Thomas Wolfe, page 454
“Yes, yes. It’s very good. You will learn fast.”
At these words, the girl, who with the same sullen, aloof, and ashamed look had walked on ahead of her parents, now turned, and cried out in a furious and exasperated tone:
“I tell you, the gentleman knows all that! . . . Will you leave him alone now! . . . You are only making a fool of yourself!”
But the old man and old woman paid no attention to her, but stood looking at the young man with a friendly smile, and shook hands warmly and cordially with him as he said good-bye.
Then he walked on across the tracks and got up into a compartment on the other train. When he looked out the window again, the peasant and his wife were standing on the platform, looking toward him with kind and eager looks on their old faces. When the peasant caught his eye, he pointed his great finger toward the sun again, and called out:
“Le soleil.”
“Le soleil,” the young man answered.
“Yes, yes!” the old man shouted with a laugh. “It’s very good.”
Then the daughter looked toward the young man sullenly, gave a short and impatient laugh of exasperation, and turned angrily away. The train began to move then, but the old man and woman stood looking after him as long as they could. He waved to them, and the old man waved his great hand in answer, and laughing, pointed toward the sun. And the young man nodded his head and shouted, to show that he had understood. Meanwhile, the girl had turned her back with an angry shrug and was walking away around the station.
Then they were lost from sight, the train swiftly left the little town behind, and now there was nothing but the fields, the earth, the smoky and mysterious distances. The rain fell steadily.
[¬]
THE HOUSE OF THE FAR AND LOST
[Scribner’s Magazine, August 1934]
In the fall of that year I lived out about a mile from town in a house set back from the Ventnor Road. The house was called a “farm”—Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that—but it was really no farm at all. It was a magnificent house of the weathered gray stone they have in that country, as if in the very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick gray of time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down forever on you—and enriching everything it touches—grass, foliage, brick, ivy, the fresh moist color of people’s faces, and old gray stone with the incomparable weathering of time.
The house was set back off the road at a distance of several hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by means of a road bordered by rows of tall trees which arched above the road and which made me think of home at night when the stormy wind howled in their tossed branches. On each side of the road were the rugby fields of two of the colleges, and in the afternoon I could look out and down and see the fresh moist green of the playing fields and watch young fellows, dressed in their shorts and jerseys and with their bare knees scurfed with grass and turf, as they twisted, struggled, swayed, and scrambled for a moment in the scrimmage-circle, and then broke free, running, dodging, passing the ball as they were tackled, filling the moist air with their sharp cries of sport. They did not have the desperate, the grimly determined, the almost professional earnestness that the college teams at home have; their scurfed and muddy knees, their swaying scrambling scrimmages, the swift breaking away and running, their panting breath and crisp clear voices gave them the appearance of grown-up boys.
Once when I had come up the road in afternoon while they were playing, the ball got away from them and came bounding out into the road before me, and I ran after it to retrieve it as we used to do when passing a field where boys were playing baseball. One of the players came over to the edge of the field and stood there waiting with his hands upon his hips while I got the ball: he was panting hard, his face was flushed, and his blond hair tousled, but when I threw the ball to him, he said, “Thanks very much!” crisply and courteously—getting the same sound into the word “very” that they got in “American,” a sound that always repelled me a little because it seemed to have some scornful aloofness and patronage in it.
For a moment I watched him as he trotted briskly away on to the field again: the players stood there waiting, panting, casual, their hands upon their hips; he passed the ball into the scrimmage, the pattern swayed, rocked, scrambled, and broke sharply out into open play again, and everything looked incredibly strange, near, and familiar.
I felt that I had always known it, that it had always been mine, and that it was as familiar to me as everything I had seen or known in my childhood. Even the texture of the earth looked familiar, and felt moist and firm and springy when I stepped on it, and the stormy howling of the wind in that avenue of great trees at night was wild and desolate and demented, as it had been when I was eight years old and could lie in my bed at night and hear the great oaks howling on the hill above my father’s house.
The name of the people in the house was Coulson: I made arrangements with the woman at once to come and live there: she was a tall, weathered-looking woman of middle age, we talked together in the hall. The hall was made of marble flags and went directly out onto a graveled walk.
The woman was crisp, cheerful, and worldly-looking. She was still quite handsome. She wore a well-cut skirt of woolen plaid and a silk blouse: when she talked, she kept her arms folded because the air in the hall was chilly, and she held a cigarette in the fingers of one hand. A shaggy brown dog came out and nosed upward toward her hand as she was talking, and she put her hand upon its head and scratched it gently. When I told her I wanted to move in the next day, she said briskly and cheerfully:
“Right you are! You’ll find everything ready when you get here!” She then asked if I was at the university. I said no, and added, with a feeling of difficulty and naked desolation, that I was a “writer” and was coming there to work. I was twenty-four years old.
“Then I am sure that what you do will be very, very good!” she said cheerfully and decisively. “We have had several Americans in the house before, and all of them were very clever! All the Americans we have had here were very clever people,” said the woman. “I’m sure that you will like it.” Then she walked to the door with me to say good-bye. As we stood there, there was the sound of a small motor car coming to a halt, and in a moment a girl came swiftly across the gravel space outside and entered the hall. She was tall, slender, very lovely, but she had the same bright hard look in her eye that the woman had, the same faint, hard smile around the edges of her mouth.
“Edith,” the woman said in her crisp, curiously incisive tone, “this young man is an American—he is coming here tomorrow.” The girl looked at me for a moment, with her hard bright glance, thrust out a small gloved hand, and shook hands briefly, a swift firm greeting.
“Oh! How d’ye do!” she said. “I hope you will like it here.” Then she went on down the hall, entered a room on the left, and closed the door behind her.
Her voice had been crisp and certain like her mother’s, but it was also cool, young, and sweet, with music in it, and later, as I went down the road, I could still hear it.
That was a wonderful house, and the people there were wonderful people. Later, I could not forget them. I seemed to have known them all my life, and to know all about their lives. They seemed as familiar to me as my own blood, and I knew them with a knowledge that went deep below the roots of thought or memory. We did not talk together often, or tell of our lives to one another. It will be very hard to tell about it—the way we felt and lived together in that house—because it was one of those simple and profound experiences of life which people seem always to have known when it happens to them, but for which there is no language.
And yet, like a child’s half-captured vision of some magic country he has known, and which haunts his days with strangeness and the sense of immanent, glorious re-discovery, the word that would unlock it all seems constantly to be almost on our lips, waiting just outside the gateway of our memory, just a shape, a phrase, a sound away the moment that we choose to utter it—but when we try to say the thing, something fades within our mind like fading light, and something melts within our grasp like painted smoke, and something goes forever when we try to touch it. It is the greatest perceiver of moonlight and magic that this earth has known—“For if a man should dream that he had gone to heaven and waking found within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there—ay, and what then?” What then!
The nearest I could come to it was this: In that house I sometimes felt the greatest peace and solitude that I had ever known. But I always knew the other people in the house were there. I could sit in my sitting room at night and hear nothing but the stormy moaning of the wind outside in the great trees, the small gaseous flare and jet from time to time of the coal fire burning in the grate—and silence, strong living lonely silence that moved and waited in the house at night—and I would always know that they were there.
I did not have to hear them enter or go past my door, nor did I have to hear doors close or open in the house, or listen to their voices: if I had never seen them, heard them, spoken to them, it would have been the same—I should have known they were there.
It was something I had always known, and had known it would happen to me, and now it was there with all the strangeness and dark mystery of an awaited thing. I knew them, felt them, lived among them with a familiarity that had no need of sight or word or speech. And the memory of that house and of my silent fellowship with all the people there was somehow mixed with an image of dark time. It was one of those sorrowful and unchanging images which, among all the blazing stream of images that passed constantly their stream of fire across my mind, was somehow fixed, detached, and everlasting, full of sorrow, certitude, and mystery that I could not fathom, but that wore forever on it the old sad light of waning day—a light from which all the heat, the violence, and the substance of furious dusty day had vanished, and was itself like time, unearthly-of-the-earth, remote, detached, and everlasting. For though that image was remote from life, it was essential to it, yet subject to no change and connected to no source of living or event that I could trace.
And that fixed and changeless image of dark time was this: In an old house of time I lived alone, and yet had other people all around me, and they never spoke to me, or I to them. They came and went like silence in the house, but I always knew that they were there. I would be sitting by a window in a room, and I would know then that they were moving in the house, and darkness, sorrow, and strong silence dwelt within us, and our eyes were quiet, full of sorrow, peace, and knowledge, and our faces dark, our tongues silent, and we never spoke. I could not remember how their faces looked, but they were all familiar to me as my father’s face, and we had known one another forever, and we lived together in the ancient house of time, dark time, and silence, sorrow, certitude, and peace were in us. Such was the image of dark time that was to haunt my life thereafter, and into which, somehow, my life among the people of that house had passed.
In the house that year there lived, besides myself and Morison, the Coulsons, the father and mother and their daughter, and three men who had taken rooms together, and who were employed in a factory where motor cars were made, two miles from town.
I think the reason that I could never forget these people later and seemed to know them all so well was that there was in all of them something ruined, lost, or broken—some precious and irretrievable quality which had gone out of them and which they could never get back again. Perhaps that was the reason that I liked them all so much, because with ruined people it is either love or hate: there is no middle way. The ruined people that we like are those who desperately have died, and lost their lives because they loved life dearly, and had that grandeur that makes such people spend prodigally the thing they love the best, and risk and lose their lives because it is so precious to them, and die at length because the seeds of life were in them. It is only the people who love life in this way who die—and these are the ruined people that we like.
The ruined people that we hate are those who died because they hated life and always had the seeds of death within them, and who, when dead, talk fatally and with an evil desperation of the vast land of the earth, but never go into the rain without their rubbers, or paint their corpse up with the hues of life, and try to put their leper’s touch upon the living flesh of man. These are the people who are old and evil, full of cunning and cold caution, who ensnare the heart of youth in death and desperation with false faces of gallantry and who finally risk nothing. These are the ruined people that we hate, for they are dead, yet will not die, and try to spread corruption at the heart of life.
But the people in the house were people who had lost their lives because they loved the earth too well, and somehow had been slain by their hunger. And for this reason I liked them all, and could not forget them later: there seemed to have been some magic that had drawn them all together to the house, as if the house itself was a magnetic center for lost people.
Certainly, the three men who worked at the motor car factory had been drawn together for this reason. Two were still young men in their early twenties. The third man was much older. He was a man past forty, his name was Nicholl, he had served in the army during the war and had attained the rank of captain.
He had the spare, alert, and jaunty figure that one often finds in army men, an almost professional military quality that somehow seemed to set his figure upon a horse as if he had grown there, or had spent a lifetime in the cavalry. His face also had the same lean, bitten, professional military quality: his speech, although good-natured and very friendly, was clipped, incisive, jerky, and sporadic, his lean weather-beaten face was deeply, sharply scarred and sunken in the flanks, and he wore a small cropped mustache, and displayed long frontal teeth when he smiled—a spare, gaunt, toothy, yet attractive smile.
His left arm was withered, shrunken, almost useless, part of his hand and two of the fingers had been torn away by the blast or explosion which had destroyed his arm, but it was not this mutilation of the flesh that gave one the sense of a life that had been mined, lost, and broken irretrievably. In fact, one quickly forgot his physical injury: his figure looked so spare, lean, jaunty, well-conditioned in its energetic fitness that one never thought of him as a cripple, nor pitied him for any disability. No: the ruin that one felt in him was never of the flesh, but of the spirit. Something seemed to have been exploded from his life—it was not the nerve-centers of his arm, but of his soul, that had been destroyed. There was in the man somewhere a terrible dead vacancy and emptiness, and that spare, lean figure that he carried so well seemed only to surround this vacancy like a kind of shell.
He was always smartly dressed in well-cut clothes that set well on his trim spruce figure. He was always in good spirits, immensely friendly in his clipped spare way, and he laughed frequently—a rather metallic cackle which came suddenly and ended as swiftly as it had begun. He seemed, somehow, to have locked the door upon dark care and worry, and to have flung the key away—to have lost, at the same time that he lost more precious things, all the fretful doubts and perturbations of the conscience most men know.
Now, in fact, he seemed to have only one serious project in his life. This was to keep himself amused, to keep himself constantly amused, to get from his life somehow the last atom of entertainment it could possibly yield, and in this project the two young men who lived with him joined in with an energy and earnestness which suggested that their employment in the motor car factory was just a necessary evil which must be borne patiently because it yielded them the means with which to carry on a more important business, the only one in which their lives were interested—the pursuit of pleasure.
And in the way in which they conducted this pursuit, there was an element of deliberate calculation, concentrated earnestness, and focal intensity of purpose that was astounding, grotesque, and unbelievable, and that left in the mind of one who saw it a formidable and disquieting memory because there was in it almost the madness of desperation, the deliberate intent of men to cover up or seek oblivion at any cost of effort from some hideous emptiness of soul.
Captain Nicholl and his two young companions had a little motor car so small that it scuttled up the road, shot around and stopped in the gravel by the door with the abruptness of a wound-up toy. It was astonishing that three men could wedge themselves into this midget of a car, but wedge themselves they did, and used it to the end of its capacity, scuttling away to work in it in the morning, and scuttling back again when work was done, and scuttling away to London every Saturday, as if they were determined to wrest from this small motor, too, the last ounce of pleasure to be got from it.
Finally, Captain Nicholl and his two companions had made up an orchestra among them, and this they played in every night when they got home. One of the young men, who was a tall fellow with blond hair which went back in even corrugated waves across his head as if it had been marcelled, played the piano, the other, who was slight and dark, and had black hair, performed upon a saxophone, and Captain Nicholl himself took turns at thrumming furiously on a banjo, or rattling a tattoo upon the complex arrangement of trap drums, bass drums, and clashing cymbals that surrounded him.
They played nothing but American jazz music or sobbing crooners’ rhapsodies or nigger blues. Their performance was astonishing. Although it was contrived solely for their own amusement, they hurled themselves into it with all the industrious earnestness of professional musicians employed by a night-club or a dance hall to furnish dance music for the patrons. The little dark fellow who played the saxophone would bend and weave prayerfully with his grotesque instrument, as the fat gloating notes came from its unctuous throat, and from time to time he would sway in a half circle, or get up and prance forward and back in rhythm to the music as the saxophone players in dance orchestras sometimes do.
