Thomas Wolfe, page 447
His figure was tall, thin, almost fragile, and the nervous, almost convulsive, quickness of his movements also suggested the enforced and tortured control of the habitual alcoholic. He was always neatly and carefully dressed in garments which were not gaudy but which showed a rather provincial and local taste in favor of colored sox, tan shoes, shirts and neckties moderately striped, tie-clasps, engraved belt buckles, and elegant-looking watch fobs.
He smoked cigarettes constantly, but with a kind of deep-drawn langourous inhalation that I had noticed a thousand times in the small-town South Carolinian, and which was one of the most agreeable things on earth to watch, and which gave a kind of rare sensual quality even to the most common men of that region, beside which the middle-westerner, for instance, would seem flat, colorless and rather dreary. It evoked a powerful sensuous image of an easy-going pleasure-loving race who were able to draw ease, luxury, and delight from the most common and uncostly pleasures of the earth, and to touch every familiar act and experience of life, food, tobacco, drinking, going on a journey or to a baseball game, or sitting on a porch step talking to one of their slow-tongued sweet-voiced women with a brooding, sultry, entrail-stirring prophecy of exultant joy.
In addition to this, McKeithan had the infinitely engaging and agreeable tone and manner of these people: the soft, low-toned friendly voice, the natural grace and easiness of manner, the instinctive desire for warm, friendly and happy relations with people, the native, almost excusable, hypocrisy of agreeableness which marks the Southerner, and the sudden, genial, deep-toned laugh of good-natured friendliness.
It was an image of the natural sensuous man as warm, engaging and attractive as anything on earth could be, if one could have found the same complement of warmth, freedom, friendliness and natural vigor in the soul. But one rarely found that dual triumph in these people: behind its warmly colored and attractive tenement of flesh, the soul looked out warped, mutilated, full of fear, ignorance, cruelty, superstition and mistrust.
And so it was with McKeithan. Even as he laughed his sudden, warm, deep-noted laugh, and spoke in his agreeable low voice to you, his inflamed and reddened eyes were looking at you all the time with an ugly, sullen, furious and distempered look, in which all the blind distempered hatred of his mutilated soul was packed. Yet no one could pluck out the heart of this mystery. We did not know the reason for this poisonous hatred of the soul in which his life was drowning, and though he saw it, felt it, lived it hideously with every anguished breath he drew, it is certain he did not know the cause or remedy himself.
Now I could hear his right foot doing it’s devil’s jig upon the porch, and I knew that he was crossing and uncrossing his thin legs rapidly and convulsively in an effort to check the dissonant almost epileptic jerking of his limbs, and that his head was craning, jerking, and grimacing over the edges of his collar like a man suffering from some uncontrollable disease of the facial nerves, and that there was nothing constant but the blind, sweltering, and implacable hatred in his inflamed red eyes.
What was it? What was the reason for that terrible distemper of the spirit, that maddened fury and unrest of soul that was so different from my father’s since it seemed to work like poison in the blood, to have no name or aim or reason in its blind unarguable insanity of hate? What had caused the horrible dissonance of nerves, brain, heart, mind, spirit in this man which had already wrecked his life and within another year would utterly destroy him. For, one morning eight months later while lying in the lower berth of a Pullman coming south from Washington—whither he had gone and been rejected in a final fruitless effort to enlist for active service in the army—he shot himself through the brain, dying as he had lived, a ruined, lost, and desperate man, with the reason for his life’s grief and error unknown.
Later, I could not forget the man. The memory of his life and death, and the fury of blind brainless hatred that could blaze so suddenly from his reddened eyes would return to haunt my spirit with a wordless pity and regret. The man’s life must have been one agony of living hell—a hell from which no one on earth could save him, and from which he had no power to save himself. And curiously, although I never knew the reason for the cancerous poison of the soul that was destroying him, I seemed to understand its nature thoroughly. For I had felt its sweltering corrosions in myself, and seen it in a thousand other men.
And for this reason I could not forget him. For, although part of the distempered weather of his life, the moroseness, mistrust, and sudden taking of offense when no offense had been intended, was traceable to his constant saturation in the fatal anodyne of alcohol—a saturation so complete that it never rose to open drunkenness and never knew a cleansing interval of sobriety—that enslavement was itself not the cause of the destroying malady, but one of the results.
Moreover, I had seen all the elements of that disease—the lacerated, swiftly-wounded pride, the sudden blind hostility, the stubborn, ugly and dogmatic prejudice, the truculent flaring-up in face of an imagined injury, the wild, blind, maddened hatreds of the soul—in a thousand other Southern men, and particularly in those who came, as did McKeithan, from a region where cruelty, fear and ignorance were rooted in the structure of man’s life, where the free play and exploration of man’s spirit was warped and mutilated from his birth, and where the only alternative to the unquestioning and utter conformity that was demanded to the dogmas of that life, no matter how cruel, superstitious and degrading they might be, was exile, bitter and dishonored loneliness, or death.
Thus, in the eyes of a thousand other men from those same regions, of whom McKeithan might have been the brother, so much was he their true type in look, in soft-toned and agreeable speech, in natural kindliness, friendliness, warmth and grace of manner, I had seen that same look of blind, ugly, reasonless and distempered hate. It seemed to come from something fierce and lonely in their lives, from something so foully poisoned and grievously lacerated that their lives had become one incurable running wound of passionate bitterness and disgust, one maddened grievance of complaint against an insult, injury and injustice for which they had no words.
Thus, I knew that McKeithan was now sitting in the darkness on the porch, choking with feelings of hatred, revenge, and insulted pride, all because my father had made a simple reference to the old Hayes-Tilden controversy. And by this time, also, although in what way he could himself not have determined, that simple reference to Hayes and Tilden had become so poisonously enlarged and translated in McKeithan’s maddened brain that he had now read into it an insult implied or intended for himself, so that he now found some sneer at his judgment, some intolerable insult to his dignity and pride, in any word of simple disagreement.
And now the madness of blind hate had so possessed him that he sat there in the darkness drowning in his venom, doing his devil’s jig upon the floor with one frantic foot, jerking and twitching like the victim of an epileptic fit, smiling convulsively, and bursting from time to time into an ugly jeering laugh from which every vestige of good nature had vanished, as he read into every word my father, Mr. Helm or anyone else now said, a sneer or insult intended for himself.
In the same way, the man had suddenly begun to hate me one night in winter two years before, although I was only a boy of fourteen years at that time, and had never done or intended to do him any injury. We had been sitting round the table in the dining room one Sunday night in February, and my father, who had been talking about Gladstone, now quoted one of his favorite sayings: that Gladstone, on being asked by a foreigner the population of England, had answered: “About fifteen million, mostly fools.”
For some reason, probably because I had for the first time that winter read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this suggested to me the famous utterance of Puck—“Lord! What fools these mortals be!”
When this happened, Mr. McKeithan, who had been eating in silence, smiling bitterly and morosely to himself while he ate, now broke into an ugly jeering laugh, and said:
“Yes, and some of the fools are sitting not very far away from me right now!”
Then, even as we stared at the man in gape-mouthed stupefaction, he suddenly hurled his knife and fork down on the table, pushed back his chair violently, leaped to his feet, and glaring across the table at me, he cried in a shaking voice:—
“You—you—you—damned fellow, you!—I’m not going to stand for your insults any longer!”
And suddenly he rushed around the table towards me, his face livid and convulsed, his eyes blood-shot and blind with hate. I jumped to my feet, badly shocked and frightened by his unprovoked and reasonless assault. As I did so, the man rushed on me and struck out at me with his opened hands, a clumsy and feeble blow that did me no harm but that sent me back a foot or two. I hit back at him from a kind of instinct and my blow was harder and more solid—it caught him on the breast and sent him staggering back.
A wretched and degraded scene had then occurred which even at that time, with all the excitement and anger that I felt, had seemed shameful to me, and which later I could not forget. For, although even at that time I had been bigger and stronger than the man, and better able to defend myself, I had felt so powerfully the contaminating shame of his act, the naked ruin in his life that had made him so forget his manhood as to come to blows with a boy of fourteen years, who had never done him any injury, that I could hardly bear to look at him.
And at the same time I felt a horrible and nauseous sickness as if that poisonous and morbid disease of his own nerves, the huge infection of his own life, had somehow tainted all the wholesome tissues of my life and spirit, so that suddenly the lights turned dull and wretched like a smear of blood, and for a moment I seemed to have the thick brown taste of blood and shame and loathing in my mouth.
The man had stood there, mad with fear and rage and shame, knowing that he had now irrevocably stripped bare to our gaze of horror the festering sore of his life. Stripped of the last rag of concealment, he now railed wildly, miserably, at all of us, trembling in every limb as if he had the palsy, and shouting at us accusations of insults and injuries we had never done to him in a voice that shook, faltered, gasped and choked and was finally almost incoherent:
“This—this—this—fellow!” he panted, pointing a shaking finger at me. “Ever since I came here—it’s been one thing after another—I’ve taken as much as I can stand from this—this—this—damned boy—”
And finally, we had said nothing to him, but had just stood looking at him, silent and full of a horrible anguish of regret and shame until he had gasped himself to silence. During all the time the man had railed at us, my mother had stood solidly, quietly, her strong worn hands clasped at her waist in their powerful loose gesture, her powerful and delicate mouth puckered in an expression of strong revulsion and concern.
When he had finished, she said nothing, but just looked at him quietly for a moment, shaking her head silently and slightly from side to side in a movement of powerful and spontaneous regret. That natural, simple, and wordless gesture had suddenly overwhelmed the man with the shame and despair as no words of anger or reproach could do. He had stared at my mother for a moment with his inflamed eyes and trembling speechless lips, and suddenly had turned with a scream of pain like the cry of a tortured animal, and had rushed out of the room and up the stairs, shouting:
“I’ll not put up with any more of it. . . . I’m going to leave—do you hear?”
Within fifteen minutes he had come down again carrying a valise packed with his few belongings, had spoken quietly to her and paid his bill, and then had gone. Three months later he came back to us again. He never spoke to any of us about the quarrel, and none of us spoke to him about it. The elements of shame and pity made us silent. After that, his manner towards me was as kind, friendly, and good-natured as anyone’s could be. But when he looked at me his reddened eyes were full of the blind unreasoning hatred. It was the hatred of a man who knows the hatred that exposed him had no reason, and who hates more bitterly on that account.
Now, I knew, he was sitting there in the darkness, completely out of reason, choked with hate, sweltering in corroding meditation of his imagined wrongs. It is doubtful if he was any longer able to pay attention to what was being said by the other people. Rather, he sat there brewing in his own poison, with twitching limbs and a convulsed and livid face, hearing from time to time a random word or phrase, muttering “Yeah” from time to time and laughing to himself an ugly jeering laugh.
Now I could hear my father’s voice again. Less annoyed by argument, to which he paid no attention anyway, than by the interruption, he now cleared his throat and said in a tone of almost comic patience and long-suffering resignation:
“Well—am I to be allowed to speak, or not—or must I always be interrupted when I start?”
Several of the boarders could now be heard hitching their chairs around eagerly, and murmuring hastily, as if there was an enormous passive vacancy in their own lives, forever famished and unfed, and waiting to be filled: “No, go on, go on. We want to hear about it.” Then I could hear old Mr. Helm’s guttural voice speaking in tones of chiding reproof, as he ponderously defended the inviolable right to speech of his hero:
“Den you should all keep k’viet und not interrupt,” he said severely. “Dere are t’ings de rest of you don’t know aboud.”
“All right! All right!” said Mr. McKeithan, laughing his full sudden hearty laugh of false good-nature. “No one’s stopping you! Go on!”
“Well, as I say,” my father said then, clearing his throat and wetting his great thumb briefly on his mouth, “the first vote that I cast was for U. S. Grant in 1872, I voted for Hayes in 1876, in 1880 I cast my vote for James Abram Garfield—that great good man,” he passionately declared, “that martyred hero who was so foully and brutally done to death by the cowardly assault of a murderous assasin!”
“You’re sure it wasn’t a Democrat who murdered him?” said McKeithan with his full, false, ugly laugh.
“He did not say it vas a Democrat,” said Mr. Helm heavily.
“No, but I thought it was only the Democrats who committed crimes,” McKeithan answered. “When anything good gets done it’s always done by the Republicans. Isn’t that right?” He laughed jeeringly again and relapsed bitterly and sullenly into the huge self-poison that was drowning him.
My father breathed heavily and impatiently, like a locomotive checked in its full course until some obstacle that lay across the rails had been removed. Then he cleared his throat, wet his thumb, lunged forward in his rocking chair and spat, and went on without paying any further attention to his heckler.
“In 1884,” he said, “I cast my vote for James G. Blaine in the year that Grover Cleveland defeated him—”
“Something must have been wrong that time,” McKeithan said now with an ugly laugh. “That was the time the Democrats got in. That time doesn’t count.”
“They got in,” my father answered shortly, “because Blaine let Burchard’s ‘Rum Romanism and Rebellion’ speech go unchallenged. It was a fatal error, if ever there was one! It turned the Roman Catholic vote against him like a flash. And that was the thing that defeated him. But he’d have been elected by a big majority had it not been for that speech! You can rest assured of that!” my father said, and spat.
“I voted for Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and for Harrison again in 1892—the time that Cleveland got in for his second term—”
“Ah—hah,” said McKeithan ironically and then laughed his false and ugly laugh again. “What went wrong that time?”
“Everything,” my father answered curtly, “as anyone who was alive then and remembers it could tell you. That was a time we will remember to our dying days,” he went on grimly. “Business went to smash, the banks were going to the wall—”
“Ja,” said Mr. Helm, “I gan remember dat: de banks are glosing all around us—de people are all frightened und dey make a run on us—dey come pooshing in like dey vas crazy—‘Vere iss my money?’—ve gif it to dem—ve are vaiting in de cage mit shtacks of it dat high,” he added, indicating its height with a comical gesture of his pudgy hands. “It last for free days und den dey go avay. Ve vere too shtrong for dem,” he concluded proudly. “But dat vas a bad time!”
“A fearful time!” my father said. “There was no work, no business, no money, and no nothing, for the Democrats were in and we had soup-kitchens. . . . And you can mark my words,” he howled suddenly, “you’ll have them again, before these next four years are over—your guts will grease your back-bone as sure as there’s a God in heaven before that fearful, that awful, that cruel, inhuman and blood-thirsty monster—who kept us out of war”—he snarled bitterly—“is done with you! For hell, ruin, misery, and damnation commences every time the Democrats get in. You can rest assured of that!” he said, and breathing heavily with excitement he lunged forward in his chair and spat and then rocked violently for a moment, his great hands gripped hard on the arms of the rocking chair.
“Oh, here, here, here! Papa, for heaven’s sake!”—for the first time now I could hear my sister’s voice, speaking to him quietly, wearily humorous, with patient and tolerant reproof. She had been married just the year before, and that summer, after a year’s absence, she and her husband had returned home to live, to keep life in my father while she could.
“You mustn’t talk that way!” she said quietly, laughing. “He’s just the same as everybody else, and trying to do the best he can—even if he is a Democrat. Besides,” she now said warningly, almost angrily, “you can’t afford to talk that way! You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you don’t look out! That talk was all right a year ago, but, good heavens, Papa!”—she now cried with a furious impatience—“this country’s at war now! Can’t you realize that? We’re not a neutral nation any longer. You’ve already got one son in the navy and before it’s over the rest of them may have to join up, too. If people hear you say these things they’ll think you’re pro-German!”
