Thomas Wolfe, page 261
When he awoke he grew terribly tired in an hour or two; his mind kept beating with a weary pulse, and she was throbbing like an ache in every pulse of that beat. He drove his mind to focus its attention upon various objects, but he had to force and lift it away from its obsession as an exhausted runner lifts his leaden thighs upon the running track; his eyes were tired, and he squinted constantly in the effort to concentrate.
At last, in a moment of aching desire and total abnegation of the will, he rushed to the office of the American Express and found a letter from her. And then it was as though those months of doubt and hate and bitterness had never been, and he knew he loved her more than he loved life.
He thought about her all the time, and yet he could no longer remember how she looked. Or, if he remembered how she looked, he could not remember one look but a thousand, and these thousand looks came, passed, shifted, were mingled, mixed, and woven in such bewildering shift and play that no single image of her face remained, and there was no picture of her he could see that was fixed, and certain, and unchanging. And this filled his heart with hideous doubt, perplexity, and confusion, for suddenly he remembered how one could see a face only a few times in his life and yet that face would be fixed there in a single unforgettable image that never changed.
And then he saw that this was true of all the people he had known best and loved the most: when he tried to remember how they looked he could see not one look but a thousand looks, not one face but a swarming web of faces.
In the afternoon he would walk into town to the Oxford post office to see if there were letters for him. As he went down the street towards the post office building his heart would begin to thud feverishly, his legs would tremble, and his bowels would get cold and numb. He would wait there desperately while the man thumbed through a stack of mail to see if there was anything for him. The man took his time deliberately, and Monk felt like tearing the letters from his hand and going through them himself.
If he saw that there were letters, his heart began to beat like a trip hammer, and he was wild with hope and apprehension. But when there were no letters from her, it was just the same as no letters at all. He had no interest in the rest of them; he just thrust them indifferently in his pocket and walked away, and he was sick through heart and soul with misery and despair. The soft, wet skies of humid grey seemed to have fallen on him and broken his back, and his life was drowning in an ocean of sinister and desolate grey from which it could never emerge.
But if there was a letter from her, a feeling of drunken joy and triumph surged up in him the moment that he saw its spidery, forceful, and graceful characters. He would snatch it out of the hands of the man, rip it open and devour it as he stood there, and feel that the greatest poets in the world had never written words of such magic, truth, and love as were in that letter. And he would look up and laugh exultantly at the man who had given him the letter, for now he felt that the man was one of the best friends that he had on earth, just because he had given it to him.
The man came to know him, to expect him, to look for him, and when he saw Monk coming he would reach for a stack of letters and begin to thumb through them even before he got there. Once when Monk had finished reading a letter and looked up at him, the man was looking at him quietly, gravely, and intently. When Monk grinned at him and shook the letter in his fist triumphantly, the man did not smile as he often did. Instead, he shook his head slightly, rapidly, and gravely from side to side, and turned away.
The worst time was at night. For as he sat in his room at night and heard the wind sighing with demented wistfulness in the great trees, the madness would come back to him again, and he would think of home. Over the dark, illimitable seas the fabulous city blazed upward from the evil sorcery of night, and again he thought of the great and obscene avenues of night, the huge street of the living dead, and he would see again the faces on rat’s alley where the dead men were—the faces of vultures, rats, foxes, reptiles, swine—and he could not believe that it had ever existed or that he had ever known it.
It blazed upward in some evil sorcery of time, some legend of now or forever, some evil dream of his own dreaming, and intolerably, intolerably, he wanted to go back to see if it was there—and to find and see and know the bitter, strange enigma of that woman’s face again.
He saw her face, that thousand-visaged face of joy and love and health and radiance, now fixed forever in that world of evil night, and instantly the shapes of death were moving all around her, the poisonous images of cruelty, faithlessness, and despair had come alive again. He saw her fixed and secure in that infamous world of death-in-life, that poisonous, perverse, and sterile life of vanity, hate, and evil. The madness pierced him like an asp, and the worm was feeding at his life again.
Duped in that legend of enchanted time, he tried to cast a spell across the darkened seas, to catch her life into the net of his despair, to hold her, keep her, guard and prison her with love, to turn on her a light so fierce and merciless, a hunger and desire so limitless, that it could leap through darkness over half the world to find her, and keep her for him against every threatened treachery, moment by moment, as he thought the night away.
But all the time, as he sat there striving to nail down every act and moment of her life, to follow her step by step with these savage watchdogs of desire, he had again been duped by time, and had forgotten that time struck another note for her, and that, false, faithful, evil, good, or bad, she had been living in another land, another time, that she was sleeping while he thought of her, or waking while he slept, alive in all the darkness and desire of evil night when dawn had come for him, and that all acts, ardors, treacheries, or evils that he feared had passed, had long since passed, had passed five hours ago, or were to come.
Time is a fable and a mystery: it has ten thousand visages, it broods on all the images of the earth, and it transmutes them with a strange, unearthly glow. Time is collected in great clocks and hung in towers, the ponderous bells of time throng through the darkened air of sleeping cities, time beats its tiny pulse out in small watches on a woman’s wrist, time begins and ends the life of every man, and each man has his own, a different time.
At night, he writes his mistress from a foreign land, he bends his love and hunger over the immense dark vastness of the nighttime seas, he tries to wish his passion and his madness into her, he says, “Where are you now, and in what place?” He hears a footstep in the empty street, the bells of time strike three o’clock for him, he writes: “What are you doing at this time at home? Are you asleep? Alone? Do you hear footfalls in the empty street; and do you think of me? Or have you found new love, and are you stirring at this moment in some other lover’s grasp?” Then, as the footfalls die along the street, and the great trembling of the bells upon the air is stilled again, he strikes his flesh in his despair and agony, he thinks of perjured love, but he has forgotten that, whether she be false or faithful to him, time beats another note for her, and in the streets of home the bells are striking ten o’clock.
Thus, even in the memory of love’s grief, even at the moment when we hope love’s cry will pray a miracle and compass half the earth, time strikes a jagged flash and where we think it fell no love is, the moment of our faith or our betrayal has passed, or is to come, our cry wells out on darkness; and all the earth is peopled by these dupes of time, by these lost cries, by these unmeted, lost, and lonely moments of myriad mocking, and unmindful time.
There is a moment when our prayers are heard, there is a moment when our lives may meet, there is a moment when our wandering might end, and all our hunger be appeased, and we could walk into love’s heart and core forever.
But what man knows that moment when it comes? What man can know the door that he may open? What man can find one light out of a million lights, one face out of a billion faces, one meet desire, one mated ecstasy out of the immense and tangled wilderness of love and hunger that covers all the earth? We are small grope-things crying for the light and love by which we might be saved, and which, like us, is dying in the darkness a hand’s breadth off from us if we could touch it. We are like blind sucks and sea-valves and the eyeless crawls that grope along the forest of the sea’s great floor, and we die alone in the darkness, a second away from hope, a moment from ecstasy and fulfillment, a little half an hour from love.
That is one kind of time; that is one of time’s myriad faces. Here is another:
When he opened the door of the little shop in Ambleside and stepped down, the young man with the thin, bright face was waiting for him. Outside, dark was coming and the rain had begun to fall. The day had been wild and grey and beautiful, marked by a spume of flying clouds around the hills and by squalls of driving rain. Now the rain had set in again, it was falling steadily outside along the village street. In the dulling light the young man with the thin, bright face peered at him across the counter and said:
“Good evening, thir.” He smiled then, a smile of singular humor, intelligence, and understanding which revealed for a moment the black horror of his toothless gums, the reason for his lisp. “You are late, thir. I wath jutht clothing.”
“Is my suit ready yet?”
“Oh yeth, thir. I wath waiting for you.”
He pushed the cardboard suit-box, neatly tied, across the counter, and as Monk fumbled in his trousers for some money and looked at him inquiringly, he said quietly:
“That will be two and thix, thir. And I’m thorry that you had to come out in thuch weathah, but—” the tone finely suggested mild and humorous reproof—“you know, thir, you did not leave me yoah addweth. Othahwithe I thould have thent it.” He peered into the greying light through the windows of the shop, and then, shaking his head in a movement of sharp disapproval, he said emphatically: “It ith wet-thed weathah! Wet-thed! I am thorry, thir, that yoah vithit thould be thpoiled by thuch wet-thed weathah.”
“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” replied the customer, as he took his bundle under his arm and prepared to go. “This kind of weather’s all right once in a while, and besides, we’ve had such fine weather here the last two weeks I’ve got no reason to complain. I had expected something so different from the way it has been. When I saw how fine the weather could be up here I was surprised.”
The young man with the thin, bright face turned, and, arching his thin fingers deliberately upon his counter and leaning forward a trifle, he said in a tone of challenging, finely humorous inquiry:
“And why, pway? Why, may I athk, were you thirpwithed? What kind of weathah did you eckthpect?”
“Oh, I expected it to be rotten. That’s what they told me, you know. They told me in London that it rained here all the time, and not to expect anything else.”
“That, thir,” said the young man slowly and emphatically, “ith a bathe thlahndah! A tewwibly bathe thlahndah! Wain, it ith twue, we do have,” he conceded judicially, “but to deny that we have fine dayth, too, ith thimply widiculuth! Why, thir,” the young man declared with sudden pride, “taking it yeah in and yeah out, there ith no finah weathah in the world than the weathah of the English Laketh—and to deny it ith theer thlahndah—the batheth thort of thlahndah—London thlahndah!”
And suddenly, having delivered himself with great seriousness of these words, the young man with the thin, bright face straightened, and smiled a quick, friendly, and immensely engaging smile.
“Good night, thir,” he said quietly, as the other turned to go.
And the customer departed, followed by the young man’s smile—a smile that later he could never forget, that would return to stir his heart with warmth and affection as he remembered the character of swift intelligence, quick, kindly understanding, and fine humor that the smile revealed—and that turned his flesh sick with a feeling poignantly and strangely mixed of pity and of loathing as he remembered the horror of toothless, blackened gums in one so young which that rare and finely-tempered smile had ruthlessly exposed.
Outside, in the village street, there was nothing left but the dull, wet ghost of light, and the steady sound of the rain falling quietly through the leaves, dripping incessantly from the branches to the ground. And he strode onward with cold rain beating in his face, haunted by the poignant revelations of man’s brief meeting with his fellows, the thin, bright wonder of a smile.
This is another moment of lost time, another of time’s million faces.
Again, the traveler is on a Channel steamer approaching the town of Boulogne, on the French coast, at two o’clock in the morning. It is mid-Summer, the month of July. The steamer moves in swiftly towards the town. The passengers line the rails and watch the breakwater slide past in the darkness, the lights of the town approach. These things, together with the punctual shuttered flash of the lights all up and down the coast of France, combine to touch these travelers with a sense of ecstasy and wonder.
Not only is that French earth, not only are the little figures waiting on the brightly-lighted quay French people, but these are French lights; and it is a part of the sense of wonder and glory that never dies entirely in our hearts that for a few days these passengers will invest every object they see—trees, cats, dogs, chickens—with this same magic of their own weaving: “Frenchness.” They will be unable to see even the most familiar and universal thing without feeling that it is somehow “French” and different, and they will examine it curiously with this purpose.
Meanwhile the steamer moves in swiftly towards the town, and the traveler, weary of flesh but gripped again by the excitement of the voyage, by the hope and belief in voyages that never dies, waits nervously for the landing. The little boat churns up beside the stone-grey quays, he sees the people moving quickly along beside the ship, he sees the bright blue and flaming red stripe of a gendarme’s baggy trousers, then he touches land again, he passes down the gangway and surrenders his landing card, he is moving swiftly across the quay behind the brawny little blue-jacketed figure of a porter, a vital little French goat stepping along cockily with his baggage. At the customs counter the man is waiting, he shouts and beckons to the traveler, the fatigued officials mutter the usual formula, to which he replies swiftly, “Je n’ai rien, monsieur,” his baggage is swiftly chalked, the examination is over, he is passed.
Suddenly, the traveler is filled with a great regret and hunger for places he has passed unvisited, for mystery he has not fathomed, for doors he has not opened. He knows that life in this little coastal town, which has before this existed for him only as a cluster of lights, a swift, snarled pattern of streets, faces, bridges, the fronts and backs of houses, and the long boat quay where the train halts, which has existed only as a glint of waters, a slap of tides, a confusion of the voices of officials, porters, and travelers, then as a slide of wooden piers, a vision of outer lights, and at length the ship!—he knows that life here in this town will probably repeat itself in the accustomed tones and gestures of all the earth, but he knows also that one of the fateful errors of living is not to obey the impulse which commands us to doubt, to search, and to explore forever, and, turning to the porter, he tells him he will not go to Paris in the train that waits, but will remain in the town.
In another minute, leaving the maritime quay by a new door, he is seated in a rickety victoria, drawn by a rawboned nag. The decrepit vehicle rattles away over the cobbled stones from the surprised porter and the curious group of cab drivers. The quay, the customs, and the train are left behind, he passes new buildings, traverses new streets, the pattern of arrival has been destroyed forever. In a moment more he has called out the proprietor of a small hotel, taken a room, and almost before the hooves of the old horse have clattered away on the cobbles of the empty street, he finds himself and his baggage alone in a big whitewashed chamber. He orders a big bottle of red wine and drinks it just for the joy and jubilation that he feels.
A few minutes later he has undressed and turned out the light. For a moment he stands in the darkness. The old, thick planking of the floor seems for a moment to swing beneath his feet as ships do. He still feels the motion of the sea. He goes to the window and looks out. The sweet air of the night, the sweet air of the Summer earth, stained with the fragrance of leaves and blossoms, with the smell of the sea in a harbor, and with all the old, familiar smells of the earth and towns—of streets, of old buildings, of pavements, and of shops—comes in to him and bathes him with its friendly human odor.
His window looks out on a little street—one of those narrow back streets of a French town, paved with big cobbles and flanked by narrow sidewalks barely wide enough for the passage of one person. The street has the high, utterly silent, closed appearance of a French street at night: the corrugated shutters are drawn down in front of all the little shops, and the secretive people who sleep in the high old houses, which lean steeply into one another with the settled, malleable sculpture of age, have closed their blinds firmly so that no one may look in. Across the street below him he can see the faded letters above the shutters of a little shop—Pâtisserie. It is immensely old and immensely familiar. The street sleeps, and yet possesses a strange, living watchfulness—it is as if one great, dark eye was brooding watchfully and sleeplessly over the destiny of the street.
The traveler feels that he has been here before. He stands for a moment longer drenching himself in the fixed and living eternity of the earth, drawing its mighty and potent fragrance into his lungs, a part of the destiny of all its people. Then he gets into the bed, his flesh gropes down into the rich luxury of clean, coarse sheets and deep pillows as into a living substance, and now for a moment he is alive and still with wonder, he becomes a part of that living darkness. The objects of the room—the bed, the chairs, the wardrobe, the wash-basin—are grouped like living things in his consciousness, like old, immensely familiar, and essential things, although an hour before he did not know of their existence; and he is conscious as well of the street outside, the old houses, the town, and all the earth.
