Thomas Wolfe, page 243
“I know!” said Esther, pityingly. “It’s ridiculous! These people are such fools, you’d think they had never read a thing—they have no quality. . . . Still, don’t you think it would be rather nice to meet them?” she said, looking at him quietly and hopefully. “To find out what she’s really like? They say she is simply beautiful . . . and all these other people will be there . . . and I don’t know, it all sounds sort of jolly . . . and people really are so nice . . . and everyone would love you if they knew you as I do—ah, come!” she cried swiftly, coaxingly, as she came close to him and took him by the arms.
“All right—I might as well be there, I guess, as up here in this freezing room, alone.”
“Ah, me!” said Esther in a melodramatic tone, and then, striking a pose and smiting herself upon the breast, she cried out throatily, “Strike home, strike home!” in the celebrated phrase and style of Mr. Turveydrop.
He glowered sullenly at her, but as she began to shake with laughter, and to shriek with appreciation of her own wit, the contagion of her self-enjoyment was so infectious that after a moment he grinned sheepishly and shook her by the arms.
“I know—” she gasped—“but that’s the way you sound—like Mr. Turveydrop—freezing in this cold garret, all alone!” Again she struck a melodramatic pose as she pronounced the words with sonorous resignation.
“Ah—h,” he protested, “I didn’t say ‘garret,’ I said ‘room.’”
“I know,” said Esther, “but you meant garret, yes you did!” she cried, seeing a look of denial on his face, and then went off again in laughter. “God, you are a wonder—you are!” she said when she had recovered. “I wonder if there was ever anybody like you. It doesn’t seem possible.”
“There won’t be anyone like me when you are done with me,” he predicted gloomily.
“Strike home!” cried Esther.
He seized her, and they wrestled, and he flung her on the couch.
As the time for the great party approached, there was excitement about it. Now that he had made the decision, taken the first step, committed at length his pride and youth to the ordeal of its own desire, he felt a tension, nervous, sharp, electric, like that a runner feels when he is teetering at the mark. The group of persons she had named were, he knew, among the most fashionable and sophisticated of the literary people of the day. The circle that they kept was touched with magic: the glamour of their names embodied the glamour of the whole city at the time.
Now that the thing was settled, they both went at it with a will. He had no suit of evening clothes, but now he decided that he ought to get one, and the matter was confirmed.
“I think it’d be a good investment,” said Esther. “Now that you’re meeting people, you’ll probably be going out more and more all the time”—great vistas of social glory opened up before him—“and you’ll find you can always use it. Besides,” she added loyally, “you’ll be simply beautiful.”
They went to one of the great stores at Herald Square and, under her discerning and appraising eye, he got fitted up. It was not perhaps the best of fits, he got it out of stock, and it had not been designed for such variations from type as his heavy shoulders and long arms and short waist and legs signified. Nevertheless, like Mercutio’s wound, it would serve. Esther made him revolve while she inspected him; she put deft fingers in the lapel here, made chalk marks there across the sleeves and shoulder blades, surveyed the waist and legs, and gave instructions to the fitter that left the man quite silent, humble, and amazed.
Downstairs, on their way out, they stopped and shopped for evening shirts and collars, links and studs, and a black tie. She decided that he didn’t have to purchase evening pumps:
“Lots of people never use them,” she said. “You’ll look well enough without them. Besides,” she smiled at him, “you’ll be so beautiful now that no one will ever look at your feet. You wait and see.”
Even so it was a dear economy. By the time he had finished his modest purchases he had consumed the better part of a month’s salary. Going abroad among the great ones of the city, even when the great were poets, was coming high.
The great night had arrived. He was to dine with Mrs. Jack at home, and later take her to the party, which was not scheduled until ten.
He dressed with tense, excited care in his new regalia. His sumptuous black and white sat awesomely against his gaze at first, and he was almost overwhelmed by his own splendor.
He reached the street and breached the foot traffic to the corner like a man who walks out for the first time upon an enormous stage before a mighty audience. But almost instantly he saw that the look of people was friendly and approving, and after that he felt glittering and fine. And James, the negro bootblack on the corner, flashing solid white teeth at him from the compact ebon of his face, said, “Steppin’ out among ’em, huh?”—the words were full of glamorous excitement and cheerful happiness—then the darkey nimbly sprang ahead of him and signaled for a cab.
He felt fine. He had been in the city a long time and felt he knew it—knew it as only one can know it who has walked the streets alone at all hours of the day and night. But now he was going to see and be a part of it for the first time.
The experience of being “dressed up” is a healthy and invigorating one. To be formally attired for the first time in the conventional appointments of society is one of the memorable experiences in a man’s life. And to be young, and in love, and so beautifully arrayed, and on one’s way to meet one’s love through the sky-flung faëry of the night, and thence to join in the companionship of poets, and of the loveliest women that this jeweled rock, this central and imperial gem of all the earth could offer—the magic of this wine, this golden draft, this glory and this triumph—there is no pinnacle of life so dizzy and intoxicating, and, happens once, it will burn there in the mind forever.
He was not merely young, in love, and going to a party so arrayed for the first time in his life. There beat in him that night the pulse of Tamerlane, and he thought that it was passing great to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis.
And it was not merely that he had been a stripling boy led moth-wise, like a million others, from the outer darkness of the province to the great blaze of this imperial light, into familiar patterns of desire and custom as old as cities and as ageless as the earth.
He was a poet, the flung spear of their immortal life, and he sang the songs of all the poets that had ever sung and died. He was a poet, and upon his tongue there rolled the swelling tide of song of all the poets that had ever sung and lived. He was a poet, and he was the brother and the son, and the undying tongue, of all the poets that had ever sung and lived and died since time began. He was a poet, and the son of poets dead and gone, and a mighty poet in his own domain, and in his wild, unuttered blood there sang that night the wild, unuttered tongues of darkness and America. He was a poet, and all of the wild, unuttered tongues that he must sing were singing in his blood that night. And he stood here on the lid of night, upon this shore of the immortal dark, upon the undiscovered edge of all the brave new world of this America; and knew that still the tide was coming in upon the full, and that even yet, the Muses yet, had not yet reached their prime.
That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless coincision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacré Cœur, in its vast, mysterious geography of lights, fumed here and there by drowsy, sensual, and mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.
The city blazed there in his vision in the frame of night, and for the first time his vision phrased it as it had never done before. It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.
And even the very skies that framed New York, the texture of the night itself, seemed to have the architecture and the weather of the city’s special quality. It was, he saw, a Northern city: the bases of its form were vertical. Even the night here, the quality of darkness, had a structural framework, an architecture of its own. Here, compared with the qualities of night in London or in Paris, which were rounder, softer, of more drowsy hue, the night was vertical, lean, immensely clifflike, steep and clear. Here everything was sharp. It burned so brightly, yet it burned sweetly, too. For what was so incredible and so lovely about this high, cool night was that it could be so harsh and clear, so arrogantly formidable, and yet so tender, too. There were always in these nights, somehow, even in nights of clear and bitter cold, not only the structure of lean steel, but a touch of April, too: they could be insolent and cruel, and yet there was always in them the suggestion of light feet, of lilac darkness, of something swift and fleeting, almost captured, ever gone, a maiden virginal as April.
Here in this sky-hung faëry of the night, the lights were sown like flung stars. Suddenly he got a vision of the city that was overwhelming in its loveliness. It seemed to him all at once that there was nothing there but the enchanted architecture of the dark, star-sown with a million lights. He forgot the buildings: all of a sudden, the buildings did not seem to exist, to be there at all. Darkness itself seemed to provide the structure for the star dust of those million lights, they were flung there against the robe of night like jewels spangled on the gown of the dark Helen that is burning in man’s blood forevermore.
And the magic of it was incredible. Light blazed before him, soared above him, mounted in linkless chains, was sown there upon a viewless wall, soared to the very pinnacles of night, inwrought into the robe of dark itself, unbodied, unsustained, yet fixed and moveless as a changeless masonry, a world of darkness, the invisible, lighted for some immortal feast.
He was as naked and as perfect as a flame: his face glowed with all the clarity of its high youth. He was exalted with that supreme and noble exaltation of man’s youth, which comes so seldom, and which he can never later on regain. It was a moment when the whole wine of life seemed to have been distilled and poured into his veins, when his very blood was the wine of life itself, when he possessed the whole of life—its power, beauty, pity, tenderness, and love, and all its overwhelming poetry—when all of it was his, fused to a perfect center in the white heat of his youth, the triumphant knowledge of his own success.
The hour spoke to him its unuttered tongues, and suddenly he heard the song of the whole land:
Smoke-blue by morning in the chasmed slant, on, quickening the tempo of the rapid steps, up to the pinnacles of noon; by day, and ceaseless, the furious traffics of the thronging streets; forever now, forevermore, upbuilding through the mounting flood crest of these days, sky-hung against the crystal of the frail blue weather, the slamming racketing of girdered steel, the stunning riveting of the machines. So soon the dark, the sky-flung faëry, and the great Medusa of the night; ’twixt beetling seas, the star-flung crustaceans of the continent, and darkness, darkness, and the cool, enfolding night, and stars and magic on America. And across the plains the Overland, the continental thunders of the fast express, the whistle cry wailed back, the fire box walled and leveled on eight hundred miles of wheat; the stiff rustling of the bladed corn at night in Indiana; down South, beside the road, the country negro, clay-caked, marching, mournful, and the car’s brief glare; the radiance of the mill at night, the dynamic humming behind light-glazed glass, then the pines, the clay, the cotton fields again; fast-heard, soon-lost, the wheeling noises of the carnival; and sinners wailing from a church; and then dumb ears beneath the river bed, the voices in the tunnel stopped for Brooklyn; but hackled moonlight on the Rocky Mountains, time silence of the moon on painted rock; in Tennessee, among the Knobs, down by the Holston River, the last car coming by upon the road above, sounded horn, and someone surely listening: “That’s those fellows. They’ve been to town. They’re coming in”—and silence later and the Holston River; but in Carlisle, a screen door slammed and voices going and “Goodnight, goodnight, Ollie. Goodnight, May. . . . Where’s Checkers? Did you let him out?”—and silence, silence, and “Goodnight, goodnight”; the cop in Boston, twirling at the stick, “Just one lone bum”—and ruminant—“Just one lone bum upon the Common—that was all tonight; well, goodnight, Joe”—the windows fogged with pungent steam—“Goodnight”; and moonlight on the painted buttes again—“Meestaire. . . . Oh—h, Meestaire”—so eager, plaintive, pleading, strange—and off the road, in the arroyo bed a shattered Ford, a dead man, two drunk Mexicans—“Meestaire”—and then the eerie nearness of the wild coyote yelp—“Meestaire”—and it is seven miles to go to Sante Fe.
And the rustle of young leaves across America, and, “Say it!” fierce, young, and low—and fierce and panting, “Oh, I won’t!”—insistent, fierce, “You will! Now say it! Say it!”—and the leaves softly, ‘say it, say it’—and half-yielding, desperate, fierce, “Then . . . if you promise!”—the leaves, then, sighing, ‘promise, promise’—quickly, fiercely, “Yes, I promise!”—“I’ll say it!”—“Then say it! Say it!”—and quickly, low, half-audible, “. . . Darling! . . . There! I said it!”—fierce, exultant, the boy’s note, “Darling! Darling! Darling!”—wild and broken, “Oh, you promised!”—wild and fierce, “Oh, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling!”—despairing, lost, “You promised!”—and the leaves, sadly, ‘promised, promised, promised’—“Oh darling, but you promised!”—‘promised promised promised promised promised,’ say the leaves across America.
And everywhere, through the immortal dark, something moving in the night, and something stirring in the hearts of men, and something crying in their wild, unuttered blood, the wild, unuttered tongues of its huge prophecies—so soon the morning, soon the morning: O America.
The people who build apartment houses had won a double victory: Mrs. Jack had at last given up her lovely old house near the Drive and had moved into a large apartment on Park Avenue. As Monk’s cab drew up before the entrance, the liveried doorman stepped smartly out to the curb, opened the door, and said, “Good evening,” with just a shade more warmth than the young man had expected from so grand a creature. Inside at the desk, the telephone girl looked up from the switchboard for a moment and smiled quietly at him as she told him the apartment number. He stepped into the elevator and was whisked noiselessly aloft.
Mrs. Jack’s family had gone out, and a quiet dinner had been arranged for four. Stephen Hook was there, with his sister, Mary.
Hook’s fragile body had been set beyond the glittering stir and shock of life. He had lived a hermit’s life, incurred by filial devotion to his mother. He was remote, detached, amorous of all the rich life of the senses, with his iron brain knowing what joy was without the power to feel it. He lived almost completely in the lives of others. Only his bright, sharp mind was bold and fierce.
For ten years Hook had turned more and more to certain Jews in New York for companionship. His mind, with its hunger for the rich and sumptuous, drew back wearily and with disgust from the dry sterility and juiceless quality of his own Puritan inheritance. All around him, he thought, he saw this drying up of the warmth and savor of life. “Things flat and stale in hand” possessed the earth, and he thought this universal saplessness, especially in the life of the artist and the intellectual, was false.
The Jews loved what was beautiful and pleasant in life. Rich Jews and poor Jews were full of life and curiosity. The rich Jews had saved themselves from the inanity of the Yankee plutocrats with their imitation of English high life. While the Smart Set gravitated with the routine imbecility of the seasons between New York, Newport, Palm Beach, and Nice, the rich Jews were going everywhere, seeing everything. They established art theatres and made them pay, they spent week-ends with Bernard Shaw, they got analyzed by Sigmund Freud, they bought paintings by Pablo Picasso, they endowed radical magazines, they flew to Russia in airplanes, and they explored the fjords of Norway in yachts rented from decayed royalty. They had a glorious time, and their wives were dark and beautiful, covered with rich gems.
As for the poor Jews, they were a low-down, swarming lot, and Hook never got tired watching them—his face like a homesick ghost pressed to the window of a taxi as it wove drunkenly among the pillars of the elevated in the Bronx and on the East Side. They swarmed, they fought, they haggled, they pinched the vegetables and prodded the meat, they talked with dirty fingers, they swore that they were being robbed or swindled—they ate, drank, and fornicated with a will. The poor Jews also enjoyed life.
Hook was often sorry he had not been born a Jew.
Later, Monk was always to remember the wonder of that meal—the fine dining room and the lovely table, and the faces of four people lit so purely and so hauntingly by the candles’ silent flame. He knew somehow it was his dinner—his and Esther’s—and the other two, as if they knew it also, seemed to share in the communion of his happiness and youth. Mary Hook’s blue eyes danced with sparkles of amusement, she looked shrewdly at him and laughed her wise, infectious laugh, and in the candle light her red hair was astoundingly lovely. He had seen her once before, but, being with her now, the quality of her spinsterhood was completely evident. One felt and saw that she was an old maid, but an old maid of such great charm that for a moment it seemed to Monk that every woman in the world ought to be an old maid like Mary Hook.
