Thomas Wolfe, page 501
—And the Center of the storm? The Cause of all this tumult—what was It doing now? It was enjoying the privacy of one of Mrs. Jack’s lovely rooms—and, as if utterly unaware of the towering position It now enjoyed in the great world, It was modestly and matter-of-factly pulling on a pair of canvas pants!
V
Mrs. Jack, after arranging anew a vase of roses on a table in the hall, walked briskly toward her room. Her husband was just coming from his room as she passed his door. He was a well-kept man of fifty years or more. But, compared to his wife’s expression of childlike innocence, his own manner was curiously sophisticated.
He bent smoothly over her small figure and kissed her perfunctorily on one rosy cheek. It was the kiss of an ambassador; his manner and his tone, the perfect bland assurance of everything he did, were like the gestures of an old and jaded diplomat.
She was conscious of a moment’s repugnance as she looked at him, but then she remembered what a perfect husband he had been, how thoughtful and how good and how devoted. “He’s a sweet person,” she was thinking as she responded brightly to his greeting: “Oh, hello, darling. You’re all ready, aren’t you? . . . Listen,”—she spoke rapidly—“will you take care of anyone who comes? Mr. Hartwell is changing his costume in the guest room—won’t you look out for him if he needs anything?” She slipped the jade ring quickly from her finger and slipped it back again. “I do hope that everything’s all right! I do hope—” She paused again, with a look of worried abstraction in her eyes.
“You do hope what?” he said with just the suggestion of an ironic grin around the corners of his mouth.
“I do hope he won’t—” she began in a troubled tone, then went on rapidly—“He said something about—about clearing away some of the things in the living room for his show—”
Then, catching the irony of his faint grin, she laughed, shortly, richly. “I don’t know what he’s going to do. Still, everyone’s been after him, you know—everyone’s thrilled at the chance of seeing him—Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right. Don’t you think so?” She looked eagerly at him with such droll, beseeching inquiry that he laughed abruptly, as he turned away, saying, “Oh, I suppose so, Alice. I’ll look after it.”
Mrs. Jack went on down the hall and entered her room, leaving her door slightly ajar behind her.
She regarded herself for a moment in the mirror, and her face betrayed a childlike vanity that would have been ludicrously comical if anyone had seen her. First she bent forward a little and looked at herself with a childlike innocence which was one of her characteristic expressions when she faced the world. Then she surveyed the outlines of her small and lovely figure, and arranged half-consciously the folds of her simple, splendid gown. Then she lifted her arm and hand and half-turning with the other hand upon her hip, she ogled herself absurdly in the friendly mirror.
A tremor, faint and distant, shook her feet. She paused, startled; waited; listened. A slight frown appeared between her eyes, and an old unquiet feeling stirred faintly in her heart. At times she thought she felt this faint vibration in the massive walls around her. Once she had asked the doorman a few questions. The man told her that the building had been built across two depths of railway tunnels, and that all Mrs. Jack had heard was the faint vibration from the passing of a train below her. The man assured her it was all quite safe; still, the news disturbed her vaguely. She would have liked it better if the building had been built upon the solid rock.
VI
But now the guests were beginning to arrive. The electric thring of the doorbell broke persistently on the accustomed quietness. In the hallway there arose now the confused but crescent medley of a dozen voices—the rippling laughter and quick, excited voices of the women with the deeper and more vibrant sonorities of the men. One could sense and feel the growing momentum of the party. It was a mixture, smooth as oil, which grew and mounted headily with each arrival.
Mrs. Jack, her eyes sparkling with the joy that giving parties, meeting people, the whole warm and brilliant flux and interplay of life always gave to her, now left her room and moved up the hall, greeting people everywhere with a rosy, beaming face.
The whole party was in full blast now. Everywhere people were talking, laughing, bending to fill glasses with long frosty drinks, moving around the loaded temptations of the dining table with that somewhat doubtful look of people who would like to taste it all but know they can’t. It was wonderful, weaving back and forth in a celebrated pattern of white and black and gold and power and wealth and loveliness and food and drink. And through it all, like some strange and lovely flower, bending and welcoming on its gracious stem, moved the flushed and rosy face, the warm heart and the wise, the subtle, childlike, magic spirit that was Mrs. Jack.
She glanced happily through the crowded rooms. It was, she well knew, a notable assemblage: a distinguished excerpt of the best, the highest, and the fairest the city had to offer. And yet, someone was still lacking.
“Long, long into the night I lay”—thought Mrs. Jack—“thinking about you all the time.”
For someone was still absent and she kept thinking of him—well, almost all the time. At least, so she would phrase it with that infatuation which a woman feels when she is thinking of her lover: “I keep thinking of you all the time. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I think about is you. Did you ever try to tell a story? Once when I was a child I felt sure I had to tell a story. And yet, when I began it, all that I could think of was ‘Long, long into the night I lay thinking of how to tell my story.’ It seemed to me to be the most beautiful and perfect way to begin a story—but I could go no further. And now I know the end. ‘Long, long into the night I lay—thinking of you. I think about you all the time. You fill my life, my heart, my spirit and my being.’ And that’s the story. Ah, dearest, that’s the story.”
And so this lovely woman really felt—or thought she felt. Really, when she thought of him, she kept thinking she was “thinking of him all the time.” And on this crowded and this brilliant evening, he kept flashing through her mind.
“I wonder where he is,” she thought. “Why doesn’t he come? If only he hasn’t been—” She looked quickly over the brilliant gathering with a troubled eye and thought impatiently, “If only he liked parties more! Oh well! He’s the way he is. I wouldn’t have him any different. I think about him all the time!”
And then he arrived, a hurried but relieved survey told her that he was “all right.”
Webber had been drinking just a little, the eyes were injected just a little, the speech and manner a trifle more excited than is wont, but, she saw, he was “all right.”
“If only people—the people who know me—didn’t affect him so,” she thought. “What does he want? He is like a crazy man with doubt: he hates everyone I know, he has every kind of insane, impossible delusion—oh, he is so strange and wild and mad—and young. And he is the best! the best! At bottom he is the grandest and the best. I love him!”
As Webber entered the crowded room, Sidney Page, the novelist, who had been leaning upon the mantel talking with a handsome woman, turned, glanced at him, and then, extending his soft, plump hand sideways, said casually, “Oh. How are you? . . . Look,” his tone, as always when he did something that came from the generous and sensitive warmth of his spirit, was deliberately casual. “Have you a telephone? I was trying to get you the other day. Can’t you come and have lunch with me some time?”
As a matter of fact, he had not thought of it until that moment. And Webber knew that he had thought of it to put him at his ease, to make him feel less desperately shipwrecked in these glittering, sophisticated tides. He seized it desperately, with a feeling of overwhelming gratefulness and affection. He had understood the kind of man Page was from the first moment he met him, and had seen the desperate shyness, the naked terror in his eyes. He had never for a moment been deceived by the man’s air of sophisticated weariness, the elaborately mannered speech. Below all the concealments of that elaborate disguise, he had felt the quality of generosity, of nobility, in the tormented spirit of the man. And now, like a bewildered swimmer in strong tides, he reached out and caught hold of it with enormous relief, as being the one thing before him in the disturbing and unfathomed currents of these brilliant lives that he could understand—he stayed there now, hung on as to a rock among the flood. He stammered out a hasty acceptance, and Page said quickly, casually, to put an end to more embarrassment: “Good. Suppose we meet for lunch on Tuesday, then, at one o’clock, at the Meadowbrook. Do you know where it is?” He gave the address, passed quickly on to other things, introduced the young man to the woman. They made speech, the young man looked around as if searching for someone, and really to give some show of ease and purpose which he did not feel, he blurted out: “Have—have you seen Alice anywhere about?” knowing as he said the words how stiff and clumsy they must seem to be, and how absurd also, for Mrs. Jack, as anyone could see, surrounded by a group of chattering guests, was standing in the center of the room.
Almost before the words were out of his mouth, the sophisticated-looking woman had “taken him up on it.” “About?” she said. “Yes, I think you’ll find her about—just about there,” with her cold, bright smile, she nodded in the direction of Mrs. Jack, not ten feet away.
He knew that what unfriendliness the words may have had: was just the concomitant of fashion, willing to sacrifice manners to the opportunity of exhibiting one’s wit, however feeble the attempt might be. So understood, so accurately appraised, why did the young man’s face now flush with anger? It was absurd to feel so, and yet, as is usually the case with youth, his sense proved unequal to the welling upsurge of his feeling. For a moment, he tried to find a telling and bitter retort, but he was not apt with matters such as these, and he just stood there, looking like some baffled clodhopper and feeling ten times the clodhopper that he looked. And then, defeated utterly, he turned and stalked away.
In just a minute’s time, the chip upon his shoulder, with which he had entered that great room, had grown ten times as big, and now he was not only daring someone to knock it off, he was hoping someone would. Why?
Well, of such is youth. And he was young.
At this moment Mrs. Jack saw him, and came toward him.
“Oh, hello, darling,” she said, taking his hand and looking up at him with an earnest, tender glance. “How are you? Are you all right?”
Even that simple question touched some raw spot of lacerated sensitivity.
“Who said I wasn’t all right? Why shouldn’t I be all right?” he demanded harshly, and then, seeing her tender face, was filled with a miserable feeling that again he’d failed.
“Oh all right, all right,” she said placating. “I just wanted to know if—are you having a good time?” she said eagerly, smiling. “Don’t you think it’s a nice party? You want to meet anyone?” she said, before he had a chance to answer. “You must know some of the people here.”
Lily Mandell, whose sensational figure and smoldering, Slavic face had been conspicuous all the evening, now came weaving through the crowded room toward Mrs. Jack.
“Oh Alice darling,” she said in a drowsy tone that also had in it a quality of yolky arrogance, “I wonder if you’ve heard—” Seeing the young man, she paused and greeted him: “Oh hello—I didn’t know that you were here.” They shook hands. Mrs. Jack’s face was glowing with a rapt and tranquil joy that was almost like religious ecstasy. She put her own hands in a firm clasp upon those of the woman and the man and whispered: “My two. Two of the people that I love best in the whole world. And you must know and love each other as I do you.” Her eyes misted suddenly with tears, the clasp of one hand tightened upon the closed hands of the other two, but her other hand went quickly to her breast. She turned to Lily and whispered: “If I could only tell you—” She shook her head, and whispered huskily: “The greatest—the best—” without saying what the greatest and the best might be.
VII
I mean!—You know!—” At the words, eager, rapid, uttered in a rather hoarse, yet strangely seductive tone of voice, Mrs. Jack smiled and turned: “There’s Amy!” Then, as she saw the angelic head with its unbelievable harvest of auburn curls, the lovely face so radiant with an almost boyish quality of eagerness, she thought: “Isn’t she beautiful! And—and—there is something so sweet, so lovely, so—so good about her!”
She did not know why this was true. Indeed, from any worldly point of view it would have been hard to prove. If Amy Van Leer was not “a notorious woman” the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limit of notoriety years before. By the time she was nineteen years old she had been married and divorced and had a child. And even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her hubsand had had no difficulty in demonstrating her unfitness for the custody of her own child. From that moment on, she took to drink, from drink to lovers, from lovers to opium, from opium to—everything.
People had once said: “What on earth is Amy going to do next?” And really if life is to be expressed solely in terms of velocity and sensation, it seemed that there was very little left for her to do. She had been everywhere, she had “seen everything” as one might see things from the windows of an express train traveling at eighty miles an hour. People now said: “What on earth is there left for her to do?” Nothing. There was nothing. Having tried everything in life save living, and having lost the way to live, there was nothing left for her to do except to die.
And yet that auburn, that angelic head: the quick excited laugh, the hoarse and thrilling tones, the eager animation of a boy—were all so beautiful, and somehow, one felt, so good! “If only”—people would think regretfully as Mrs. Jack now thought—“Oh, if only things had turned out differently for her”—and they would seek back desperately to find the clue to her disorder—saying, “Here—or here—it happened here, you see—if only!”—If only men were so much clay, as they are blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling!
“I mean! . . . You know! . . .” at these familiar words, Amy turned to her companions as if fairly burning with desire to communicate something to them that filled her with exuberant elation—“I mean!” she cried—“When you compare it with the stuff they’re doing nowadays!—I mean! There’s simply no comparison!”
During the course of this feverish monologue, the group of young people, of which Amy was the center, had moved over toward the portrait of Mrs. Jack above the mantel, and were looking up at it. The famous portrait was deserving of the enthusiastic praise that was now being heaped upon it. It was one of the best examples of Henry Mallows’ early work and it had also been created with the passion, the tenderness, the simplicity of a man in love.
“I mean!” cried Amy jubilantly again. “When you think how long ago that was! . . . and how beautiful she was then! . . . and how beautiful she is now!” cried Amy exultantly, then cast her lovely gray-green eyes so full of splintered torment around her in a glance of almost feverish exasperation—“I mean!” she cried again—“The whole thing’s obvious,” she muttered. Then, turning toward Page with an impulsive movement, she demanded: “How long has it been, Steve? It’s been twenty years ago, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, quite all of that,” Page answered in a cold, bored tone. In his agitation and embarrassment he turned away from her with an air of fatigued indifference. “I should think it was done in nineteen one or two—wasn’t it, Alice?” he drawled, turning to Mrs. Jack, who had now approached the group.
“What?” cried Mrs. Jack and then went on immediately, “Oh, the picture! No, Steve—it was done in nineteen—”—she checked herself so swiftly that it was not apparent to anyone but Page that she was not telling the truth—“in nineteen four.”
As a matter of fact, he knew the exact date—which had been October, 1902. And musing on the vagaries of the sex, he thought: “Why will they be so stupid! She must know that to anyone who knows the least thing about Mallows’ life, the date is as familiar as the Fourth of July—”
“Of course,” Mrs. Jack was saying rapidly, “I couldn’t have been more than eighteen at the time—if I was that—”
“Which would make you not more than forty-three at the present time,” thought Page cynically—“Well, my dear, you were twenty when he painted you—and you had been married for two years and had a child. Why do they do it!”—he thought impatiently, “Does she take me for a fool!”
He turned toward her almost impatiently and saw an expression, startled, almost pleading in her eye. He followed it, and saw the hot eye, the fierce packed features of her youthful lover: he caught it in a flash: “Ah! It’s this boy! She’s told him then that—” and suddenly remembering the startled pleading of that look—so much of child, of folly, even in its guile—he was touched with pity.
“My God, here she is!” he thought. “Still featured like a child, still beautiful, still loving someone—another boy!—Almost as lovely now as she was then when Mallows was a boy.”
Poor child! Poor child!—Page turned pompously away to hide the naked anguish in his eyes—So soon to be consumed and die like all of us—She was too prone to die the death upon a single death; to live the life upon the single life; to love the love upon the single love—never to save out of anything a prudent remnant for the day of ruin; but to use it all, to give it all, to be consumed, burnt out like last night’s moths upon a cluster of hard light!
Poor child.
VIII
The hour had now arrived for Mr. Piggy Hartwell and his celebrated circus of wire dolls. Mr. Piggy Hartwell wore a thick blue sweater with a turtle neck, an old pair of canvas trousers, and a pair of battered kneepads which were formerly in favor with professional wrestlers. And thus arrayed, he now made his appearance, staggering between his two enormous cases, which at length he dropped with a floor-shaking thump.
