OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
is slanting swiftly, the crowd is waiting tense and silent, already with a touch of sorrow, resignation, and the winter in their hearts, for summer’s over, the game is ending, and October has come again, has come again. In the window, where the red slant of the sun already falls, Ben is moving quickly, slipping new placards into place, taking old ones out, scowling, snapping his hard, white fingers in command, speaking curtly, sharply, irritably to the busy figures, moving at his bidding on the floor. The game — the last game of the series — is sharp, close, bitterly contested. No one can say as yet which way the issue goes, which side will win, when it will end — but that fatality of red slanting light, the premonitory menace of the frost, the fatal certitude of victory and defeat, with all the sorrow and regret that both can bring to man, are in their hearts.
From time to time, a wild and sudden cheer breaks sharply from the waiting crowd, as something happens to increase their hope of victory, but for the most part they are tense and silent now, all waiting for the instant crisis, the quick end.
Behind Ben, seated in a swivel chair, but turned out facing toward the crowd, the boy can see the gouty bulk of Mr. Flood, the owner of the paper. He is bent forward heavily in his seat, his thick apoplectic fingers braced upon his knees, his mouth ajar, his coarse, jowled, venously empurpled face and bulging yellow eyes turned out upon the crowd, in their constant expression of slow stupefaction. From time to time, when the crowd cheers loudly, the expression of brutal surprise upon Mr. Flood’s coarse face will deepen perceptibly and comically, and in a moment he will say stupidly, in his hoarse and phlegmy tones:
“Who done that? . . . What are they yelling for? . . . Which side’s ahead now? . . . What happened that time, Ben?”
To which Ben usually makes no reply whatever, but the savage scowl between his grey eyes deepens with exasperation, and finally, cursing bitterly, he says:
“Damn it, Flood! What do you think I am-the whole damned newspaper? For heaven’s sake, man, do you think all I’ve got to do is answer damn-fool questions? If you want to know what’s happening, go outside where the rest of them are!”
“Well, Ben, I just wanted to know how —” Mr. Flood begins hoarsely, heavily, and stupidly.
“Oh, for God’s sake! Listen to this, won’t you?” says Ben, laughing scornfully and contemptuously as he addresses the invisible auditor of his scorn, and jerking his head sideways toward the bloated figure of his employer as he does so. “Here!” he says, in a disgusted manner. “For God’s sake, someone go and tell him what the score is, and put him out of his misery!” And scowling savagely, he speaks sharply into the mouthpiece of the phone and puts another placard on the line.
And suddenly, even as the busy figures swarm and move there in the window before the waiting crowd, the bitter thrilling game is over! In waning light, in faint shadows, far, far away in a great city of the North, the 40,000 small empetalled faces bend forward, breathless, waiting — single and strange and beautiful as all life, all living, and man’s destiny. There’s a man on base, the last flash of the great right arm, the crack of the bat, the streaking white of a clean-hit ball, the wild, sudden, solid roar, a pair of flashing legs have crossed the rubber, and the game is over! And instantly, there at the city’s heart, in the great stadium, and all across America, in ten thousand streets, ten thousand little towns, the crowd is breaking, flowing, lost for ever! That single, silent, most intolerable loveliness is gone for ever. With all its tragic, proud and waiting unity, it belongs now to the huge, the done, the indestructible fabric of the past, has moved at last out of that inscrutable maw of chance we call the future into the strange finality of dark time.
Now it is done, the crowd is broken, lost, exploded, and 10,000,000 men are moving singly down 10,000 streets — toward what? Some by the light of Hesperus which, men say, can bring all things that live on earth to their own home again — flock to the fold, the father to his child, the lover to the love he has forsaken — and the proud of heart, the lost, the lonely of the earth, the exile and the wanderer — to what? To pace again the barren avenues of night, to pass before the bulbous light of lifeless streets with half-averted faces, to pass the thousand doors, to feel again the ancient hopelessness of hope, the knowledge of despair, the faith of desolation.
And for a moment, when the crowd has gone, Ben stands there silent, lost, a look of bitter weariness, disgust, and agony upon his grey gaunt face, his lonely brow, his fierce and scornful eyes. And as he stands there that red light of waning day has touched the flashing head, the gaunt, starved face, has touched the whole image of his fiercely wounded, lost and scornful spirit with the prophecy of its strange fatality. And in that instant as the boy looks at his brother, a knife is driven through his entrails suddenly, for with an instant final certitude, past reason, proof, or any visual evidence, he sees the end and answer of his brother’s life. Already death rests there on his proud head like a coronal. The boy knows in that one instant Ben will die.
xx
He visited Genevieve frequently over a period of several months. As his acquaintance with the family deepened, the sharpness of his appetite for seduction dwindled, and was supplanted by an ecstatic and insatiable glee. He felt that he had never in his life been so enormously and constantly amused: he would think exultantly for days of an approaching visit, weaving new and more preposterous fables for their consumption, bursting into violent laughter on the streets as he thought of past scenes, the implication of a tone, a gesture, the transparent artifice of mother and daughter, the incredible exaggeration of everything.
He was charmed, enchanted: his mind swarmed daily with monstrous projects — his heart quivered in a tight cage of nervous exultancy as he thought of the infinite richness of absurdity that lay stored for him. His ethical conscience was awakened hardly at all — he thought of these three people as monsters posturing for his delight. His hatred of cruelty, the nauseating horror at the idiotic brutality of youth, had not yet sufficiently defined itself to check his plunge. He was swept along in the full tide of his adventure: he thought of nothing else.
Through an entire winter, and into the spring, he went to see this little family in a Boston suburb. Then he got tired of the game and the people as suddenly as he had begun, with the passionate boredom, weariness, and intolerance of which youth is capable. And now that the affair was ending, he was at last ashamed of the part he had played in it and of the arrogant contempt with which he had regaled himself at the expense of other people. And he knew that the Simpsons had themselves at length become conscious of the meaning of his conduct, and saw that, in some way, he had made them the butt of a joke. And when they saw this, the family suddenly attained a curious quiet dignity, of which he had not believed them capable and which later he could not forget.
One night, as he was waiting in the parlour for the girl to come down, her mother entered the room, and stood looking at him quietly for a moment. Presently she spoke:
“You have been coming here for some time now,” she said, “and we were always glad to see you. My daughter liked you when she met you — she likes you yet —” the woman said slowly, and went on with obvious difficulty and embarrassment. “Her welfare means more to me than anything in the world — I would do anything to save her from unhappiness or misfortune.” She was silent a moment, then said bluntly, “I think I have a right to ask you a question: what are your intentions concerning her?”
He told himself that these words were ridiculous and part of the whole comic and burlesque quality of the family, and yet he found now that he could not laugh at them. He sat looking at the fire, uncertain of his answer, and presently he muttered:
“I have no intentions concerning her.”
“All right,” the woman said quietly. “That is all I wanted to know. . . . You are a young man,” she went on slowly after a pause, “and very clever and intelligent — but there are still a great many things you do not understand. I know now that we looked funny to you and you have amused yourself at our expense. . . . I don’t know why you thought it was such a joke, but I think you will live