Of Time and the River (95 page)
It changed, it passed, it swept around him in all its limitless surge and sweep and fold and passionate variety, and it was more strange in all its haunting loveliness than magic or a dream, and yet more near than morning and more actual than noon.
It was a hot day: the two young men walked along with their coats flung back across their shoulders: towards five o’clock as they were coming home again, and coming down into the wooded hollow where Mr. Joel lived, Joel turned, and with a slight flush of embarrassment on his gaunt face, said:
“Look—do you mind wearing your coat when we go by Grandfather’s house?—you can take it off again when we get out of sight.”
He said nothing, but silently did as his friend requested, and thus correctly garmented they passed the old man’s great white house and crossed the little wooden bridge and stared up again out of the hollow, taking a foot-path through the woods that would lead them out into the road near Miss Telfair’s house: she had invited them to tea.
And curiously, inexplicably, of all that they had said and talked about together on that walk, these two things were later all he could remember:—his friend’s eyes narrowed with professional appraisal as he looked at the hot opacity of the sun-burnished tree and said, “—hm . . . It’s nice that—the light is interesting—I’d like to do it;” and the embarrassed but almost stubbornly definite way in which Joel had asked him to put on his coat as he went past “Grandfather’s place.” He did not know why, but that simple request aroused in him a feeling of quick and hot resentment, a desire to say:
“Good God! What kind of idol-worship is this, anyway? Surely that old man has been made of the same earth as all the rest of us— surely he’s not so grand and rare and fine that he can’t stand the sight of two young men in shirt-sleeves going by his house! . . . Surely there is something false, inhuman, barren in this kind of reverence—no real respect, no decent human admiration, but something cruel, empty, worthless and untrue, and against the real warmth and worth and friendliness of man!”
For a moment hot resentful words rose to his lips: that act of empty reverence seemed to him, somehow, to be arrogant and disdainful of humanity; he felt a sudden blind resentment, a choking anger against old Mr. Joel and his grand manners and his growling and magnificent old age: he wanted to bring back again the conversation he had overheard at lunch, to ask Joel bitterly who the hell he thought this old man was that he could grandly dispose of man according to his judgment as “low cads,” as “gentlemen”—to inquire savagely who the hell this damned contriving, cunning old custodian of the treasures of the rich thought he was that he could arrogate unto himself the power to pronounce banishment on his betters—to call Rousseau a rascal, and De Musset and Lord Byron “a couple of low cads.”
And childish, foolish as this anger was in all its blind unreason, he was to remember these two trifling episodes in later years with a feeling of regret and nameless loss. These two acts on Joel’s part—the one an act of barren interest—a joyless empty interest in the blind opacity of light—and the other an act of barren joyless reverence to old age and an inhuman state—seemed to mark for him the beginning of his gradual separation from his friend, a dumb, inexplicable and sorrowful acceptation of their fatal severance. It seemed to him that here began that slow, and somehow desperately painful recognition that the enchanted world of wealth and love and beauty, of living fulfilment and of fruitful power, which he had visioned as a child in all his dreams about the fabled rich along the Hudson River—did not exist; and that he must look for that grand life in ways stranger, darker, and more painful in their labyrinthine complications than any he had ever dreamed of as a child; and that, like Moses, he must strike water from the common stone of life, and like Samson, take honey from the savage lion’s maw of the great world, find all the joy of living that he lusted for in the blind swarm, the brutal stupefaction of the streets; goodness and truth in the mean hearts of common men; and beauty in the only place where it can ever be found—inextricably meshed, inwrought, and interwoven in that great web of horror, pain and sweat and bitter anguish, that great woven fabric of blind cruelty, hatred, filth and lust and tyranny and injustice, of joy, of faith, of love, of courage and devotion—that makes up life and that resumes the world.
It was a desolating loss, a hideous acknowledgment, a cruel discovery—to know that all the haunted glory of this enchanted world, which he thought he had discovered the night before, had been just what it now seemed to him to be—moon-magic—and to know that it was gone from him for ever. It was a bitter pill to know that what had seemed so grand, so strong, so right, and so inevitable at the moment of discovery was now lost to him—that some blind chemistry of man’s common earth, and of his father’s clay, and of genial nature, had taken from him what he seemed to possess, and that he could never make this enchanted life his own again, or ever again believe in its reality. It was a desperate and soul-sickening discovery to know that not alone through moonlight, magic, and the radiant images of their heart’s desire could men find America, but that somewhere there, and far darklier and strangelier than the river, lay the thing they sought, in all the blind and brutal complications of its destiny—buried there in the grimy and illimitable jungles of its savage cities—a-prowl and raging in the desert and half mad with hunger in the barren land, befouled and smutted with the rust and grime of its vast works and factories, warped and scarred and twisted, stunned, bewildered by the huge multitude of all its errors and blind gropings, yet still fierce with life, still savage with its hunger, still broken, slain and devoured by its terrific earth, its savage wilderness—and still, somehow, God knows how, the thing of which he was a part, that beat in every atom of his blood and brain and life, and was indestructible and everlasting, and that was America!
Miss Telfair’s house, which they now entered, was just the sort of house that one would expect a woman like Miss Telfair to live in. Everywhere one looked, one saw the image of the woman’s personality—and that personality was fragile, exquisite, elegant, and elaborately minute. In spite of its graceful, plain proportions, that house was not wholly a comfortable place to be in. It was filled with ten thousand little things—ten thousand little, fragile, costly, lovely and completely useless little things, and their profusion was so great, their arrangement so exquisitely right, their proximity so immediate and overwhelming that one instantly felt cramped, uneasy, and uncomfortable, fearfully apprehensive lest a sudden free and spacious movement should send a thousand rare and terribly costly little things crashing into shattered bits, the treasure of a lifetime irretrievably lost, and one’s own life and work and future irretrievably mortgaged, blighted, wrecked, in one shattering instant of blind ruin. In short, in Miss Telfair’s lovely, exquisite and toy-becluttered house, one felt very much like a delicate, sensitive, intelligent and highly organized bull in a horribly expensive china-shop, and this feeling was cruelly enhanced if one was twenty-three years old and six and a half feet tall, and large of hand and foot, and long of arm and leg in just proportion, and painfully embarrassed, and given to sudden and convulsive movements, and keyed and strung on the same wires as a racehorse.
It was an astonishing place, about as exquisitely feminine a place as one could imagine. One had only to take a look round to feel that no man had ever lived here, that the only man who ever came here had come as a visitor; and somehow one felt at once he knew the reason why Miss Telfair had not married—she simply did not want to have “a man about the place,” a disgusting, clumsy brute of a man who would go plunging round like a wild bull, sending her vases crashing to the floor, upsetting her fragile little tables and all the precious little bric-ŕ-brac that crowded them, sprawling out upon the voluptuously soft but elegantly arrayed cushions of the sofa, reaching for matches on the mantel and sweeping it clear of a half-dozen dainty eighteenth-century clocks and plates and china shepherds with one swinging blow, barging into dainty little stools of painted china and sending it a-teeter while Miss Telfair watched and prayed and waited with a smile of frozen apprehension, raising hell with the Wedgwood plates, the vases of Dresden and of Delft, and making the buried kings of the old Ming dynasty turn over in their graves with groans of anguish every time some brute of a bull of a man came lumbering near the dearest and most priceless treasures of their epoch.
Miss Telfair, herself the most dainty, fragile, and exquisitely inviolable ornament of the collection, was waiting for them at the centre of this fabulous clutter. She gave each of the young men a quick cool clasp of her small, frail, nail-bevarnished hand, a few crisp words of greeting, and a quick light smile, as brittle, frail, and painted as a bit of china—a smile curiously like that of Mrs. Pierce in its glacial rigidity but, like everything else about the woman, more fragile, delicate, and shell-like.
Then she turned and led the way through the house out into the sun- porch. The two young men picked their way carefully between the frail and crowded complications of a thousand costly relics and around great bowls and vases filled with flowers—great bouquets of roses, lilies and carnations, which were everywhere—and which filled the air with the clinging, dense, and overpowering sweetness of their perfumes.
The sun-parlour was a great, light place, alive and golden with bright sunlight—a magnificent room with comfortably padded wicker chairs and tables and settees, but here, as elsewhere in the house, the fabulous complication of small useless ornaments was overwhelming, and one walked with care. This room also was filled with great bowls of roses, lilies and carnations, the air was dense and heavy with their scent, and through the windows of the place one could see the smooth velvet of the lawns, trimly patterned with designs of flowers aflame with all their glorious polychrome of colour, and at the end the flower-garden, which was alive with many rich and costly blooms growing in geometric designs. It was just the kind of flower-garden, just the kind of flowers, that a woman like Miss Telfair would have: their orderly, exotic and unnatural profusion suggested the cultivation of a hot-house; even the wild and lyric growth of sweet unordered nature had been made to conform to the elegant and fragile pattern of Miss Telfair’s life.
She led the way to a wicker table where there were easy chairs and a comfortable settee and great flaming fragrant lights of flowers. They seated themselves and tea was brought in by a maid-servant. The service of the tea was fragile, costly, elegant, like everything else about the woman; but it was also wonderful, rich, and generous in its abundance, and this was probably like her, too. There were delicate little pastries, cubes, and crusts of things that were so flaky, rich and succulent that they melted away in the mouth; and there were little cubes and squares of sandwiches as well, all dainty, elegant, and small, but wonderfully good. She asked them if they wanted hot-tea or iced-tea or some whisky: the day was hot and Joel took iced-tea, refusing whisky; the other youth took iced-tea too—she poured it for them in marvellous tall frail glasses filled with slivers of bright ice, and put in mint and lemon, doing all things deftly, beautifully, with her small, swift, china-lovely hands, and then turning to Joel’s guest, with her light cool smile, her crisp incisive inquiry, in which there was somehow something good and generous, she said:
“And won’t you have some whisky, too?” and as he hesitated, and looked dubious yet consenting, added: “In your iced-tea—if you like it that way?”
He looked at her, perplexed, and said uncertainly:
“I—don’t know. . . . Does it go that way?”
Miss Telfair bent back her head—her cheeks had the delicate colour of rose-tinted china, and she was pretty in the rose-tinted-china way—and laughed a thin, metallic, and yet musical and friendly laugh.
“Oh, yes!” she cried briskly and gaily, “it goes that way! . . . It goes very well that way.” More seriously, she added: “Yes, it’s really very good that way”—and crisply, yet encouragingly, with her fire-bright china-smile—“why don’t you try it?”
He looked at Joel dubiously, not certain what to do, and not wishing to embarrass his friend, and Joel looked back, with his radiant eager smile, shaking his head in droll refusal, whispering:
“Not for me. But go on if you like. Do as you like—”
“Well, then—” he said consentingly—and Miss Telfair, smiling lightly, took a bottle of Scotch whisky off the tray, uncorked it, and poured a drink into the tea—a good stiff shot it was, too—and when he had finished the drink, she poured him out another, adding another liberal potation of the Scotch.
Thus animated and released, he felt more at ease: they talked together quickly and easily; he had a good time. She was a bright, quick, cool, inquiring kind of woman, at once detached yet friendly, coolly amused yet curious: she asked him about his work at the university, the kind of classes that he taught and the kind of people that attended them, the kind of life he had in the city, and about the play that he was writing. The detached coolness of her curiosity was much like that of Mrs. Pierce, and suggested the curiosity of a woman of a separate and privileged world hearing about the creatures who lived in the great nameless world of dust and noise and strife and swelter “down below”—and yet it was also a more friendly and eager curiosity than Mrs. Pierce had shown: it had a certain warmth of human interest in it, too.
She was obviously very fond of Joel: her relation to him was that of an old-maid friend of the family, who is so intimate and close to all the family’s history that she is practically a part of it herself, and who feels for the children and all their lives and actions as much affection and interest as she could feel for her own blood. Now she turned to Joel, and began to talk to him about some decorative screens which he was painting for her: as one might expect, she knew all about decorative screens and their respective merits; she spoke of them with the exact authority, the assured conviction of the expert, she spoke her mind about them crisply, plainly, incisively, and Joel listened to her eagerly, his gaunt face lifted, turned towards her in an attitude of rapt attention and respect, while she was talking.