OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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to make commercially attractive to every young man the beauty and comfort of the life she had made for her family, and although the secret niggling discontent of their lives was plainly described on both her own and her daughter’s face, steeped behind their transparent masks in all the small poisons of irritability and bitterness, they united in their pretty tableau before the world — a tableau, he felt, something like those final exhibitions of grace and strength with which acrobats finish the act, the strained smile of ease and comfort, as if one could go on hanging by his toes for ever, the grieving limbs, the whole wrought torture which will collapse in exhausted relief the second the curtain hides it.
“We want you to feel absolutely at home here,” she said brightly. “Make this your headquarters. You will find us simple folk here, without any frills,” she continued, with a glance around the living-room, letting her eye rest with brief satisfaction upon the striped tiles of the hearth, the flowered vases of the mantel, the naked doll, tied with a pink sash, on the piano, and the pictures of “The Horse Fair,” the lovers flying before the storm, Maxfield Parrish’s “Dawn,” and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” which broke the spaces of the wall, “but if you like a quiet family life, a welcome is always waiting for you here. Oh, yes — everyone is for each other here: we keep no secrets from each other in our little family.”
Eugene thought that this was monstrous if it was true; a swift look at Genevieve and Mama convinced him, however, that not everything was being told. A mad exultancy arose in him: the old desire returned again to throw a bomb into the camp, in order to watch its effect; to express murderous opinions in a gentle Christian voice, further entrenched by an engaging matter-of-factness, as if he were but expressing the commonplace thought of all sensible people; bawdily, lewdly, shockingly with a fine assumption of boyish earnestness, sincerity, and naïveté. So, in a voice heavily coated with burlesque feeling, he said: “Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Simpson. You have no idea what it means to me to be able to come to a place like this.”
“I know,” said Genevieve with fine sympathy, “when you’re a thousand miles from home —”
“A thousand!” he cried, with a bitter laugh, “a thousand! Say rather a million.” And he waited, almost squealing in his throat, until they should bite.
“But — but your home is in the South, isn’t it?” Mrs. Simpson inquired doubtfully.
“Home! Home!” cried he, with raucous laugh. “I have no home!”
“Oh, you poor boy!” said Genevieve.
“But your parents — are they BOTH dead?”
“No!” he answered, with a sad smile. “They are both living.”
There was a pregnant silence.
“They do not live together,” he added after a moment, feeling he could not rely on their deductive powers.
“O-o-oh,” said Mrs. Simpson significantly, running the vowel up and down the vocal scale. “O-o-oh!”
“Nasty weather, isn’t it?” he remarked, deliberately drawing a loose cigarette from his pocket. “I wish it would snow: I like your cold Northern winters as only a Southerner can like them; I like the world at night when it is muffled, enclosed with snow; I like a warm secluded house, sheltered under heavy fir trees, with the curtains drawn across a mellow light, and books, and a beautiful woman within. These are some of the things I like.”
“Gee!” said the boy, his heavy blond head leaned forward intently. “What was the trouble?”
“Jimmy! Hush!” cried Genevieve, and yet they all looked toward Eugene with eager intensity.
“The trouble?” said he, vacantly. “What trouble?”
“Between your father and mother?”
“Oh,” he said carelessly, “he beat her.”
“Aw-w! He hit her with his fist?”
“Oh, no. He generally used a walnut walking-stick. It got too much for her finally. My mother, even then, was not a young woman — she was almost fifty, and she could not stand the gaff so well as she could in her young days. I’ll never forget that last night,” he said, gazing thoughtfully into the coals with a smile. “I was only seven, but I remember it all very well. Papa had been brought home drunk by the mayor.”
“The MAYOR?”
“Oh, yes,” said Eugene casually. “They were great friends. The mayor often brought him home when he was drunk. But he was very violent that time. After the mayor had gone, he stamped around the house smashing everything he could get his hands on, cursing and blaspheming at the top of his voice. My mother stayed in the kitchen and paid no attention to him when he entered. This, of course, infuriated him. He made for her with the poker. She saw that at last she was up against it; but she had realized that such a moment was inevitable. She was not unprepared. So she reached in the flour bin and got her revolver —”
“Did she have a revolver?”
“Oh, yes,” he said nonchalantly, “my Uncle Will had given it to her as a Christmas present. Knowing my father as he did, he told her it might come in handy sometime. Mama was forced to shoot at him three times before he came to his senses.”
There was a silence.
“Gee!” said the boy, finally. “Did she hit him?”
“Only once,” Eugene replied, tossing his cigarette into the fire. “A flesh wound in the leg. A trifle. He was up and about in less than a week. But, of course, Mama had left him by that time.”
“Well!” said Mrs. Simpson, after a yet longer silence, “I’ve never had to put up with anything like THAT.”
“No, thank heaven!” said Genevieve fervently. Then, curiously: “Is — is your mother Mr. Pentland’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“And the uncle who gave her the revolver — Mr. Pentland’s brother?”
“Oh, yes,” Eugene answered readily. “It’s all the same family.” He grinned in his entrails, thinking of Uncle Bascom.
“Mr. Pentland seems a very educated sort of man,” said Mrs. Simpson, having nothing else to say.
“Yes. We went to see him when we were hunting for a house,” Genevieve added. “He was very nice to us. He told us he had once been in the ministry.”
“Yes,” said Eugene. “He was a Man of God for more than twenty years — one of the most eloquent, passionate, and gifted soul-savers that ever struck fear into the hearts of the innumerable sinners of the American nation. In fact, I know of no one with whom to compare him, unless I turn back three centuries to Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine, who evoked, in a quiet voice like the monotonous dripping of water, a picture of hell-fire so near that the skins of the more imaginative fanatics on the front rows visibly blistered. However, Edwards spoke for two and a half hours: Uncle Bascom, with his mad and beautiful tongue, has been known to drive people insane with terror in twenty-seven minutes by the clock. There are still people in the asylums that he put there,” he said piously. “I hope,” he added quickly, “you didn’t ask him why he had left the Church.”
“Oh, no!” said Genevieve. “We never did that.”
“Why did he?” asked Mrs. Simpson bluntly, who felt that now she had only to ask and it would be given. She was not disappointed.
“It was the centuries-old conflict between organized authority and the individual,” said Eugene. “No doubt you have felt it in your own lives. Uncle Bascom was a poet, a philosopher, a mystic — he had the soul of an artist which must express divine love and ideal beauty in corporeal form. Such a man as this is not going to be shackled by the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical convention. An artist must love and be loved. He must be swept by the Flow of Things, he must be a constantly expanding atom in the rhythmic surges of the Life Force. Who knew this better than Uncle Bascom when he