Thomas Wolfe, page 238
Then the curtain went up, and on an enormous and lofty stage stood the deformed and solitary figure of a man. For a moment I knew the man was Brandell; for a moment I could feel nothing but an astounded surprise, a sense of unreality, to think of the miracle of transformation which had been wrought in the space of a few minutes, to know that this cruel and sinister creature was the man with whom we had just been talking. Then the first words of the great opening speech rang out across the house, and instantly all this was forgotten: the man was no longer Brandell, he was the Duke of Gloucester.
That evening will live in my memory as the most magnificent evening I ever spent in the theatre. On that evening Richard Brandell reached the summit of his career. That night was literally the peak. Immediately after the performance Brandell had a nervous collapse: the play was taken off, he never appeared as Richard again. It was months before he made any appearance whatever, and he never again, during the remainder of his life, approached the performance he gave that night.
With the opening words, the intelligence was instantly communicated to the audience that it was about to witness such a performance as occurs in the theatre only once in a lifetime. And yet, at first, there was no sense of characterization, no feeling of the cruel and subtle figure of Richard—there was only a mighty music which sounded out across the house, a music so grand and overwhelming that it drowned the memory of all the baseness, the ugliness, and the pettiness in the lives of men. In the sound of the words it seemed there was the full measure of man’s grandeur, magnificence, and tragic despair, and the words were flung against immense and timeless skies like a challenge and an evidence of man’s dignity, and like a message of faith that he need not be ashamed or afraid of anything.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Then, swiftly and magnificently, with powerful developing strokes of madness, fear, and cruelty, the terrible figure of Richard began to emerge; almost before the conclusion of the opening speech it stood complete. That speech was really a speech of terror, and set clearly the picture of the warped, deformed, agonized Gloucester, for whom there was no beautiful thing in life, a man who had no power to raise himself except by murder. As the play went on, the character of Richard had become so real to me, the murders so frightful, the lines filled with such music and such terror, that when the curtain rose on that awful nightmare scene in the tent, I felt I could not stay there if one more drop of blood was shed. Then, just as the ghosts of the little princes appeared to Richard, just as he started up crying, “The lights burn blue”—there occurred one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
Suddenly, I heard in my ears the faint rumbling of wheels, far, far away, and gradually coming nearer. The king’s tent faded from my view, and suddenly before my eyes there stretched a long band of hard, silvery sand and a calm ocean beyond. The water was of a delicate blue tint known as aquamarine, the sun shone low in the sky from the land side. The beach near the water was perfectly flat, no human had trod there since the tide had washed out.
I felt the land was an island, the beach curved round a high cliff of earth and growth quite far down. Then I heard the wheels come nearer, and saw a chariot moving with great speed, drawn by three horses. The rumble of the wheels grew very loud and the chariot, which was of Greek form, came before my vision. It was driven by a woman who filled my being at once with warmth and familiarity. She was of medium height, her head rather small, and her face I can only describe as heart-shaped: it was wide at the temples and tapered to a delicate pointed chin. She had fine, silky, wavy hair, bound with a chaplet of leaves made of beaten gold, the chaplet tied at the back with a red-purple ribbon. Neither face nor figure was of the classic type, as we conceive it. The face was beautiful in its own way and touched a chord within me that answered with all the warmth of my nature.
I had known this woman forever. Sometimes a certain set of vibrations will make a crystal goblet ring when nothing has really touched it. That is what this woman did to my heart. If I had come into a room filled with the most beautiful women on earth, and among them I had seen her face, I would have exclaimed, “There she is!” She meant home, love, delight to me. Her figure was rounded, but not developed like the Greek statues, and not particularly beautiful except for her noble and perpendicular carriage. She handled the reins and horses with a swift, sure grace, with one hand, and with the other patted the heads of two children who stood at her left side—a girl of about ten, skinny, and a tiny boy about four, whose eyes just cleared the rim of the chariot. Her dress was ivory white, laced in infinitesimal pleats of that clinging yet flowing material worn by the Greeks. She wore high-laced cothurns of white leather, trimmed with gold.
So they raced along, the wind whipping her dress close to her form. The wheels thundered in my ears, and the thud of the horses’ hoofs upon the hard, wet sand. I could see the wheel revolving on the axle. They passed by, and soon had turned the promontory. She was gone. I felt a sense of irreparable loss. I have felt nothing like it, before or since.
Then I became aware of the theatre full of people. I saw the scene on the stage again, and I heard a sound coming from my own throat. My father had taken my outstretched hands in his and was speaking gently to me. The vision, or whatever it was, seemed to me to have lasted fully five minutes, but in reality it must have been much less.
I wrenched my mind from my vision to watch the stage. The play was drawing to its magnificent close. But the dream stayed with me for many days, and for months I would feel that wonderful sense of recognition and love, and smell the beach, the sea, the shore, and see everything as clearly as events that passed around me. Then, in course of time, it faded; but from time to time, in years to come, it would return, as clearly as when first I saw it that night in the theatre.
What do you think it was?
“Long, long into the night I lay awake, thinking how I should tell my story.”
(One!)
Now in the dark I hear the boats there in the river.
(Two!)
Now I can hear the great horns blowing in the river.
Time! Where are you now, and in what place, and at what time? Oh now I hear the whistles on the river! Oh now great ships are going down the river! Great horns are baying at the harbor’s mouth, great boats are putting out to sea!
And in the nighttime, in the dark, in all the sleeping silence of the earth, the river, the dark rich river, full of strange time, dark time, strange tragic time, is flowing, flowing out to sea!
God, the things I’d like to tell! I wish I could write! I’d like to write a book and tell people about the things that happen inside me, and about all the things I see.
First, I should tell them all about the clothes people wear. You can’t know what a person is like until you have seen what he is wearing. People are like the clothes they wear. They may think it’s all an accident, but it’s not. There is the way that actors and preachers and politicians and quack doctors and psychologists dress: everything they wear sort of goes forward, they are turning everything in them out for the world to see. You can tell if people turn inward or outward by their shoes, neckties, shirts, socks, and hats.
The most wonderful people are the old women you see who wear about a million little things. There are a lot of them in England. They live in all those horrible little hotels up in Bloomsbury and places like that. There are also a lot of them in Boston. They have strange faces, they are lost.
Gee, I saw a wonderful old woman in Boston once! It was in a restaurant. She must have had about a thousand little things on. She had on a long black dress and it was all covered with beads and bangles and glittering ornaments. God! It must have weighed a ton! Then she had all sorts of lace things on over that, it all sort of dripped down from her arms, and fell over her wrists, and got into her soup. And then she had a lot of rings and loose bracelets and beads and necklaces, and a whalebone collar with a lot more lace, and earrings, and all sorts of combs in her hair, and a hat all covered with masses of things, feathers, fruit, birds. God! That woman was a walking museum! It was one of the strangest things I ever saw in my life, and I was so excited. I got as close as I could to her and tried to hear what she was saying, but I couldn’t. I’d have given anything to know what it was. There was something so tragic about her. Isn’t it a strange thing? It comes from something inside them, something all fancy and broken up like beads, something all cluttered up that can’t bear to throw anything away and that is smothering in oceans of junk.
Then there are the things people wear underneath. I should like to tell about that, too. There was poor old Todd that time she was staying at our house and got bronchitis, and we thought she was going to die. She was simply burning up with fever and shivering, and Edith and I undressed her and put her to bed.—Good God! Would you believe it? She was wearing three pairs of those old-fashioned cotton drawers!
“O Todd!” I cried, “Todd! In God’s name, what’s the matter?”
“Oh don’t let them see me!” she said. “They’re after me!”
“They?” I said, “Who do you mean, Todd? There’s no one here but us.”
The poor old thing, she was simply terrified. She told me later she’d been afraid for years that some man was going to attack her, and that’s why she wore all those things.
God, it’s sad! When I first knew her she was a young and very beautiful woman, she had just come from the hospital, and Bella was her first case. Then later, when I had my little Alma, we had her again. That was the time I almost died. She was simply wonderful, and since then she always came and stayed with us. Isn’t it a strange thing? I remember her when she had lots of beaus, and several men wanted to marry her, and she had this other terrible thing in her all the time.
Oh yes! And then I should like to write about the way you feel when you have a child, and what it was like when my little Alma came, for I had lain on the earth upon green hillsides all that Summer with my child inside me, and I felt the great earth move below me and swing eastward in the orbits of the sun. I knew the earth, my body was the earth, I grew into the earth, and my child was stirring in me as I lay there on that green hillside.
And Todd came, and old Dr. Roth—he was a great surgeon—and I seemed to be out of my head. And yet I knew everything that was going on around me. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning and it was August and it was hot as hell, and I could hear the people going by in the street, I heard the clank of the iceman’s tongs and the children shouting, and all of a sudden I could hear all the birds singing in the trees outside, and I cried out, “Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, with charm of earliest birds,” and that was the way it was.
It was so lovely—God!—and I was mad with the pain. It is beyond anything you could ever imagine. It becomes a kind of exquisite and unbearable joy, and one part of you, the upper part, seems to be floating around way up above you, and the other part seems chained to the earth, and they are rending and stabbing you with knives, and great waves of it roll over you, and you feel yourself come and go from it, and when it came I kept crying out:
“Who would fardels bear? Who would fardels bear? Who would fardels bear?”
And I could see Todd and Dr. Roth moving about through it all, and it was all so strange because their faces bloomed and faded with the pain. And then there was Todd with her enormous, gentle hands that were everlasting and merciful, they were as big and strong as a man’s under me, and I was not afraid but I thought I was dying, I was sure I was dying, and I cried:
“O Todd! Todd! Good-bye, I am going!”
And she said: “O my darling! My dear! You’re not! You will be all right!”
She loved me so, and God! but I was lovely then, I was so small and lovely then. But there was something so strange and terrible about Todd and Dr. Roth. I had never seen them that way before, he was always so gentle. He told me later he was awfully worried, but now he was bending over me and barking in my face:
“Push! You’ve got to push, mother! You’re not trying hard enough! You’ve got to try harder than that, mother! Come on, mother! We can’t have it for you, you know! Push! Push hard, mother! You’re not trying!”
And Todd said: “Oh she is trying, too!” She got so mad at him, and they were both terribly worried, it had been so long. And then it was all over and I was floating on clouds of peace, I was floating in a lovely and undulant ocean of bliss.
And yes! I should like to tell all about my little Alma, and how tiny she was, and of the things that child said! Gee, she was a funny kid! We were having tea one day and she came by the door, and we had guests there, and she couldn’t have been more than four years old, and I called out:
“O Alma, Alma, where are you going?”
And she said, “I am going out, out, brief candle!”
O God! I thought they’d kill themselves laughing, but there was something so wonderful about it, too. Wasn’t that a strange thing for a child that age to say? It popped right out of her mouth, I suppose she had heard some of us quoting Shakespeare.
And then one time when Edith and I came in we found her doing her lessons. She had all her books around her in the middle of the floor and she was doing her spelling lesson. She was simply biting each word off as if she were scolding it:
“O-u-n-c-e, ounce! O-u-n-c-e, ounce! O-u-n-c-e, ounce!”
Then she changed to another one:
“P-u-a-r-t, quart! P-u-a-r-t, quart! P-u-a-r-t, quart!”
God, we had a fit! The poor kid thought the “q” was a “p.” And whenever anything went wrong after that, we used to say, “O-u-n-c-e, ounce!”—it was like saying damn, only better.
Gee, that kid’s a scream! You have never in your life heard anything like the way she goes on at the table. We get to laughing so sometimes that we can hardly eat. She says the funniest things you ever heard, I wish I could remember some of them. . . . Oh yes! The other night we were talking about the house in the country and what name we would call it by, and Alma said:
“We will call the side that Father sleeps on the Patri-side, and the side that Mother sleeps on the Matri-side.”
God, she’s so wonderful! She is my darling and my dear, she is my little Alma, she is the most delicate and lovely thing that ever lived.
And, oh yes! I should like to tell about Jews and Christians, and about Jews who change their names. There’s this fellow Burke! Doesn’t it make you want to laugh? Nathaniel Burke my eye! Why didn’t he go pick a real fancy Christian name while he was about it? Montmorency Van Landingham Monteith, or Reginald Hilary Saltonstall, or Jefferson Lincoln Coolidge, or something like that? Nathaniel Burke! Can you beat it? His real name is Nathan Berkovich, I’ve known his people all my life.
The nerve of that fellow! I got so tired of his goings on that I said to him once: “Look here, Burke. You’d just better be glad you are a Jew. Where would you be if it weren’t for the Jews, I’d like to know? It’s too bad about you.”
His mother and father were such nice old people. The old fellow had a store on Grand Street. He wore a beard and a derby hat, and washed his hands in a certain way they have before eating. There’s something awfully nice about old Jews like that. They were orthodox, of course, and I think it almost killed them the way he’s acted. He won’t go near them any more. Isn’t it a shame—to throw that wonderful thing away in order to become an imitation Christian?
We’re fine people. They sneer at us and mock us, but we’re fine people just the same. “Many a time and oft in the Rialto you have rated me . . . and spit upon my Jewish gaberdine.” Daddy was a Christian, but he was so beautiful. He loved all the things we do. He loved food so much, I don’t think he could have stood this anæmic Christian cooking. No wonder he got away from them.
And yes! Yes! I should like to tell how it is the mornings I go to Stein’s and Rosen’s to design, and Mr. Rosen is walking up and down on big, thick carpets, and God! richness and power and goose grease seem to be oozing out of every pore of him. And there is something so clean and lovely about the place, and wonderful, too, with the Grand Duchess Somebody-or-Other selling one thing and this Princess Piccatitti selling something else. If I had a name like that I’d change it to Schultz or something. Even Edith has to laugh when she says it. Imagine being called Ophelia Piccatitti! Wouldn’t it be awful to be one of the Piccatitti children and have them call you one of the little Piccatittis?
Gee, I have to laugh sometimes when I see their names in the social columns. New York must be simply full of these people. Where do you suppose they all come from? When you read about it, it doesn’t seem possible, you think somebody made all the names up: “Mrs. H. Stuyvesant O’Toole entertained at dinner last night in honor of the Prince and Princess Stephano di Guttabelli. Among those present were Mr. and Mrs. Van Rensselaer Weisberg, Count Sapski, Mr. R. Mortimer Shulemovitch, and the Grand Duchess Martha-Louise of Hesse Schnitzelpuss.”
And then there’s Mr. Rosen in his shop, walking up and down and giving orders and bowing and shaking hands with people in his striped pants and rich black coat with the pearl in his necktie. He is so well-kept and sleek, and everything about the place sort of purrs with luxury, everything seems so quiet, but everything seems to be going on just the same, and they’re calling for Edith all over the place. You hear them asking for her everywhere. And there she is, looking like a very elegant piece of limp celery, with that pedometer strapped around her ankle. She told me she walked seventeen miles one day, and sometimes she is simply dead when she gets home. The poor thing is as thin as a rail. Sometimes she won’t say three words during the entire evening, even when there are people coming to dinner. But God, she is smart! They couldn’t do without her, she is smarter than any of them.
