Thomas Wolfe, page 411
Meanwhile, at the big front entrance, another policeman was conferring with the doorman, Henry. The doorman answered the questions of the officer in a toneless, monosyllabic and almost sullen voice, and the policeman wrote down his answers in another little book.
“You say he was unmarried?”
“Yes,” said Henry.
“How old?”
“I think he was 28,” Henry said.
“And where did he live?” said the policeman.
“In the Bronx,” said Henry.
His tone was so low and sullen that it was hardly more than a mutter and the policeman lifted his head from the book in which he had been writing, and rasped out harshly: “Where?”
“The Bronx!” said Henry almost furiously.
The man finished writing in his book, put it away into his pocket, and then before he departed, looked up at the facade of the big building with a look of casual, almost weary speculation.
“Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t like to try it. It’s a long way up there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the man named Henry answered with the same ungracious sullenness and turned impatiently away—“If that’s all you want?” he began.
“That’s all,” the policeman said with a kind of brutal and ironic geniality, “that’s all, brother.” And with a hard, ironic look of mirth in his cold eyes he oscillated his nightstick behind him and looked at the retreating figure of the doorman as he disappeared.
—
At this moment, Mr. Jack, wearing his silken dressing gown, and ready for his bed and sleep, had just gone to the window of his room, lowered the sash still farther, and drawn in a good full breath of cool night air. He found it good. The last disruptive taint of smoke had been washed clean and sweet away by the cool breath of April. And in the white light of the virgin moon the spires and ramparts of Manhattan were glittering with cold magic in splintered helves of stone and glass. Peace fell upon his tranquil spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed his soul. It was so solid, splendid, everlasting and so good. And it was all as if it had always been—all so magically itself as it must be save for its magical increasements, forever.
A tremor, faint and instant shook his feet. He paused, startled, waited, listened. Was the old trouble there again to shake the deep perfection of his soul? What was it he had felt that morning? What rumor had he heard this night? . . . Faint tremors, small but instant, and a talk of tunnels—what was it? What?—This talk of tremors in the tunnels there below?—Ah, there it was a second time! What was it?—
TRAINS AGAIN!
—Passed, faded, trembled delicately away into securities of eternal stone, and left behind it the blue helve of a night, and April, in the blazing vertices of all that sculptured and immortal peace.
The smile came back into his eyes. The brief and troubling frown had lifted from his soul. And his look as he prepared to sleep was almost dulcet and cherubic—the look of a good child who ends the great adventure of another day and who knows that sleep and morning have come back again—
—
“Long, long into the night I lay” she thought—“and thought of you—”
Ah, sleep.
[¬]
STORIES
[The texts follow The Complete Short Stories, Charles Scribner’s Sons 1987, except “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,” “The Web of Earth,” “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” “The Party at Jack’s” (magazine publications) and “The Four Lost Men” (The Four Lost Men. The Previously Unpublished Long Version, Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds., The University of South Carolina Press 2008).]
AN ANGEL ON THE PORCH
[Scribner’s Magazine, August 1929]
Late on an afternoon in young summer Queen Elizabeth came quickly up into the square past Gant’s marble-shop. Surrounded by the stones, the slabs, the cold carved lambs of death, the stonecutter leaned on the rail and talked with Jannadeau, the faithful burly Swiss who, fenced in a little rented place among Gant’s marbles, was probing with delicate monocled intentness into the entrails of a watch.
“There goes the Queen,” said Gant, stopping for a moment their debate. “A smart woman. A pippin as sure as you’re born,” he added with relish.
He bowed gallantly with a sweeping flourish of his great-boned frame of six feet five. “Good evening, madame.”
She replied with a bright smile which might have had in it the flicker of an old memory, including Jannadeau with a cheerful impersonal nod. For just a moment she paused, turning her candid stare upon smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim within the shop, and finally on an angel poised on cold phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy, stationed beside the door upon Gant’s little porch. Then, with her brisk firm tread, she passed the shop, untroubled by the jeweler’s heavy stare of wounded virtue, as he glowered up from his dirty littered desk, following her vanishing form with a guttural mutter of distaste.
They resumed their debate:
“And mark my words,” proceeded Gant, wetting his big thumb, as if he had never been interrupted, and continuing his attack upon the Democratic party, and all the bad weather, fire, famine, and pestilence that attended its administration, “if they get in again we’ll have soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts will grease your backbone before another winter’s over.”
The Swiss thrust out a dirty hand toward the library he consulted in all disputed areas—a greasy edition of The World Almanac, three years old—saying triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing, in a strange wrenched accent: “Ah—just as I thought: the muni-cip-al taxation of Milwaukee under De-moc-ratic administration in 1905 was two dollars and twenty-five cents the hundred, the lowest it had been in years. I cannot ima-gine why the total revenue is not given.”
Judiciously reasonable, statistically argumentative, the Swiss argued with animation against his Titan, picking his nose with blunt black fingers, his broad yellow face breaking into flaccid creases, as he laughed gutturally at Gant’s unreason, and at the rolling periods of his rhetoric.
Thus they talked in the shadow of the big angel that stood just beyond the door upon Gant’s porch, leering down upon their debate with a smile of idiot benevolence. Thus they talked, while Elizabeth passed by, in the cool damp of Gant’s fantastical brick shack, surrounded by the stones, the slabs, the cold carved lambs of death. And as they talked, the gray and furtive eyes of the stonecutter, which darkened so seldom now with the shade of the old hunger—for stone and the cold wrought face of an angel—looked out into the square at all the pullulation of the town, touched, as that woman passed his door with gallant tread, by a memory he thought had died forever. The lost words. The forgotten faces. Where? When?
He was getting on to sixty-five, his long, erect body had settled, he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he wept in his tirades now because of his great right hand, stiffened by rheumatism, which once had carved so cunningly the dove, the lamb, the cold joined hands of death (but never the soft stone face of an angel). Soaked in pity, he referred to himself as “the poor old cripple who has to provide for the whole family.”
That proud and sensual flesh was on its way to dust.
The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping over him. He rose now a full hour later, he came to his shop punctually, but he spent long hours of the day extended on the worn leather couch of his office, or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old Liddell, Cardiac, his doctor, and Fagg Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in two big buildings on the square, and was at the present moment tilted comfortably in a chair before the fire department, gossiping eagerly with members of the ball club, whose chief support he was. It was after five o’clock; the game was over.
Negro laborers, grisly with a white coating of cement, sloped down past the shop on their way home. The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed along the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken Negress. Life buzzed slowly like a fly.
The sun had reddened slightly; there was a cool flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope, the ecstasy, of evening in the air. In slow pulses the thick plume of fountain rose, fell upon itself, and slapped the pool in lazy rhythms. A wagon rattled leanly over the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the grocer Bradly wound up his awning with slow creaking revolutions.
Across the square at its other edge the young virgins of the eastern part of town walked lightly home in chattering groups. They came to town at four o’clock in the afternoon, walked up and down the little avenue several times, entered a shop to purchase small justifications, and finally went into the chief drug-store, where the bucks of the town loafed and drawled in lazy, alert groups. It was their club, their brasserie, the forum of the sexes. With confident smiles the young men detached themselves from their group and strolled back to booth and table.
“Hey theah! Wheahd you come from?”
“Move ovah theah, lady. I want to tawk to you.”
Gant looked and saw. His thin mouth was tickled by a faint sly smile. He wet his big thumb quickly.
While his furtive eyes roved over the east end of the square, Gant talked with Jannadeau. Before the shop the comely matrons of the town came up from the market. From time to time they smiled, seeing him, and he bowed sweepingly. Such lovely manners!
“The King of England,” he observed, “is only a figurehead. He doesn’t begin to have the power of the President of the United States.”
“His power is severely limited,” said Jannadeau gutturally, “by custom but not by statute. In actuality he is still one of the most powerful monarchs in the world.” His black fingers probed carefully into the viscera of a watch.
“The late King Edward, for all his faults,” said Gant, wetting his thumb, “was a smart man. This fellow they’ve got now is a nonentity and a nincompoop.” He grinned faintly, with pleasure, at the ghost of his old rhetoric, glancing furtively at the Swiss to see if the big words told.
His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish carriage of Queen Elizabeth’s well-clad figure as she came down by the shop again. She smiled pleasantly, bound homeward for her latticed terrace. He bowed elaborately.
“Good evening, madame,” he said.
She disappeared. In a moment she came back decisively and mounted the broad steps. He watched her approach with quickened pulses. Twelve years.
“How’s the madam?” he said gallantly as she crossed the porch. “Elizabeth, I was just telling Jannadeau you were the most stylish woman in town.”
“Well, that’s mighty sweet of you, Mr. Gant,” she said in her cool, poised voice. “You’ve always got a good word for everyone.”
She gave a bright pleasant nod to Jannadeau, who swung his huge scowling head ponderously around and muttered at her.
“Why, Elizabeth,” said Gant, “you haven’t changed an inch in fifteen years. I don’t believe you’re a day older.”
She was thirty-eight and cheerfully aware of it.
“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing. “You’re only saying that to make me feel good. I’m no chicken any more.”
She had pale, clear skin, pleasantly freckled, carrot-colored hair, and a thin mouth live with humor. Her figure was trim and strong—no longer young. She had a great deal of energy, distinction and elegance in her manner.
“How are all the girls, Elizabeth?” he asked kindly.
Her face grew sad. She began to pull her gloves off.
“That’s what I came to see you about,” she said. “I lost one of them last week.”
“Yes,” said Gant gravely, “I was sorry to hear of that.”
“She was the best girl I had,” said Elizabeth. “I’d have done anything in the world for her. We did everything we could,” she added. “I’ve no regrets on that score. I had a doctor and two trained nurses by her all the time.”
She opened her black leather handbag, thrust her gloves into it, and pulling out a small blue-bordered handkerchief, began to weep quietly.
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh,” said Gant, shaking his head. “Too bad, too bad, too bad. Come back to my office,” he said. They went back to the dusty little room and sat down. Elizabeth dried her eyes.
“What was her name,” he asked.
“We called her Lily—her full name was Lilian Reed.”
“Why, I knew that girl,” he exclaimed. “I spoke to her not over two weeks ago.” He convinced himself permanently that this was true.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, “she went like that—one hemorrhage after another. Nobody knew she was sick until last Wednesday. Friday she was gone.” She wept again.
“T-t-t-t-t-t,” he clucked regretfully. “Too bad, too bad. She was pretty as a picture.”
“I couldn’t have loved her more, Mr. Gant,” said Elizabeth, “if she had been my own daughter.”
“How old was she?” he asked.
“Twenty-two,” said Elizabeth, beginning to weep again.
“What a pity! What a pity!” he agreed. “Did she have any people?”
“No one who would do anything for her,” Elizabeth said. “Her mother died when she was thirteen—she was born out here on the Beetree Fork—and her father,” she added indignantly, “is a mean old devil who’s never done anything for her or anyone else. He didn’t even come to her funeral.”
“He will be punished,” said Gant darkly.
“As sure as there’s a God in heaven,” Elizabeth agreed, “he’ll get what is coming to him in hell. The dirty old crook!” she continued virtuously, “I hope he rots!”
“You can depend upon it,” he said grimly. “He will. Ah, Lord.” He was silent for a moment while he shook his head with slow regret.
“A pity, a pity,” he muttered. “So young.” He had the moment of triumph all men have when they hear some one has died. A moment, too, of grisly fear—sixty-four.
“I couldn’t have loved her more,” said Elizabeth, “if she had been one of my own. A young girl like that with all her life before her.”
“It’s pretty sad when you come to think of it,” he said. “By God, it is!”
“And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant,” said Elizabeth, weeping softly. “She had such a bright future before her. She had more opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know”—she spoke modestly—“what I’ve done.”
“Why,” he exclaimed, startled, “you’re a rich woman, Elizabeth—damned if I don’t believe you are. You own property all over town.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she answered, “but I’ve enough to live on without ever doing another lick of work. I’ve had to work hard all my life. From now on I don’t intend to turn my hand over.”
She looked at him with a shy, pleased smile, and touched a coil of her fine hair with a small competent hand. He looked at her attentively, noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted hips, moulded compactly into her tailored suit, and her cocked comely legs tapering into graceful feet, shod in neat little slippers of tan. She was firm, strong, washed, and elegant—a faint scent of lilac hovered over her. He looked at her candid eyes, lucently gray, and saw that she was quite a great lady.
“By God, Elizabeth,” he said, “you’re a fine-looking woman!”
“I’ve had a good life,” she said. “I’ve taken care of myself.”
They had always known each other—since first they met. They had no excuses, no questions, no replies. The world fell away from them. In the silence they heard the pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter of bawdry in the square. He took a book of models from the desk and began to turn its slick pages. They showed modest blocks of Georgia marble and Vermont granite.
“I don’t want any of those,” she said impatiently. “I’ve already made up my mind. I know what I want.”
He looked up surprised. “What is it?”
“I want the angel out front.”
His face was startled and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his white elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering in all the wind and rain. Now it was brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily on the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.
In his rages Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel. “Fiend out of hell,” he roared, “you have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death—fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are.”
But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, the name of his first wife, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. There was from the square laughter.
“What’s the matter?” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you want to sell it?”
“It will cost you a good deal of money, Elizabeth,” he said evasively.
“I don’t care,” she answered positively. “I’ve got the money. How much do you want?”
He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood. He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place—it left a barren crater in his heart.
“All right,” he said finally. “You can have it for what I paid for it—four hundred and twenty dollars.”
She took a thick sheaf of bank notes from her purse and counted the money out for him. He pushed it back.
“No. Pay me when the job’s finished and it has been set up. You want some sort of inscription, don’t you?”
“Yes. There’s her full name, age, place of birth, and so on,” she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. “I want some poetry, too—something that suits a young girl taken off like this.”
He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each she shook her head. Finally he said:
