Thomas Wolfe, page 446
Then, on the face of an old dead prophet or philosopher there would live and would not die the immortality of proud, dark, lonely Thought. We could not say just where that spirit rested. Sometimes it would seem to rest upon the temples of the grand and lonely head. Sometimes we would think it was a kind of darkness in the shadows of the closed and sunken eyes, sometimes the marsh fire of a dark and lambent flame that hovered round the face, that never could be fixed, but that we always knew was there.
And just as poet, prophet, priest, and conqueror each might retain in death some living and fitting image of his whole life’s truth, so would the strength, the skill, all of the hope, hunger, fury, and unrest that had lashed and driven on through life the gaunt figure of a stonecutter be marvellously preserved in the granite power and symmetry of those undying hands.
Moreover, in the unwearied and even ravenous interest with which my father heard every repetition of old Mr. Helm’s account of the greatness of his bank, and the generosity and benevolence of the officials who directed it, there was evident all of the savage hunger, interest, and delight of a man who loves life dearly, and holds to it fiercely with a bitter hug.
It was the same with everything my father did. Everything that he had found good in life gained and flourished in repeating. His powerful relish for all the joyful, adventurous, warlike, savage, strange and fiercely living acts and histories of life was as strong and sharp as his appetite for food and drink. He could no more have grown tired of a story which had once delighted and interested him than he could have discarded his favorite dishes on the ground that he had been familiar with them since his boyhood, and had now, accordingly, grown weary of them. The reason for discarding one would have seemed as absurd and foolish as the reason for discarding the other.
It will be found that this is true of all men who have loved life fiercely, had the richest and most interesting lives, and have enjoyed life best. For it is only the living man who does not stale of life and its familiar uses; it is always the sterile man who turns life dead. The complaint of tedium, the sneering charge of dulness, the charge of weariness with what was once found good, but now has grown stale through repetition, is the lament of people who themselves were born tedious, weary, stale and dull as hell out of their mothers’ wombs.
These are the living dead of life and their dismal legions swarm across the earth, and spread the grey infection of their hopeless taint at all the living roots of joy. Their eyes are lustreless and old, their veins flow slowly with a pale and viscous liquid like embalming fluid, and they have never known innocence, exultancy or joy.
For them all living things on earth turn to a substance of grey ashes in the mouth, and nothing can be done to help them. For them, there is no joy, no hunger, and no savor on the earth. Surfeited from the cradle, jaded even in the loins that wearily begot them, they hate their lives and every living thing on earth with the hatred of their death and impotence.
Nothing is theirs, therefore, but style and newness turning old the moment that they touch it. If they are poor they swarm greyly, wearily along the obscene avenues of night where lights are, seeking constantly about with dead hard eyes and the harsh clamour of their sterile, strident and exacerbated tongues. And if they are rich they sauce up their funeral meats in a quaint and curious realm of pederasts, lesbians, prizefighters, Negro barytones, bicycle riders, jolly old opium eaters and precious kept and sensitively refined young men from the yearning nuances of the art-theatre.
At length, no doubt, this precious and most weary crew submits to the superfetation of death, and the finial anachronism of embalming, and are motored to swift burials and at once forgot.
The living man, however, is never weary of an ancient joy, nor does he sneer at an old magic because he once has known it. Rather, he seeks out constantly the plain, priceless, and uncostly glory of the earth, and knows that there is nothing better. In all his fury, hunger, and unrest, his voyages to strange lands, his constant searching through the streets of life, there is forever the thought of return, the hope of discovery. In such a man there burns forever the belief that all will be again for him as it was once, and that the whole earth will again come instantly to life for him in all the hues of its familiar joy and magic.
The Greeks, one of the more loving, wise, and joyful peoples of the earth, recognized the truth of this with, “Dis a tris tail kala” (The good things are worth trying two or three times). But the man who loves life knows that they could have added: “And if you are a living man and find them good you will not weary of them if you try them twenty thousand times.”
Homer did not grow weary of the siege of Troy and of the heroes of that war, although he must have heard the story told by many men. Neither, having looked upon that sea and known its color, was he ashamed to repeat a thousand times that it was “wine-dark”; nor did any living man grow weary when he told him so.
So was it with my father. Just as I had heard him tell a thousand times of old wars and battles and the thousand scenes and stories of a past which he had known and lived, just as I had heard him speak, as now, a thousand times, of the strange lost moments of dark time, of vanished faces, of lost men, of “Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes,” so had I never grown weary of these stories, nor of the way in which he told them, the soaring rhetoric and the familiar epithet, the design that grew, enlarged, and enriched itself forever, but was woven from the old familiar thread of joy.
For my father with his fierce exultant love of life could make the lost world and the buried life that he had known live for me as no one else on earth could do. And because my father had this power and love of life in him, his delight in hearing such stories as old Mr. Helm told to him about his bank was insatiable. So far from ever growing tired of them, he derived constantly a deeper and greater satisfaction from each telling, looking around at all of us with a kind of triumphant satisfaction as he heard the familiar words, as if to say, “You see? What did I tell you?”—even when he had heard the story told unnumbered times—holding his great leathery ear cocked to one side, as he bent forward in an attitude of ravenous attention, and when the story had been told, looking around at all of us with a thin grin of satisfaction, and a slow hoarse almost unwilling chuckle, as he spat strongly, lunged back violently in his chair, wet his great thumb briefly on his tongue, and made an indefinable noise in his throat that sounded like “E’ God!”
So had it always been. Now, at the beginning of this first summer of the war, old Mr. Helm had come back again, and now there were new marvels to be added to that old familiar tale. For this year, just the month before, in fact, Mr. Helm, having reached his seventieth birthday and having completed more than forty years of service to his beloved bank, had given in his resignation and prepared to retire to the old age of modest comfort which his savings would enable him to enjoy.
Then, what a leave-taking there had been! What a triumph of farewell and felicitation, joy and sorrow, happiness and regret! On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, which was also the day the old man’s resignation took effect, the officials of the bank had given such a banquet in his honor as had never been known before even in the annals of that glorious institution. Not only all the great officials of the bank were there, and the whole personnel down to the last remotest teller, but the most prominent people in the city’s life had been invited, and were there in all their stiff white-shirted glory.
The mayor had made a speech of eloquent congratulation, the cashier who was succeeding Mr. Helm had spoken on behalf of employes, and had told of the position of esteem and affection the old man had won in the hearts of all who had known him and worked with him. Finally, “he,” the great man himself, seated at the right hand of the guest of honor, had got up and paid such a tribute to the qualities of his departing servant as no one there had ever heard before. The president had spoken with a simple depth and earnestness of feeling of the “bank’s great loss,” of the place left vacant “in our hearts which no one else can ever fill,” and of the honor and respect in which the old man was held by all who had known him “and come to love him as we do.” When he had finished, there was not a dry eye left among them, and the old man himself had been so overcome that he was unable to respond.
“It vas not like a sbeech,” said old man Helm. “He dit not stand beseit me—he come und stand behind me—he talk to me chust like I talk to you—he call me ‘Fritz’—he put his hants upon my shoulters vile he talked like dis—so!” he said, unsteadily stretching his hands before him for a moment—“He say, ‘Fritz: no matter vere you go—no matter vat you do—I vant you to know dat our hearts go mit you. . . . Some of us,’ he say, ‘who vere younk men ven you first came to de bank are now grey-haired mit grand-chiltren of our own. . . . Some of us dat you see here aroundt you to-night vere not efen born ven you first came here. But younk or olt, our hearts are mit you to a man—you haf been more dan an associate, more dan an employe, more dan some-vun ve haf vorked mit und learnt to honor und respect—You haf been more like de fader of our family—a brudder und a friendt. . . . Und so,’ he say, ‘Fritz, olt friendt, God bless you und keep you verefer you are . . . in eferyting you do. . . . Our hearts go mit you und you leaf a blace dat no vun else can efer fill.’”
Mr. Helm paused a moment, checked by the powerful swelling flood of his own feeling, and in the silence my father cleared his throat a little huskily, straightened gauntly in his chair, wet his great thumb briefly, and muttered: “Ah, Lord!”
“Den he gif to me,” the old man went on quietly in a moment, “a check for five hundert dollars . . . ja!”—his voice rose strongly with an emphasis of passion—“five hundert dollars! . . . A bresent dat dey make to me dis time because dey know I go for good! . . . Und de odders gif to me a luffing-cup . . . und efery month of my life now, as lonk as I lif,—it comes to me a pension of two hundert dollars—and if I die—if I should be de first to go,” he went on in a shaking voice, “den de pension comes to Else just de same.”
He stopped, and in the darkness I could hear the hungry feeding silence of the boarders, and in a moment heard my father come back sharply in his chair, spit hard and wide, clear his throat and say:
“Ah, Lord! That was a noble act! It does you good to hear it! It goes to show that all mercy, justice, truth, and honor is not dead on earth. It was ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant!’ with a vengeance! That’s what it was, all right!” And savagely he cleared his throat again, lunged forward in his chair and spat across the rail, lunged back, and in the darkness I could feel the boarders waiting.
“Ja,” said Mr. Helm, quietly, with a tranquil certitude, “dat vas it. All my life I haf been faithful to dem—und dey vere fine to me! If you are faithful all goes vell,” he said, and silent for a moment, he lifted his cigar to tranquil lips and smoked.
“I vork for dem for ofer forty years,” he said. “Ven I go dere first it vas de time ven Hayes vas Bresident. . . . Dot vas a lonk lonk time ago,” said old man Helm, and smoked.
“Ah, Lord!” my father answered gravely. “That it was! A long, long time! And well do I remember!”
He lunged forward in his chair again and spat strongly, cleanly out across the rail into the dark geranium bed, and the boarders waited. Then, for a moment, there was nothing but the brooding silence of cool, lilac and deep-breasted night, a woman’s laughter welling soft and low and sensual from the darkness of a summer porch, and somewhere far away a motor starting, racing and receding into night’s dark and secret heart, then silence, mystery, and the earth again.
That was the year the war came.
—
Then, as the boarders waited, my father spoke again of the old times, the vanished faces, the lost men. He spoke of all the wars and troubles he had known, told how he had stood, “a barefoot country boy,” beside a dusty road twelve miles from Gettysburg, and had watched the dusty ragged rebels march past upon the road that led to death and battle and the shipwreck of their hopes.
He spoke of the faint and ominous trembling of the guns across the hot and brooding silence of the countryside, and how silence, wonder, and unspoken questions filled the hearts of all the people, and how they had gone about their work upon the farm as usual. He spoke of the years that followed on the war when he was a stonecutter’s apprentice in Baltimore, and he spoke of ancient joys and labors, forgotten acts and histories, and he spoke then with familiar memory of the lost Americans——
My father spoke then of the strange, lost, time-far, dead Americans, the remote, voiceless, and bewhiskered faces of the great Americans, who were more lost to me than Egypt, more far from me than the Tartarian coasts, more haunting strange than Cipango or the lost faces of the first dynastic kings that built the Pyramids—whom he had seen, heard, known, found familiar in the full pulse and passion and proud glory of his terrific youth. My father spoke of the lost, time-far, voiceless faces of Buchanan, Johnson, Douglas, Tilden, Blaine—the proud, vacant, time-strange, and bewhiskered visages of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes.
“Ah, Lord!” he said—his voice went out in darkness like a gong. “Ah, Lord!—I’ve known all of ’em since James Buchanan’s time—for I was a boy of six when he took office!”
Here he paused a moment, lunged forward violently in his rocking chair, and spat cleanly out a spurt of strong tobacco juice across the porch-rail into the loamy earth, the night-sweet fragrance of the geranium beds.
“Yes, sir,” he said gravely, lunging back again, while the attentive, hungry boarders waited in the living darkness and were still—“I remember all of them since James Buchanan’s time, and I’ve seen most of them that came since Lincoln’s day! Ah, Lord!”—he paused briefly for another waiting moment, shaking his grave head sadly in the dark—“Well do I remember the day when I stood on a street in Baltimore—poor friendless orphan that I was!” my father went on sorrowfully, but somewhat imprecisely since, at the time he mentioned, his mother was alive and in good health, upon her little farm in Pennsylvania, and would continue so for almost fifty years—“a poor friendless country boy of sixteen years, alone in the great city where I had come to learn my trade as an apprentice—and heard Andrew Johnson, then the president of this great nation,” said my father, “speak from the platform of a horse-car—and he was so drunk—so drunk!”—he howled—“the president of this country was so drunk that they had to stand on both sides of him and prop him up—or he’d a-gone head over heels into the gutter!”
Here he paused, wet his great thumb briefly, cleared his throat with considerable satisfaction, lunged forward violently again in his rocking chair and spat cleanly, strongly forth a wad of bright tobacco juice into the loamy fragrance of the dark geranium bed.
“The first vote I ever cast for president,” my father continued presently, as he lunged back again, “I cast in eighteen hundred and seventy-two, in Baltimore, for that great man—that brave and noble soldier—U. S. Grant!”
“Ja!” said Mr. Helm, nodding vigorously. “I vote for him dat time! Dot vas de first time dot I vote! Ven I come from Chermany dere vas de var, und den I could not vote.”
“And I have voted for every Republican nominee for president ever since,” my father said. “I voted for Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio in 1876—that was the year, as you well know, of the great Hayes-Tilden controversy.”
“Controversy, was it?” said McKeithan, the jeweller’s assistant, good-naturedly enough, but with an evident undertone of cynical disparagement. “You can call it controversy if you like, but some people call it highway robbery.”
My father, impatient with the interruption, cleared his throat loudly and rapidly, rocked violently back and forth in his chair, breathing heavily, made no answer.
“Now I don’t care what you say—that man got elected,” said McKeithan stubbornly, but with an appearance of good nature through which, however, the ugly truculence of his distempered spirit showed furious, bare, and ugly. “Yes, sir!” he declared with an obstinate finality, bringing his feet down from the porch rail to the porch in a sudden, nervous, almost furious movement of distemper, although he still maintained his strained pretense of hearty amiability. “By rights, he should have been the president of this country, but the Republicans cheated him out of it!”
My father cleared his throat, hitched impatiently in his chair, wet his thumb, and said shortly: “Me was defeated by Hayes, who was given a majority of one vote by the electoral commission—all of which is provided for under the terms of the Federal Constitution.”
Mr. Helm nodded his head slowly with the devoted affirmation he gave to all of my father’s opinions. “Ja,” he said. “Dot iss righd! I gan remember.”
“I don’t care what you can remember,” said McKeithan, laughing and shaking his head rapidly as he stared downward at the floor with the ugly brainless obstinacy of the provincial Southerner. The note of fury and distemper in his voice was more naked, plain and ugly now than it had been before. “All I say is that they cheated that man out of his election after he’d won it fair and square.”
Then he laughed again, his sudden full agreeable laugh of South Carolina good nature that had in it something ugly, false, and shameful because it came so quick and palpably to cover up the image of the naked and malevolent hatred that sweltered in him and that blazed furiously out of his watery red eyes even as he laughed.
He was a man in his late thirties, but his black abundant hair, which he parted in the middle, was already coarsely and heavily streaked with grey. He had sharply defined, but rather generous and pleasant-looking features. It was a thin, seamed, nervous-looking face, marked strongly with the quick, thin, febrile, hotly sensitive alertness of the Southerner, and yet rather agreeable and engaging, save for the over-developed rocky muscularity of the jaw muscles, which writhed and twisted almost constantly, suggesting unpleasantly the desperate and tenuous effort at control of a man who is suffering from a whole hell of jangled, gnarled and abscessed nerves which may twist out of his grasp at any moment.
