Thomas Wolfe, page 253
Sometimes at noon, in the presence of Esther’s rosy, healthful face of love, all the gold and singing of the past came back to him with exultant joy and sanity, but always, always, when she had gone, this cruel and sinister vision of Esther at night and in absence, the potent and evil flower of a corrupt and infamous world, would awake in him again with a searing vividness of horror. The madness would swarm into him again, poisoning his bone, brain, and blood with its malignant taint.
Then he would call Esther on the phone, and if he found her in her room he would curse and taunt her foully, ask her where her lover was, and if she had him by her at that moment, and believe he heard him whispering and snickering behind her even as she swore no one was there. And then, cursing her again, he would tell her never to come back to him, and rip the phone out of its moorings in the wall, hurl it on the floor, and smash and trample it underneath his feet, as if the instrument itself had been the evil and malignant agent of his ruin.
But if he could not find her when he called for her, if her Irish maid should answer and tell him she was out, his despair and madness knew no bounds. He would ask the woman a hundred furious questions. Where had her mistress gone? When would she return? How could he find her at once? Who was with her? What message had she left for him? And if the maid could not answer all these questions exactly and at once, he was convinced he was being duped and mocked at with a jeering contempt and arrogance. He would read into the rich and rather unctuously respectful tone of the Irish maid an undernote of mockery, the evil amusement of the hireling, lewd and confident, her own life bribed, tainted, and polluted with the wage of silence and collusion.
And he would leave the phone to drain the bottle to its last raw drop, then rush out in the streets to curse and fight with people, with the city, with all life, in tunnel, street, saloon, or restaurant, while the whole earth reeled about him its gigantic and demented dance.
And then, in the crowded century of darkness that stretched from light to light, from sunset until morning, he would prowl a hundred streets and look into a million livid faces seeing death in all of them, and feeling death everywhere he went. He would be hurled through tunnels to some hideous outpost of the mighty city, the ragged edge of Brooklyn, and come out in the pale grey light of morning in a wasteland horror of bare lots and rust and rubbish; of dismal little houses flung rawly down upon the barren earth, joined each to each in blocks that duplicated one another with an idiot repetition.
Sometimes, in such a place, the madness and the shapes of death would leave him as suddenly and mysteriously as they had come, and he would come back in the morning, come back from death to morning, walking on the Bridge. He would feel below him its living and dynamic tremble, its vast winglike sweep and flight. Then he would smell the fresh, half-rotten river smell, the glorious spermy sea-wrack with its exultant prophecy of the sea and voyages, and the sultry fragrance of the roasted coffee. He could see below him the great harbor with its flashing tides, its traffic of proud ships, and before him he could see the great frontal cliff of the terrific city, with morning, bright, shining morning, blazing again upon its thousand spires and ramparts.
So it was with him in the green sorcery of that final, fatal, and ruinous April. He was a hater of living men who saw nothing but death and cold corruption in everything and everyone around him, and who yet loved life with so furious and intolerable a desire that each night he seemed to revisit the shores of this great earth like a ghost, an alien, and a stranger, his brain filled with its wild regret of memory, and with insatiable thirst for all the joy and glory of a life that he thought he had lost forever.
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37
THE QUARREL
Underlying all the madness of his life that April, central to it, touching it at every point, was his love for Esther, a love which now, through self-inflicted jealousy, his loathing of the world she moved in, his sense of ruin and lost hope, had been converted into bitter hate. It had been almost three years since he first met Esther and since he had begun to love her, and now, like a man who emerges from the blind rout and fury of a battle and, looking back across the field, sees clearly for the first time that he is party to a broken force, sees legible at last the news of his own defeat, so now it was possible for Monk to see all of the emergent and consecutive stages through which his love for her had run.
There had been the time, in the beginning, when he had felt a young man’s exultant pride and vainglory in what he thought of as a brilliant personal conquest—the possession of the love of a beautiful and talented woman—a tribute to his vanity.
Then his vanity and joy of sensual conquest gave way to the humility and adoration of love, until every pulse, energy, and passion of his life became obsessed by her.
And then, before he knew it, the trapper was trapped, the conqueror conquered, the proud and the insolent laid low, and she was entombed in his flesh, fatally absorbed in his blood until it seemed that he would never get her out of him again, never look out on life again with his own proper vision, never recover again the exultant solitudes of his youth, never again distill out of his flesh and spirit the terrible invasions of love which rob men of their unshared secrecy, their deep-walled loneliness, the soaring music of their isolation. And when he first began to realize the deep exclusiveness of love, the extent to which it was absorbing all his thoughts and energies, he felt the price he paid for it was too exorbitant, and he began to fret and chafe against the shackles which his heart had forged.
And now, finally, all the proud, triumphant music of this love which had possessed and conquered him was being broken, corrupted, made dissonant and harsh by these recurring waves of doubt, suspicion, hate, and madness which had at last exerted a final and ruinous dominance over all his life.
In the furious chronicle of this passion, with its innumerable memories of things done, its countless intertwisted shades and moments, thoughts and feelings, each of which was so alive with a wordless fabric of pain, joy, tenderness, love, cruelty, and despair that it seemed to feed itself with the whole packed pageant of the earth, the reality of measured and recorded time had been exploded and these three years were really longer than any ten that Monk had ever known before. All that he had seen, done, felt, read, thought, or dreamed in all his former life seemed but the food and substance of this present time.
And as Monk’s thoughts made all this clear to him, the full and conscious knowledge of her invasion of his life and his subjection to her conquest seemed intolerable. The conviction of his ruin and defeat was now rooted in his heart, and he swore that he would free himself, and draw his breath alone as he had once, or die.
These thoughts and resolutions Monk had formed one night as he lay the long dark hours through upon his cot, staring up at the ceiling of his room. The next day when Esther came to him as usual, the sight of her jolly, rosy face was like a challenge to him. It seemed to him a suspicious circumstance that she should be so radiant when he was so depressed, and instantly the worm was eating at his heart again. As she came in and greeted him in her usual cheerful way, all the images of betrayal that his madness had ever fashioned now flashed in his brain once more; he passed his hand blindly and clumsily before his eyes, his vision reeled with swimming motes, and he began to speak in a voice grown hoarse with rending hate.
“So!” he said, with exaggerated emphasis. “You’ve come back to me, have you? You’ve come back, now that day is here, to spend an hour or two with me! I suppose I ought to be grateful that you haven’t forgotten me altogether!”
“Why, what on earth?” she said. “In God’s name, what is it now?”
“You know damn well what it is!” he flung back brutally. “You can’t go on forever playing me for a fool! I may be just a country yokel, but I do catch on after a while!”
“Oh, come now, George,” she said soothingly, “don’t be such a fool just because I wasn’t in when you telephoned last night. Katy told me you called, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there. But, good heavens! Anybody would think from the way you talk that I was carrying on with other men.”
“Think!” he said in a thick tone, and suddenly he began to snarl with brutal laughter. “Think! Why, God-damn you, I don’t think, I know! . . . Yes! Every time my back is turned!”
“So help me God, I never have,” she said in a trembling voice, “and you know it! I have been good and faithful to you since the first moment that I met you. No one has come near me, no one has touched me, and in your evil, lying heart you know it!”
“God, how can you say it!” he said, shaking his head with a kind of sullen wonder. “How can you stand there and look at me and say the words! It’s a wonder you don’t choke to death on them!”
“It’s the living truth!” she said. “And if your mind wasn’t poisoned by evil and vile suspicions you’d know it! You mistrust everyone because you think everyone is as vile and base as you are!”
“Don’t you worry about that!” he shouted furiously. “I’ll trust anyone that’s worth it! I know when people can be trusted, all right!”
“Oh, you know, you know,” she said bitterly. “God, you know nothing! You wouldn’t know the truth if it stopped you on the street!”
“I know you, all right!” he shouted. “And I know that damned crowd you run around with, too!”
“Listen to me!” she cried warningly. “You may not like the people I work with——”
“You’re damned right I don’t like the people you work with!” he shouted. “Nor any of their crowd—those fine Jewish ladies on Park Avenue with their million-dollar soul yearnings and their fancy fornications!” Then, quietly, dangerously, he turned to her and said: “I should like to ask you a single question.” He stood facing her. “Tell me, Esther, do you know what a whore is?”
“Wh-a-a-t?” she said, in a faltering and uncertain voice that ended on a high note of hysteria. “What did you sa-a-y?”
He leaped savagely upon her, gripping her arms, pinning her and thrusting her back against the wall.
“Answer me!” he snarled insanely. “You heard me! You’re good enough at using words like faith, and truth, and love, and loyalty! But you don’t even know what I’m saying, do you, when I ask you if you know what a whore is! That’s not a word to use about those fine ladies on Park Avenue, is it? That doesn’t apply to the like of them, does it? You’re God-damned right it doesn’t!” he whispered slowly, with all the choking passion of his hate.
“Let me go!” she said. “Take your hands off me!”
“Oh, no—not yet! You’re not going yet. You’re not going till I instruct your pure, sweet innocence!”
“Oh, I have no doubt that you can tell me,” she said bitterly. “I have no doubt that you’re an authority on the subject! That’s the trouble with you now! That’s the reason that your mind’s so full of filth and evil when you speak of decent women! You never knew a decent woman till you met me. You’ve gone with dirty, rotten women all your life—and that’s the only kind of woman that you know about. That’s the only kind you understand!”
“Yes, I know about them, Esther, and I understand them better than I do all the fancy soul yearnings of your million-dollar friends. I’ve known two hundred of the other kind—the common street and house and gutter whore—I’ve known them in a dozen countries, and there never was one yet like these fine Park Avenue ladies!”
“You can bet your life they weren’t!” she said quietly.
“They didn’t have a million dollars, and they didn’t live in twenty-room apartments. And they didn’t whine and whimper about their souls, and say their lovers were too coarse and low to understand them. They were not fine and dainty in whatever light you saw them, but they knew that they were whores. Some were fat, worn-out old rips with pot bellies and no upper teeth, and a snuff stick dripping from the edges of their mouth.”
“You can save your precious knowledge for those who want to hear it,” Esther said. “But it only sickens me! I don’t want to know any more about this great wisdom you’ve dug out of the gutter.”
“Oh, come, now!” he jeered quietly. “Is this the fine artist who sees life clearly and who sees it whole? Is this the woman who finds truth and beauty everywhere? Since when have you begun to turn your nose up at the gutter? But maybe you don’t like my kind of gutter? Now, if it were only a fine art-theatre gutter—if it were only a fine old gutter from Vienna or Berlin—that would be a different matter, wouldn’t it? Or a nice, juicy, running sewer of a gutter in Marseilles? That’s the real stuff, isn’t it? In fact, you made designs one time for a fine gutter in Marseilles, didn’t you? The one about the whore who was the mother of all men living, and who mothered the waifs and outcasts of the earth into her all-engulfing belly—Madame Demeter! I could have told you something of that gutter, too, because I have been there on my travels, pet, although I never happened to run into that particular lady! And of course my vile, low nature could not appreciate the deep, symbolic beauty of the play,” he snarled, “although it might have given you a few pointers about the stinks and smells of the Old Quarter and the bits of rotten fish and fruit and excrement in the alleyways! But you didn’t ask me, did you? I have a good eye and a splendid nose, and the memory of an elephant—but I lack the deeper vision, don’t I, darling? And besides, my base soul could never rise to the high beauties of a fine old gutter in Marseilles or Budapest—it could not rise above the gutter of a Southern Niggertown! And of course, that’s only common, native clay—that is not art!” he said in a strangling voice.
“Now, quiet, quiet, quiet!” she said gently. “Don’t lash yourself into a frenzy. You’re out of your head and you don’t know what you’re saying.” For a moment she stroked his hand tenderly and looked sorrowfully at him. “In God’s name, what is it? What is all this wild talk about gutters and alleyways and theatres? What has it got to do with you and me? What has it got to do with how I love you?”
His lips were blue and trembled stiffly, and his face had grown livid and was twisted in a convulsion of mad, mindless fury, and it was true that he was no longer fully conscious of what he said.
Suddenly she grasped him by the arms and shook him fiercely. Then she seized him by the hair and furiously pulled his stunned, drugged stare around to her.
“Listen to me!” she said sharply. “Listen to what I’m going to tell you!” He stared at her sullenly, and for a moment she paused, her eyes shot angrily with tears and her small figure trembling with the energy of a dogged and indomitable will.
“George, if you hate the people that I work with and the work I do—I’m sorry for it. If the actors and the other people working in the theatre are as vile and rotten as you say they are, I am sorry for that, too. But I did not make them what they are, and I have never found them that way. I have found many of them vain and pitiful and shabby, poor things without a grain of talent or of understanding, but not vile and evil as you say they are. And I have known them all my life. My father was an actor and he was as wild and mad as you are, but he had as glorious and beautiful a spirit as anyone that ever lived.”
Her voice trembled, and the tears began to flow from her eyes. “You say we are all base and vile and have no faithfulness! Oh, you fool! I heard him crying for me in the middle of the night—I rushed in and found him lying on the floor and the blood was pouring from his mouth! I felt the strength of ten people and I lifted him up and put him across my back and carried him to his bed.” She paused, her voice was trembling so she could not continue for a moment. “His blood soaked through my nightgown on my shoulders—I can feel it yet—he could not speak—he died there holding to my hand and looking at me with his great grey eyes—and that was almost thirty years ago. You say we are all base and vile and have no love for anyone except ourselves. Do you think I could ever forget him? No, never, never, never!”
She closed her eyes, raising her flushed face slightly, and tightly pressing her lips together. In a moment she went on, more quietly:
“I’m sorry if you do not like my work, or the people that I have to work with. But it’s the only work I know—the work I like the best—and George, no matter what you say, I am proud of the work I do. I am a fine artist and I know my value. I know how cheap and trashy most plays are—yes! and some of the people who play in them, too! But I know the glory and the magic is there just the same, and that nothing in this world can beat it when you find it!”
“Ah! The glory and the magic—rot!” he muttered. “All of them talk their bilge about the glory and the magic! It’s the glory and magic of bitches in heat! All of them looking for some easy love affairs! With our best young actors, hey?” he said savagely, seizing her by the arm. “With our would-be Ibsens under twenty-five! Is that it? With our young scene designers, carpenters, electricians—and all the other geniuses with their boyish apple-cheeks!” he said chokingly. “Is that the glory and the magic that you talk of? Yes! the glory and the magic of erotic women!”
She wrenched herself away from his hard grasp, and suddenly she held her small, strong hands up before his face.
“Look at these hands,” she said quietly and proudly. “You poor fool, look at them! Are those the hands of an erotic woman? They have done more work than any man’s you ever knew. There’s strength and power in them. They have learned how to sew and paint and design and create—and they can do things now that no one else on earth can do. And they cooked for you! They cooked the finest meals for you that you have ever eaten.” She seized him fiercely by the arms again and drew him to her, and looked up at him with a flaming face. “Oh, you poor, mad fool,” she whispered in the rapt tone of a woman in a trance. “You tried to throw me over—but I stuck to you. I stuck to you,” she whispered in an exultant and triumphant chant. “You tried to drive me away from you, you cursed me and reviled me—but I stuck to you, I stuck to you! You’ve tortured and abused me and made me go through things that no one else on earth would have endured—but you couldn’t drive me off,” she cried with an exultant laugh, “you couldn’t get rid of me because I love you more than anything on earth and it will never change. Oh, I’ve stuck to you! I’ve stuck to you! You poor, mad creature, I have stuck to you because I love you, and there’s more beauty and more glory in your mad, tormented spirit than in anyone I ever knew! You are the best, the best,” she whispered. “You are mad and evil, but you are the best, and that’s the reason that I’ve stuck to you! And I’m going to get the best, the highest out of you if I have to kill myself in doing it! I’ll give my strength and knowledge to you. I’ll teach you how to use the best in you. Oh, you’ll not go wrong!” she said with almost gleeful triumph. “I’ll not let you go wrong or mad or false or cheap, or lower than the best on earth. In God’s name, tell me what it is,” she cried out as she shook him desperately. “Tell me what there is that I can do about it—and I’ll help you. I’ll show you the clear design, the thread of gold, and you must always stick to it! I’ll show you how to get it out of you. I’ll not let you lose the pure gold that you have in you below a mass of false and evil things. I’ll not let you throw your life away on drunkenness and wandering and cheap women and low brothels. Tell me what it is and I will help you.” She shook him fiercely. “Tell me! Tell me!”
