sport. They did not have the desperate, the grimly determined, the almost professional earnestness that the college teams at home have; their scurfed and muddy knees, their swaying scrambling scrimmages, the swift breaking away and running, their panting breath and crisp clear voices gave them the appearance of grown-up boys.
Once when Eugene had come up the road in afternoon while they were playing, the ball got away from them and came bounding out into the road before him, and he ran after it to retrieve it, as he used to do when passing a field where boys were playing baseball. One of the players came over to the edge of the field and stood there waiting with his hands upon his hips while Eugene got the ball: he was panting hard, his face was flushed, and his blond hair tousled, but when Eugene threw the ball to him, he said “Thanks very much!” crisply and courteously—getting the same sound into the word “very” that they got in “American,” a sound that always repelled Eugene a little because it seemed to have some scornful aloofness and patronage in it.
For a moment Eugene watched him as he trotted briskly away on to the field again: the players stood there waiting, panting, casual, their hands upon their hips; he passed the ball into the scrimmage, the pattern swayed, rocked, scrambled, and broke sharply out in open play again, and everything looked incredibly strange, near, and familiar.
Eugene felt that he had always known it, that it had always been his, and that it was as familiar to him as everything he had seen or known in his childhood. Even the texture of the earth looked familiar, and felt moist and firm and springy when he stepped on it, and the stormy howling of the wind in that avenue of great trees at night, was wild and desolate and demented as it had been when he was eight years old and would lie in his bed at night and hear the great oaks howling on the hill above his father’s house.
The name of the people in the house was Coulson: he made arrangements with the woman at once to come and live there: she was a tall, weathered-looking woman of middle age, they talked together in the hall. The hall was made of marble flags and went directly out onto a gravelled walk.
The woman was crisp, cheerful, and worldly-looking. She was still quite handsome. She wore a well-cut skirt of woollen plaid, and a silk blouse: when she talked she kept her arms folded because the air in the hall was chilly, and she held a cigarette in the fingers of one hand. A shaggy brown dog came out and nosed upward toward her hand as she was talking and she put her hand upon its head and scratched it gently. When Eugene told her he wanted to move in the next day, she said briskly and cheerfully:
“Right you are! You’ll find everything ready when you get here!” Then she asked if he was at the university. He said no, and added, with a feeling of difficulty and naked desolation, that he was a “writer,” and was coming there to work. He was twenty-four years old.
“Then I am sure that what you do will be very, very good!” she said cheerfully and decisively. “We have had several Americans in the house before and all of them were very clever! All the Americans we have had here were very clever people,” said the woman. “I’m sure that you will like it.” Then she walked to the door with him to say good-bye. As they stood there, there was the sound of a small motorcar coming to a halt and in a moment a girl came swiftly across the gravel space outside and entered the hall. She was tall, slender, very lovely, but she had the same bright hard look in her eye that the woman had, the same faint, hard smile around the edges of her mouth.
“Edith,” the woman said in her crisp curiously incisive tone, “this young man is an American—he is coming here tomorrow.” The girl looked at Eugene for a moment with her hard bright glance, thrust out a small gloved hand, and shook hands briefly, a swift firm greeting.
“Oh! How d’ye do!” she said. “I hope you will like it here.” Then she went on down the hall, entered a room on the left, and closed the door behind her.
Her voice had been crisp and certain like her mother’s, but it was also cool, young, and sweet, with music in it, and later as Eugene went down the road, he could still hear it.
That was a wonderful house, and the people there were wonderful people. Later, he could not forget them. He seemed to have known them all his life, and to know all about their lives. They seemed as familiar to him as his own blood and he knew them with a knowledge that went deep below the roots of thought or memory. They did not talk together often, or tell any of their lives to one another. It is very hard to tell about it—the way they felt and lived together in that house—because it was one of those simple and profound experiences of life which people seem always to have known when it happens to them, but for which there is no language.
And yet, like a child’s half-captured vision of some magic country he has known, and which haunts his days with strangeness and the sense of imminent, glorious re-discovery, the word that would unlock it all seemed constantly to be almost on their lips, waiting, just outside the gateway of their memory, just a shape, a phrase, a sound away, the moment that they chose to utter it—but when they tried to say the thing, something faded within their minds like fading light, and something melted within their grasp like painted smoke, and something went forever when they tried to touch it.
The nearest Eugene could come to it was this: In that house he sometimes felt the greatest peace and solitude that he had ever known. But he always knew the other people in the house were there. He could sit in his sitting-room at night and hear nothing but the stormy moaning of the wind outside in the great trees, the small gaseous flare and jet from time to time of the coal fire burning in the grate—and silence, strong living lonely silence that moved and waited in the house at night—and he would always know that they were there.
He did not have to hear them enter or go past his door, nor did he have to hear doors close or open in the house, or listen to their voices: if he had never seen them, heard them, spoken to them, it would have been the same—he would have known they were there.
It was something he had always known, and he had known it would happen to him, and now it was there with all the strangeness and dark mystery of an awaited thing. He knew them, felt them, lived among them with a familiarity that had no need of sight or word or speech. And the memory of that house and of his silent fellowship with all the people there was somehow mixed with an image of dark time. It was one of those sorrowful and unchanging images which, among all the blazing stream of images that passed constantly their stream of fire across his mind, was somehow fixed, detached, and everlasting, full of a sorrow, certitude, and mystery that he could not fathom, but that wore forever on it the old sad light of waning day—a light from which all the heat, the violence, and the substance of furious dusty day had vanished, and which was itself like time, unearthly-of-the-earth, remote, detached, and everlasting.
And that fixed and changeless image of dark time was this: In an old house of time Eugene lived alone, and yet had other people all around him, and they never spoke to him, or he to them. They came and went like silence in the house, but he always knew that they were there. He would be sitting by a window in a room, and he would know then that they were moving in the house, and darkness, sorrow, and strong silence dwelt within them, and their eyes were quiet, full of sorrow, peace, and knowledge, and their faces dark, their tongues silent, and they never spoke. Eugene could not remember how their faces looked, but they were all familiar to him as his father’s face, and they had known one another forever, and they lived together in the ancient house of time, dark time; and silence, sorrow, certitude, and peace were in them. Such was the image of dark time that was to haunt his life thereafter, and into which, somehow, his life among the people in that house had passed.
In the house that year there lived, besides Eugene and Morison, the Coulsons, father and mother, and their daughter, and three men who had taken rooms together, and who were employed in a factory where motor-cars were made, two miles from town.
Perhaps the reason that Eugene could never forget these people later and seemed to know them all so well was that there was in all of them something ruined, lost, or broken—some precious and irretrievable quality which had gone out of them and which they could never get back again. Perhaps that was the reason that he liked them all so much, because with ruined people it is either love or hate: there is no middle way. The ruined people that we like are those who desperately have died, and lost their lives because they loved life dearly, and had that grandeur that makes such people spend prodigally the thing they love the best, and risk and lose their lives because life is so precious to them, and die at length because the seeds of life are in them. It is only the people that love life who die in this way—and these are the ruined people that we like.
The people in the house were people who had lost their lives because they loved the earth too well, and somehow had been slain by their hunger. And for this reason Eugene liked them all, and could not forget them later: there seemed to have been some magic which had drawn them all together to that house, as if the house itself were a magnetic centre for lost people.
