The Web and The Root (10 page)

Ira Dingley was almost as bad as Reese. He was fifteen, not so big and heavy as the other boy, but built as solid as a bullock. He had a red, small, brutal kind of face, packed with energy and evil, and one little red eye that went glowering malignantly and truculently around at the whole world. He was blind in his other eye and wore a black shade over it.

One time, when there had been the great, jubilant shout of “Fight! Fight!” from the playing field at recess, and the boys had come running from all directions, Monk Webber had seen Ira Dingley and Reese McMurdie facing each other in the circle, edging closer truculently with
fists clenched, until someone behind Reese had given him a hard shove that sent him hurtling into Ira. Ira was sent flying back into the crowd, but when he came out again, he came out slowly, crouched, his little red eye fixed and mad with hate, and this time he had the knife-blade open, naked, ready in his hand.

Reese, who had been smiling after he was pushed, with a foul, loose smile of jeering innocence, now smiled no more. He edged cautiously away and back as Ira came on, his hard eyes fixed upon his enemy, his thick hand fumbling in his trousers for the knife. And while he fumbled for his knife, he edged back slowly, talking with a sudden, quiet, murderous intensity that froze the heart:

“All right, you son-of-a-bitch!” he said, “Wait till I git my knife out!” Suddenly, the knife was out and open; it was an evil six-inch blade that opened on a spring. “If that’s what you want, I’ll cut your God-damned head off!”

And now all of the boys in the crowd were stunned, frightened, hypnotized by the murderous fascination of those two shining blades from which they could not take their eyes, and by the sight of the two boys, their faces white, contorted, mad with fear, despair, and hate, as they circled continuously around. The strong terror of their heavy breathing filled the air with menace, and communicated to the hearts of all the boys such a sense of horror, fascination, and frozen disbelief that they were unwilling to continue, afraid to intervene, and yet unable to move or wrench themselves away from the sudden, fatal, and murderous reality of the fight.

Then as the two boys came close together, Nebraska Crane suddenly stepped in, thrust them apart with a powerful movement, and at the same time said with a good-natured laugh, and in a rough, friendly, utterly natural tone of voice that instantly conquered everyone, restored all the boys to their senses and brought breath and strength back to the light of day again:

“You boys cut it out,” he said. “If you want to fight, fight fair with your fists.”

“What’s it to you?” said Reese menacingly, edging in again with his knife held ready in his hand. “What right you got to come buttin’ in? Who told you it was any business of yours?” All the time he kept edging closer with his knife held ready.

“No one told me,” said Nebraska, in a voice that had lost all of its good nature and that was now as hard and unyielding in its quality as his tar-black eyes, which he held fixed, steady as a rifle, as his foe came on. “Do you want to make anything out of it?” he said.

Reese looked back at him for a moment, then his eyes shifted, and he sidled off and half withdrew, still waiting, unwilling to depart, muttering threats. In a moment the boys broke up in groups, dispersed, and enemies sidled uneasily away, each with his partisans, and the threatened fight was over. Nebraska Crane was the bravest boy in school. He was afraid of nothing.

I
RA
, D
OCK, AND
Reese! These were the savage, foul, and bloody names, and yet there was a menaceful wild promise in them, too. World of the “mountain grills,” the poor whites, the nameless, buried, hopeless atoms of the wilderness, their lives yet had a lawless, sinful freedom of their own. Their names evoked the wretched, scabrous world of slum-town rickets whence they came; a painful, haunting, anguished memory of the half-familiar, never-to-be-forgotten, white-trash universe of Stumptown, Pigtail Alley, Doubleday, Depot Street, and that foul shamble of a settlement called, for God knows what ironic reason, Strawberry Hill—that sprawled its labyrinthine confusion of unpaved, unnamed, miry streets and alleys and rickety shacks and houses along the scarred, clay-barren flanks of the hills that sloped down towards the railway district in the western part of town.

It was a place that Monk had seen only a few times in his whole life, but that always, then and forever, as long as he lived, would haunt him with the horrible strangeness and familiarity of a nightmare. For although that world of rickets was a part of his home town, it was a part so unfamiliar to all the life he knew the best that when he saw it
first, he came upon it with a sense of grotesque discovery, and after he had gone from it he could hardly believe that it was there, and would think of it years later with a sense of pain and anguish, saying:

“Here is the town, and here the streets, and here the people—and all, save
that
, familiar as my father’s face; all, save
that
, so near that we could touch it with our hand. All of it was ours in its remotest patterns—all save
that
, save
that
! How could we have lived there with it and beside it, and have known it so little? Was it really there?”

Yes, it was there—strangely, horribly there, never-to-be-forgotten, never wholly to be remembered or believed, haunting the soul forever with the foul naturalness of a loathsome dream. It was there, immutably, unbelievably there, and what was most strange and terrible about it was that he recognized it instantly—that world of Ira, Dock, and Reese—the first time that he saw it as a child; and even as his heart and bowels sickened with their nauseous disbelief of recognition, he knew it, lived it, breathed it utterly to the last remotest degradation of its horror.

And for that reason he hated it. For that reason, nausea, fear, disgust, and horror overwhelmed the natural sense of pity which that wretched life evoked. It haunted him the moment that he saw it with a sense of buried memory, loathsome rediscovery, and it seemed to him that, so far from being different from these people, he was of them, body and brain and blood to the last atom of his life, and had escaped from them only by some unwarranted miracle of chance, some hideous insecurity of fortune that might return him into the brutish filth and misery and ignorance and hopelessness of that lost world with the same crude fickleness by which he had escaped.

No birds sang in that barren world. Beneath its skies of weary desolation the cry of all-exultant joy, the powerful, swelling anthem of youth, certitude, and victory burst from no man’s heart, rose with a wild and uncontrollable shout from no man’s throat. In Summer the heat beat down upon that baked and barren hill, upon the wretched streets, and on all the dusty, shadeless roads and alleys of the slum, and
there was no pity in the merciless revelations of the sun. It shone with a huge and brutal impassivity upon the hard red dirt and dust, on shack and hut and rotting tenement.

It shone with the same impartial cruelty on mangy, scabby, nameless dogs, and on a thousand mangy, scabby nameless little children—hideous little scarecrows with tow hair, their skinny little bodies unrecognizably scurfed with filth and scarred with running sores, staring at one forever with gaunt, empty eyes as they grubbed in the baked, dusty, beaten, grassless dirt before some dreary shack, or scrabbled wretchedly about, eaten by swarming flies, in the sun-stench of a little lean-to porch, the very planks of which were as dry, hard, baked, and wretched-looking as the beaten earth in which they merged.

And the sun shone also on the slattern women of the district, revealing them to all their foul unloveliness, their loathsome and inexplicable fecundities—the Lonies, Lizzies, Lotties, Lenas of the district, the Sals, the Molls, the Millies and Bernices—as well as on all their wretched little progeny of Iras, Docks, and Reeses, their Asas, Jeters, Greeleys, Zebs, and Roys. They stood there at the edge of a ramshackle porch, tall and gaunt and slatternly, while their grimy little tow-haired brats scrabbled wretchedly around the edges of their filthy, lop-edged skirts. They stood there, those foul, unlovely women, with their gaunt, staring faces, sunken eyes, toothless jaws, and corrupt, discolored mouths, rilled at the edges with a thin brown line of snuff.

They stood there like some hopeless, loveless, wretched drudge of nature, bearing about them constantly the unbroken progressions of their loathsome fertility. In their arms they held their latest, youngest, wretched little child, swaddled in filthy rags, and staring forth at one with its blue, drowned eyes, its peaked and grimy little face, its nostrils and its upper lip gummed thickly with two ropes of snot. And in their pregnant bellies, which they proposed from their gaunt, unlovely figures like some dropsical ripeness foully fructifying in the sun, they carried the last and most revolting evidence of the germinal sequence of maternity, which thus was odiously revealed in every stage
of its disgusting continuity—from sagging breast to swollen womb and thence to the grimy litter of their filth-bespattered brats that crawled and scrambled round their foul skirts on the porch. The idiot proliferations of blind nature which these wretched rakes and hags and harridans of women so nakedly and brutally revealed as they stood there stupidly proposing their foul, swollen bellies in the merciless and shameful light of the hot sun filled Monk with such a feeling of choking and wordless fury, loathing, and disgust that every natural emotion of pity and sorrow was drowned out below the powerful flood tide of revulsion, and his antagonism to the women and their wretched children was scarcely to be distinguished from blind hatred.

For pity, more than any other feeling, is a “learned” emotion; a child will have it least of all. Pity comes from the infinite accumulations of man’s memory, from the anguish, pain, and suffering of life, from the full deposit of experience, from the forgotten faces, the lost men, and from the million strange and haunting visages of time. Pity comes upon the nick of time and stabs us like a knife. Its face is thin and dark and burning, and it has come before we know it, gone before we can grasp or capture it; it leaves a shrewd, deep wound, but a bitter, subtle one, and it always comes most keenly from a little thing.

It comes without a herald or a cause we can determine at some moment of our lives when we are far and lost from all the scenes that pity comes from; and how, why, where it comes we cannot say. But suddenly in the city—in the great and million-footed city—pity comes to us at evening when the dust and fury of another city day is over, and we lean upon the sills of evening in an ancient life. Then pity comes to us; we will remember children’s voices of long ago, the free, full shout of sudden, gleeful laughter from a child that we once knew, full of exulting innocence, the songs that we sang on Summer porches long ago, a note of pride in our mother’s voice and her grave, worn eyes of innocence as she boasted of a little thing, the simple words that a woman we once loved had said in some forgotten moment when she left us for another day.

Then pity is there, is there at once with its dark face and sudden knife, to stab us with an anguish that we cannot utter, to rend us with its agony of intolerable and wordless regret, to haunt us with the briefness of our days, and to tear our hearts with anguish and wild sorrow. And for what? For what? For all we want that never may be captured, for all we thirst for that never may be found. For love that must grow old and be forever dying, for all the bone, brain, passion, marrow, sinew of our lives, our hearts, our youth, that must grow old and bowed and barren, wearied out!

And oh! for beauty, that wild, strange song of magic, aching beauty, the intolerable, unutterable, ungraspable glory, power, and beauty of this world, this earth, this life, that is, and is everywhere around us, that we have seen and known at ten thousand moments of our lives, that has broken our hearts, maddened our brains, and torn the sinews of our lives asunder as we have lashed and driven savagely down the kaleidoscopic fury of the years in quest of it, unresting in our frenzied hope that some day we shall find it. hold it, fix it, make it ours forever—and that now haunts us strangely, sorrowfully, with its wild song and aching ecstasy as we lean upon the sills of evening in the city. We feel the sorrow and the hush of evening in the city, the voices, quiet, casual, lonely, of the people, far cries and broken sounds, and smell the sea, the harbor, and the huge, slow breathing of deserted docks, and know that there are ships there! And beauty swells like a wild song in our heart, beauty bursting like a great grape in our throat, beauty aching, rending, wordless, and unutterable, beauty in us, all around us, never to be captured—and we know that we are dying as the river flows! Oh, then will pity come, strange, sudden pity with its shrewd knife and the asp of time to stab us with a thousand wordless, lost, forgotten, little things!

And how, where, why it came we cannot say, but we feel pity now for all men who have ever lived upon the earth, and it is night, now, night, and the great stars are flashing in the lilac dark, the great stars are flashing on a hundred million men across America, and it is night,
now, night, and we are living, hoping, fearing, loving, dying in the darkness, while the great stars shine upon us as they have shone on all men dead and living on this earth, on all men yet unborn, and yet to live who will come after us!

Yet, when Monk looked at these foul, pregnant hags in slum-town’s gulch and hill and hollow, he could feel no pity, but only loathing, sickness of the flesh, disgust and nameless fear and dread and horror, so overwhelming in their tidal flood that he looked upon the filth and misery of these people with a shuddering revulsion and hated them because of it. For joy, faith, hope, every swelling certitude of glory, love, and triumph youth can know went dead and sick and rotten in that foul place. In the casual, filthy, and incessant littering of these ever-pregnant hags was evident not a love for life, but a contempt and carelessness for it so vile and criminal that it spawned its brood of rickety, scabby, mangy, foredoomed brats as indifferently as a bitch might drop its litter, and with a murderous nonchalance and bestial passivity that made man less than dung and instantly destroyed every proud illusion of the priceless value, dignity, and sanctity of his individual life.