Thomas Wolfe, page 354
If the life of Drum Joyner was the inner seal and signing of his mother’s purpose, stamped in wax, then molded outwardly to fit the pattern of his father’s wishes, the life of his younger brother, Dolph, was from the outset governed by a purpose of its own. Dolph was one who could have gained and held the coveted honors of West Point training had he so willed, but he would have none of it. He elected to follow Drum to Charlottesville, and his college years showed unmistakable evidence of those qualities which were later to distinguish his whole career.
It is true, he did not shine in scholarship. It is also true, he made no effort to. He was content to pass acceptably, which he had no difficulty in doing, and to leave accomplishments of profounder learning to his more earnest brethren. It was not that Dolph was lacking in earnestness: he possessed it to a degree and in a way that would have astonished his more solemn-seeming contemporaries had they suspected what lay in his mind and heart. It was merely that he already knew of other laurels which seemed to him far more worth winning than any to be found in the academic groves. He had his vision fixed on larger ends. The world, and nothing less, was the oyster of this young Gustavus Adolphus—this young American with the medieval name—and the world had been the mollusk of his desire since childhood.
The geography of western Catawba is especially conducive to the stimulation of visions of the earth. Many writers have spoken of the isolation of these magic hills, the provincial insularity of the mountain man, his remoteness and his consequent asylum age from the affairs and doings of the great and distant world. All of this is true. But the effect of early imprisonment in these hills may lead, in some men, to quite another ending. In the little coves and hollows of the mountain fastness of Zebulon County, in the narrow valleys along the rocky creeks that boil down from Clingmans Dome, there may still be found in shack and cabin whole families of people who have never been as far from home as Libya Hill, and for whom the ranging earth beyond the abutment of the mountain at their back is as strange, as alien to all their thoughts and dreams, as Timbuktu. But let the acorn fall on proper earth, or let the lightning strike a chosen rock, and the oak will flourish there, the rock burst forth abundantly with water as it did in Moses’ day, and there will be a prophet there to glimpse a Promised Land as golden in its glorious enticements as the one that Moses saw.
Gustavus Adolphus Joyner was the proper earth. Gustavus Adolphus Joyner was the chosen rock. And when the lightning struck, Gustavus Adolphus Joyner was ready there and waiting to receive its flash. When he was a child and looked out from Hogwart Heights and saw the distant ranges of the soaring hills, he did not spend much time in thinking of the coves and hollows hidden away among them, or of the quaint and curious world-forgotten people who grubbed and groped there, from whose own blood and flesh and sinew not so long ago he had himself in partial measure been derived. He looked and saw the hills, and in his kindling vision leaped beyond them. His eyes pierced through the mountain wall and swept beyond to daydreams of the golden cities of the plains.
The very sight of these great hills, under the special enchantments of their weather, the blue haze of their tremendous distances, is like some magic vista of time and the imagined kingdoms of the earth. And there is no place among them that is a better vantage point for this Weltanschauung than Hogwart Heights. From the summit of that hill the eye commands a prospect in which grandeur and homeliness are uniquely and wonderfully intermingled, in which the far and the near, the sense of strangeness and Utter familiarity, are combined in a single panoramic unity of now and forever. Away to the right, miles distant, sweeping up gradually from the edges of the rolling plateau on which Libya Hill stands, the great ramparts of the Smoky Mountains first appear, ranging westward tier on tier until they end in endlessness that carries the vision on into imagined worlds beyond even after the eye can go no further. To the north, east, and south, more intimate, more friendly and familiar, rise the peaks and undulating masses of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Before one, and below one, lies Libya Hill, the straggling little town strewn widely on its broad plateau, not always lovely at close hand, but very lovely from the crest of Hogwart Heights. The center of the town, the “business section,” looks ghostly, unsubstantial, and unreal under its drifting plumes of soft-coal smoke. But out of the heart of this ethereal-looking town, coming as swift and clean as a deliberate act of cold, clear purpose, bends a bright band of what, beneath the summer sun, seems to be an arc of burnished silver. In a graceful curve it sweeps out from the town and bears around the base of Colonel Joyner’s hill, then it winds on westward, sinuously but forever westward, till it is lost among the far-flung, blue-hazed mountains. It is a river, just a thread of river, really, when compared to its great brother, the Tennessee, into which it ultimately flows; yet as rivers go in the Catawba hills, where as a rule they are hardly more than creeks, this one is quite impressive. In August, if the weather has been hot and dry, and all the mountain streams are low, the river at this point below the brow of Hogwart Heights will shrink away from banks of cake-dry mud into a mere trickle. But in the freshets of the spring, or later on in June if rains are heavy and a flood comes, the river will quickly swell and rise up to the very flooring of the wooden bridge. At these times one understands why the first settlers gave it the curiously haunting name of Catawba Broad.
Here on the summit of this hill, bedded in soft grasses, Dolph Joyner lay a thousand times in childhood and traced the shining river’s course as it swept out from the town and wound its way beyond his sight and ken; and with soaring certitude he went on following it, through mountain gorges and deep valleys of verdant coolness, until he came out with it into the imagined world upon the other side, and saw it beckoning on before him in a vision of golden lands.
If others had known why the boy spent so many hours in this solitude of hill-top dreaming, they might have guessed that the little world of Libya Hill and the Hogwart Heights Military Academy would soon prove too small for him. His father, of course, wanted him to pursue what he had come to think of as “the family tradition of arms.” It was comforting for the Colonel to think that his two sons would join their talents to carry on the school after he was gone. But this was not to be. For, while Drum was as malleable as putty in his parents’ hands, Dolph was made of different stuff.
Rather small of figure, erect and graceful as a shaft, Dolph was quick and hard in both mind and body, but this quickness, this lean hardness, was from childhood couched deceptively in a velvet sheath. He inherited all of the Colonel’s courtliness of manner without any of the Colonel’s bombast and capacity for self-deception. He seemed to be full of grace and gentleness, and his voice, which was never raised in loudness or in violence, was so pleasing in its quiet modulations that it fell on tired ears or on jangled nerves as gratefully as balm. During his college days at Charlottesville he acquired the nickname of “Silk,” which was to cling to him throughout his life. Silk was a perfectly accurate tag for him. His whole personality seemed to be summed up in that one word. But it was silk around iron. It was silk carefully overlaid on flint.
The essential quality of Silk Joyner’s character was that he not only always knew the right thing when he saw it, but sensed the right thing before anyone else even suspected its existence. And “the right thing” with Silk Joyner was, simply, the advantageous thing. This was his main concern. His vision of life was utterly utilitarian, and the only utility he recognized was that which applied to himself. He was interested in the usefulness of things and of people only insofar as they could be used to further his own purposes. That suave and courtly figure with the silken voice offended no one unless he had to, but he did not waste himself on useless and unprofitable acquaintances. People who could not help him, who could not profit him in some way, were ruthlessly cast out of his life; but the annihilating act was performed with such smooth courtesy and such winning charm that the luckless victim did not even know he had been kicked out of doors into the cold until he felt the icy blast.
At college, Silk knew precisely the right people, joined precisely the right organizations, made precisely the right connections. He squeezed the whole university life dry of the last drop of nourishment it could offer him, and yet did not once betray the fact to those who knew him best that he was anything else but the infinitely pleasant, polished, charming, friendly, and rather indolent fellow whom they took him to be. He got his law degree at Charlottesville within two years after his graduation from the college, and he followed this with a pleasant and profitable term at Heidelberg.
And then, to cap the climax, he did what no one who knew him could possibly have thought he would ever do. But it was the thing he had always had in the back of his head, the thing that his sure instinct told him was inevitably right, so he did it. He came home—home from his travels, home from Heidelberg, smoother and more silken than he had ever been—and announced that he was going out West, to the Territory of Oklahoma. He was that he was not only going there, but that he intended to settle down there and practice his profession and grow up with the country—there in that raw outpost of civilization which, to his mother’s appalled conception, seemed to be as far and wild and grotesquely unfit a place for a gentleman’s habitation as an encampment of Sioux Indians.
His mother’s tears, his father’s entreaties and objurgations, had no more effect upon his purpose than rain against the surface of a cliff. He had made up his mind to go, and go he did. So for the nonce we leave him there, to return to him a little later. In the interim we can be sure of one thing: Silk Joyner is not going to be caught picking daisies out in Oklahoma. While our backs are turned, he will still be cultivating all the right people and doing all the right things, whatever they happen to be in Oklahoma. He will be fitting his silk purse to the sow’s ear, and, incidentally, making a very good thing of it.
While Theodore’s children were growing up, an event of considerable importance occurred in Libya Hill which, in its sequel, was to reveal as nothing else had ever done the true mettle of the remarkable woman who had given them birth. The impact of this event upon the town was so electrifying that for weeks and months after the first news of it broke upon the awareness of the natives, they could think and talk of nothing else. Everybody was bursting with excitement over it, everybody was adither and agog over the stupendous implications of it, everybody said it was the best thing that could possibly have happened—everybody, that is, except Mrs. Theodore Joyner. From the first, she was totally indifferent to it.
In the late seventies, George Willetts, one of the richest and most benefactory members of that mighty tribe of plunderers which has looted the resources of America for two hundred years, came to Libya Hill and, after looking over all the mountains in the surrounding region, bought up a whole range of them, comprising a major portion of three counties, for his own domain. He imported artists, artisans, and architects by the hundred, brought in from Italy and the great cities of the East the most skilled and cunning craftsmen of their kind—a veritable army of masons, carpenters, stonecutters, and foresters—and put them to work creating on his two hundred thousand princely acres the greatest country house that had yet been built in all America—the greatest private residence, it was said, in the whole wide world.
While everybody in town gasped and buzzed with each new development in this magnificent undertaking, Mrs. Theodore Joyner sat unmoved on Hogwart Heights. From her own verandah, on a summer’s day, she sometimes surveyed the proceedings from afar. Across rolling miles of green plateau she could see from her hill the Willetts’ mansion rising on its hill, a faery citadel of royal marble gleaming white as alabaster against the smoky backdrop of the distant mountains, upborne richly and sustained by swelling masses of green forest. Poor indeed by comparison was Hogwart Heights and the weathered paint of Mrs. Joyner’s old frame house. But Mrs. Joyner sat on her verandah and she never moved. If it ever crossed her mind to draw a comparison, she did so proudly; but what she thought she kept entirely to herself and never said a word to anyone.
George Willetts could have owned six counties for all she cared, and built a marble palace of four hundred rooms instead of the two hundred and sixty-two that were now under construction. He could have spent forty million dollars for all she cared, instead of the twenty million that his plans were costing him, and her feeling toward him would have been the same. That is to say, she would have had no feeling toward him. For she had heard that his grandfather had once run a ferry boat. That settled it. He had no “family.” He did not belong. As far as Mrs. Joyner was concerned, he did not exist.
The rest of that small world fairly groveled in the dust before the Willetts’ name. People fought for a better glimpse of George Willetts’ secluded, legendary person when they saw his chrisomed flesh upon the familiar pavements of the town; they pinched themselves to make sure they were not dreaming, so that they could really tell this marvel as a verity to wide-eyed grandchildren sixty years from then. The name of George Willetts and his enchanted domain came to dominate the life of the little town like a magic spell. But through the whole of this, Mrs. Theodore Joyner sat on Hogwart Heights and gave no sign at all.
It is not likely that the Willetts family cared at first. But the years rolled by, the mansion was completed, the Willetts took possession, and as the whole community save the dame on Hogwart Heights sank before them in the obeisance of abject vassalage, the sheer effrontery of the thing began to fascinate them, then to stun them, until finally it overcame them. As time went on, the word was whispered back into the porches of the Willetts’ ears that the lady on the Heights had totally ignored them, had shown no interest in their great proceedings, had said, indeed, that Mr. Willetts had no “family,” and that she—God save the mark!—the lady on Hogwart Heights, the mistress of a shabby house and of a one-horse military school—would not receive them!
It was funny. It was unbelievable. It was absurd. It was—it was—it was—great God! it was simply horrible, that’s what it was! It was not to be endured! It had never before happened to a member of the Willetts family, and it had to stop!
The upshot of it was that there came a day—a memorable, never-to-be-forgotten day—when the Willetts family did what it had never done before. It put its pride into its pocket and went to call upon a total stranger—and to make the circumstance still more incredible, if that can be, a total stranger who had snubbed the Willetts family dead and cold.
History does not record that on that memorable day the bells were rung backward, or the flags hung at half mast in Libya Hill, or the streets lined with silent throngs, their heads uncovered, as Mrs. Willetts drove through town on her way to Hogwart Heights. There is a rumor that there was a partial eclipse of the sun, but scientific research does not confirm it. Still, everyone who remembers anything about it agrees that it was a day of days.
The coronation of a king may be witnessed by the populace, but the solemn investiture of the royal robes is reserved for the royal family and members of the most select nobility. Accordingly the full and satisfying record of what happened on that famous day will always be concealed somewhat in mystery. Yet rumor, like a fine and subtle smoke, can insinuate itself through solid walls, and rumor whispers that upon that day Mrs. Willetts got up at the crack of dawn—a thing unknown to her before—and ate the lightest kind of breakfast. Henchmen of the royal preserve, game wardens, foresters, French maids, and such like folk were known to have hinted discreetly afterwards that on this day Mrs. Willetts was not utterly herself. She looked pale and haggard in the mirror, her small, jeweled hand was seen to tremble slightly as she put the cap back on the tray, she is said to have called for her smelling salts and to have taken two sharp sniffs, one more than was her customary average.
Driving down along the eight miles of lovely road that wound from the mansion to the lodge gates of the great estate, behind a pair of spanking bays, two liveried coachmen perched above her, and two more with folded arms behind, in a princely equipage of which the very harness studs were solid silver, the lady was said to have betrayed the tension of her nerves, the agitation of her mind, by the way in which she twirled the handle of her parasol with one small gloved hand and nervously kept clenching and unclenching the fingers of the other. She swept through the arches of the lodge gate with set and rigid features, and for the first time in her life failed to respond with her customary graciousness little nod and smile to the bows of the venerable retainer who kept the gate.
These symptoms of internal stress were likewise noted by the populace as Mrs. Willetts passed through the town. At a spanking trot the splendid carriage swept smoothly through the streets on velvet wheels. The sun was shining and the silver harness sparkled like a maiden’s dream. The flowers were blooming, the month was May, the laughter of young children and of lovers could be heard upon the air. All nature wore a smile that day, but Mrs. Willetts did not smile. Her face was rigid and her eyes were blank. Had she been carved out of stone she could not have been more preoccupied, more unaware of all the eyes, the hats, the faces, and the smiles that were raised hopefully to her in greeting.
The carriage swept smartly up South Main Street, turned the corner into College at the Square, rolled out College to Montgomery, trotted swiftly down the long slope of Montgomery to the bottom, then up the hill beyond and out of town. Dust arose now beneath those shining hooves, dust arose around that shining equipage, around the coachmen and the footmen and the flunkeys; dust swirled up around the fashionable figure of George Willetts’ wife, obscuring her designs and purposes, clouding all her hopes, smothering whatever thoughts she had been thinking. At last the carriage crossed the old wooden bridge that spanned the river at the base of Hogwart Heights and heaved up as it struck a bump upon the other side. It lurched into the rutted and uneven roadway that wound up around the hill to the academy, and then, still toiling and lurching upward, disappeared from sight around a bend.
