Thomas Wolfe, page 466
Again: your coward’s heart of fear and hate, the coward’s lust for one-way killing, murder without danger to himself, the rat’s salvation from the shipwreck of his self-esteem—armed with a gun now, clothed in khaki, riding the horse of his authority—as here:—Three boys, himself among them, all employed by the contracting company, are walking after supper on the borders of the flying field in the waning light of the evening, coming dark. They are walking down near the water’s edge, across the flat marshy land, they are talking about their homes, the towns and cities they have known and come from, their colleges and schools, their plans for an excursion to the beach at the week-end, when they draw their pay. Without knowing it, they have approached a hangar where one of the new war-planes with which the government has been experimenting has been housed. Suddenly, the soldier who is there on guard has seen them, advances on them now, one hand upon the revolver in his holster, his little furtive eyes narrowed into slits. Face of the city rat, dry, gray, furtive, pustulate, the tallowy lips, the rasping voice, the scrabble of a few sharp oaths, the stony gravel of a sterile, lifeless speech:
“What are ya doin’ here ya f—— little bastards!—Who told ya to come f—— round duh hangah?”
One of the boys, a chubby red-cheeked youngster from the lower South, fair-haired, blue-eyed, friendly and slow of speech, attempts to answer:
“Why, mister, we just thought—”
Quick as a flash, the rat has slapped the boy across the mouth; the filthy tlps have left their mottled print upon the boy’s red cheek, have left their loathsome, foul, and ineradicable print upon the visage of his soul forever:
“I don’t give a f—— what ya t’ought, ya little p——! Annudeh woid outa ya f—— trap an’ I’ll shoot the s—— outa ya!” He has the gun out of its holster now, ready in his hand; the eyes of the three boys are riveted on the dull reptilian wink of its blue barrel with a single focal intensity of numb horror, fascinated disbelief.
“Now get t’ f—— hell outa here!” the hero cries, giving the boy he has just slapped a violent shove with his free hand. “Get the f—— hell away from heah, all t’ree of youse! Don’t f—— around’ wit’ me, ya little p——,” the great man snarls now, eyes a-glitter, narrow as a snake’s, as he comes forward with deadly menace written on his face. “Annudeh woid outa ya f—— traps, an’ I’ll shoot t’ s—— outa youse! On yuh way, now, ya p——. Get t’ hell away from me befoeh I plug ya!”
And the three boys, stunned, bewildered, filled with shame, and sickened out of all the joy and hope with which they had been speaking of their projects just a moment before, have turned, and are walking silently away with the dull shame, the brutal and corrosive hatred which the war has caused, aching and rankling in their hearts.
Again, an image of man’s naked desire, brutal and imperative, stripped down to his raw need, savage and incurious as the harsh need of a starved hunger which takes and rends whatever food it finds—as here: Over the bridge, across the railway track, down in the Negro settlement of Newport News—among the dives and stews and rusty tenements of that grimy, dreary, and abominable section, a rude shack of unpainted pine boards, thrown together with the savage haste which war engenders, to pander to a need as savage and insatiate as hunger, as old as life, the need of friendless, unhoused, lonely men the world over.
The front part of this rawly new, yet squalid place, has been partitioned off by rude pine boards to form the semblance of a lunch room and soft-drink parlor. Within are several tables furnished with a few fly-specked menu cards, on which half a dozen items are recorded, and at which none of the patrons ever look, and a wooden counter, with its dreary stage property of luke-warm soda pop, a few packages of cigarettes, and a box of cheap cigars beneath a dingy little glass case; and beneath a greasy glass humidor, a few stale ham and cheese sandwiches, which have been there since the place opened, which will be there till the war is done.
Meanwhile, all through the room, the whores, in their thin, meager mummers, act as waitresses, move patiently about among the crowded tables and ply their trade. The men, who are seated at the tables, belong for the most part to that great group of unclassed creatures who drift and float, work, drift, and starve, are now in jail, now out again, now foul, filthy, wretched, hungry, out of luck, riding the rods, the rusty box cars of a freight, snatching their food at night from the boiling slum of hoboes’ jungle, now swaggering with funds and brief prosperity—the floaters, drifters, and half-bums, that huge nameless, houseless, rootless, and anomalous class that swarms across the nation.
They are the human cinders of the earth. Hard, shabby, scarred, and lined of face, common, dull, and meager of visage as they are, they have the look of having crawled that morning from the box car in the train yard of another city or of having dropped off a day coach in the morning, looking casually and indifferently about them, carrying a cardboard suitcase with a shirt, two collars, and a tie. Yet a legend of great distances is written on them—a kind of atomic desolation. Each is a human spot of moving rust naked before the desolation of the immense and lonely skies that bend above him, unsheltered on the huge and savage wilderness of the earth, across which he is hurled—a spot of grimy gray and dingy brown, clinging to the brake rods of a loaded freight.
He is a kind of human cinder hurled through space, naked, rootless, nameless, with all that was personal and unique in its one life almost emptied out into that huge vacancy of rust and iron and waste and lonely and incommunicable distances in which it lives, through which it has so often been bombarded.
And this atom finds its end at length, perhaps, at some unknown place upon the savage visage of the continent, exploded, a smear of blood on the rock ballast, a scream lost in the roar of pounding wheels, a winding of entrails around the axle rods, a brief indecipherable bobbing of blood and bone and brains upon the wooden ties, or just a shapeless bundle of old ragged brown and gray slumped down at morning in a shabby doorway, on a city street, beneath the elevated structure, a bundle of ragged bone now cold and lifeless to be carted out of sight by the police, nameless and forgotten in its death as in its life.
Such for the most part were the men who now sat at the tables in this rude house of pleasure, looking about them furtively, warily, with an air of waiting, calculation, or indecision, and sometimes glancing at one another with sly, furtive, rather sheepish smiles.
As for the women who attended them, they were prostitutes recruited, for the most part, from the great cities of the North and Middle West, brutally greedy, rapacious, weary of eye, hard of visage, over-driven, harried and exhausted in the mechanical performance of a profession from which their only hope was to grasp and clutch as much as they could in as short a time as possible. They had the harsh, rasping, and strident voices, the almost deliberately exaggerated and inept extravagance of profanity and obscenity, the calculated and over-emphasized style of toughness which one often finds among poor people in the tenement sections of great cities—which one observes even in small children—the constant oath, curse, jeer, threat, menace, and truculent abuse, which really comes from the terrible fear in which they live, as if, in that world of savage aggression and brute rapacity, from which they have somehow to wrest their bitter living, they are afraid that any betrayal of themselves into a gentler, warmer, and more tolerant kind of speech and gesture will make them suspect to their fellows, and lay them open to the assaults, threats, tyrannies, and dominations they fear.
So it was with these women now: one could hear their rasping, strident voices everywhere throughout the smoke-filled room, their harsh jeering laughter, and the extravagant exaggeration and profusion with which they constantly interlarded their rasping speech with a few oaths and cries repeated with brutal monotony, such phrases as “Christ!” “Jesus!”—“What t’ God-damn hell do I care?”—“Come on! Watcha goin’ t’ do now! I got no time t’-around with yuh! If ya want t’-come on an’ pay me—if ya don’t, get t’ God-damn hell outa here”—being among the expressions one heard most frequently.
Yet, even among these poor, brutally exhausted, and fear-ridden women, there was really left, like something pitiably living and indestructible out of life, a kind of buried tenderness, a fearful, almost timid desire to find some friendship, gentleness, even love among the rabble-rout of lost and ruined men to whom they ministered.
And this timid, yet inherent desire for some warmer and more tender relation even in the practice of their profession was sometimes almost ludicrously apparent as they moved warily about among the tables, soliciting patronage from the men they served. Thus, if a man addressed them harshly, brutally, savagely, with an oath—which was the customary form of greeting—they would answer him in kind. But if he spoke to them more quietly, or regarded them with a more kindly smiling look, they might respond to him with a pathetic and ridiculous attempt at coquetry, subduing their rasping voices to a kind of husky, tinny whisper, pressing against him intimately, bending their bedaubed and painted faces close to his, and cajoling him with a pitiable pretense at seductiveness somewhat in this manner:
“Hello there, big boy! . . . Yuh look lonesome sittin’ there all by yourself. . . . Whatcha doin’ all alone? . . . Yuh want some company? Huh?”—whispered hoarsely with a ghastly leer of the smeared lips, and pressing closer—“Wanta have some fun, darling? . . . Come on!”—coaxingly, imperatively, taking the patron by the hand—“I’ll show yuh a big time.”
It was in response to some such blandishment as this that the boy had got up from his table, left the smoke-filled room accompanied by the woman, and gone out through a door at one side into the corridor that led back to the little partitioned board compartments of the brothel.
Here it was at once evident that there was nothing to do but wait. A long line of men and women that stretched from one end of the hallway to another stood waiting for their brief occupancies of the little board compartments at the other end, all of which were now obviously and audibly occupied.
As they came out into the hall, the woman with the boy called out to another woman at the front end of the line: “Hello, May! . . . Have ya seen Grace?”
“Aah!” said the woman thus addressed, letting cigarette smoke coil from her nostrils as she spoke, and speaking with the rasping, exaggerated, and brutal toughness that has been described: “I t’ink she’s in number Seven here havin’ a ——.”
And having conveyed the information in this delicate manner, she then turned to her companion, a brawny, grinning seaman in the uniform of the United States Navy, and with a brisk, yet rather bantering humor, demanded:
“Well, whatchya say, big boy? . . . Gettin’ tired of waitin’? . . . Well, it won’t be long now. . . . Dey’ll be troo in dere in a minute an’ we’re next.”
“Dey better had be!” the sailor replied with a kind of jocular savagery. “If dey ain’t, I’ll tear down duh —— joint! . . . Christ!” he cried in an astounded tone, after listening attentively for a moment. “Holy Jeez!” he said with a dumbfounded laugh. “What t’ hell are dey doin’ in deh all dis time? Who is dat guy, anyway?—A whole regiment of duh Marines, duh way it sounds t’ me! Holy Jesus!” he cried with an astounded laugh, listening again—“Christ!”
“Ah, c’mon, Jack!” the woman said with a kind of brutal, husky tenderness, snuggling close to his brawny arm meanwhile, and lewdly proposing her heavy body against his. “Yuh ain’t gonna get impatient on me now, are yuh? . . . Just hold on a minute moeh an’ I’ll give ya somet’ing ya neveh had befoeh!—”
“If yuh do,” the gallant tar said tenderly, drawing his mighty fist back now in a gesture of savage endearment that somehow seemed to please her, “I’ll come back and smack yuh right in the ——, yuh son-of-a-bitch!” he amorously whispered, and pulled her to him.
Similar conversations and actions were to be observed all up and down the line: there were lewd jests, ribald laughter, and impatient and shouted demands on the noisy occupants of the little compartments to “come on out an’ give some of duh rest of us a chanct, f’r Christ’s sake!” and other expressions of a similar nature.
It was a brutally hot night in the middle of August: in the hallway the air was stifling, weary, greasily humid. The place was thick with tobacco smoke, the stench of the men, the powder and cheap perfume of the women and over all, unforgettable, overpowering, pungent, resinous, rude, and raw as savage nature and man’s naked lust, was the odor of the new, unpainted, white-pine lumber of which the whole shambling and haphazard place had been contructed.
Finally, after a long and weary wait in that stifling place, during which time the door of the compartments had opened many times, and many men and women had come out, and many more gone in, the boy and the woman with him had advanced to the head of the line, and were next in the succession of that unending and vociferous column.
Presently, the door of the room for which they waited opened, a man came out, shut the door behind him, and then went quickly down the hall. Then for a moment there was silence, impatient mutters in the line behind them, and at length the woman with the boy muttering:
“I wondeh what t’ hell she’s doin’ all dis time!—Hey!” she cried harshly, and hammered on the door, “Who’s in dere? . . . Come on out, f’r Christ’s sake! . . . Yuh’re holdin’ up duh line!”
In a moment, a woman’s voice answered wearily:
“All right, Fay! . . . Just a minute dear. . . . I’ll be right there.”
“Oh,” the woman with the boy said in a suddenly quiet, strangely tender, kind of voice. “It’s Margaret. . . . I guess she’s worn out, poor kid.” And knocking on the door again, but this time gently, almost timidly, she said in a quiet voice:
“How are yuh, kid? . . . D’ya need any help?”
“No, it’s all right, Fay,” the girl inside said in the same tired and utterly exhausted tone. “I’ll be out in a moment. . . . Come on in, honey.”
The woman opened the door softly and entered the room. The only furnishings of the hot, raw, and hideous little place, besides a chair, an untidy and rumpled looking bed, and a table, was a cheap dresser on which was a doll girdled with a soiled ribbon of pink silk, tied in a big bow, a photograph of a young sailor inscribed with the words, “To Margaret, the best pal I ever had—Ed”—and a package of cigarettes. An electric fan, revolving slowly from left to right, droned incessantly, and fanned the close stale air with a kind of sporadic and sweltering breeze.
And from moment to moment, as it swung in its half orbit, the fan would play full upon the face and head of the girl, who was lying on the bed in an attitude of utter pitiable weariness. When this happened, a single strand of her shining hair, which was straight, lank, fine-spun as silk, and of a lovely red-bronze texture, would be disturbed by the movement of the fan and would be blown gently back and forth across her temple.
The girl, who was tall, slender, and very lovely, was, save for her shoes and stockings, naked, and she lay extended at full length on the untidy bed, with one arm thrust out in a gesture of complete exhaustion, the other folded underneath her shining hair, and her face, which had a fragile, transparent, almost starved delicacy, turned to one side and resting on her arm, the eyelids closed. And the eyelids also had this delicacy of texture, were violet with weariness, and so transparent that the fine net-work of veins was plainly visible.
The other woman went softly over to the bed, sat down beside her, and began to speak to her in a low and tender tone. In a moment the girl turned her head toward the woman, opened her eyes, and smiled, in a faint and distant way, as if someone who is just emerging from the drugged spell of an opiate:
“What? . . . What did you say, darling? . . . No, I’m all right,” she said faintly, and sitting up, with the other woman’s help, she swiftly pulled on over her head the cheap one-piece garment she was wearing, which had been flung back over the chair beside the bed. Then smiling, she stood up, took a cigarette out of the package on the dresser, lighted it, and turning to the boy, who was standing in the door, said ironically, with something of the rasping accent which the other woman used, beneath which, however, her pleasant rather husky tone was plainly evident.
“All right, Catawba! Come on in!”
He went in slowly, still looking at her with an astounded stare. He had known her the first moment he had looked at her. She was a girl from the little town where the state university, at which he was a student, was situated, a member of a family of humble decent people, well-known in the town: she had disappeared almost two years before, there had been rumor at the time that one of the students had “got her in trouble,” and since that time he had neither seen nor heard of her.
“How are all the folks down home?” she said. “How’s everyone in Pulpit Hill?”
Her luminous smoke-gray eyes were hard and bright as she spoke, her mouth, in her thin young face, was hard and bitter as a blade, and her voice was almost deliberately hard and mocking. And yet, beneath this defiant scornfulness, the strange, husky tenderness of the girl’s tone persisted, and as she spoke, she put her slender hand lightly on his arm, with the swift, unconscious tenderness of people in a world of strangers who suddenly meet someone they know from home.
“They’re all right,” he stammered in a confused and bewildered tone, his face beginning to smoulder with embarrassment as he spoke.
“Well, if you see anyone I know,” she said in the same ironic tone, “say hello for me. . . . Tell ’em I sent my love.”
“All right,” he blurted out stupidly. “I—I—certainly will.”
