OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

That’s just the point.

      Irene (with passionate scorn). Love! You don’t know what love means! Love is bigger than that! Love is big enough for all things, all people. (She extends her arms in an all-embracing gesture.) My love takes in the world — it embraces all mankind! It is glamorous, wild, free as the wind, John.

      John (slowly). Then you have had other lovers?

      Irene: Lovers come, lovers go. (She makes an impatient gesture.) What is that? Nothing! Only love endures — my love, which is greater than all.

      Eugene would writhe in his seat, and clench his hands convulsively. Then he would turn almost prayerfully to the bitter, mummied face of old Seth Flint for that barbed but cleansing vulgarity that always followed such a scene:

      “Well?” Professor Hatcher would say, putting down the manuscript he had been reading, taking off his eye-glasses (which were attached to a ribbon of black silk) and looking around with a quizzical smile, an impassive expression on his fine, distinguished face. “Well?” he would say again urbanely, as no one answered. “Is there any comment?”

      “What is she?” Seth would break the nervous silence with his rasping snarl. “Another of these society whores? You know,” he continued, “you can find plenty of her kind for three dollars a throw without any of that fancy palaver.”

      Some of the class smiled faintly, painfully, and glanced at each other with slight shrugs of horror; others were grateful, felt pleasure well in them and said underneath their breath exultantly:

      “Good old Seth! Good old Seth!”

      “Her love is big enough for all things, is it?” said Seth. “I know a truck driver out in Denver I’ll match against her any day.”

      Eugene and Ed Horton, a large and robust aspirant from the Iowa cornlands, roared with happy laughter, poking each other sharply in the ribs.

      time_

      “Do you think the play will act?” someone said. “It seems to me that it comes pretty close to closet drama.”

      “If you ask me,” said Seth, “it comes pretty close to water-closet drama. . . . No,” he said sourly. “What that boy needs is a little experience. He ought to go out and get him a woman and get all this stuff off his mind. After that, he might sit down and write a play.”

      For a moment there was a very awkward silence, and Professor Hatcher smiled a trifle palely. Then, taking his eye-glasses with a distinguished movement, he looked around and said:

      “Is there any other comment?”

      xvii

       Table of Contents

      Often during these years of fury, hunger, and unrest, when he was trying to read all the books and know all the people, he would live for days, and even for weeks, in a world of such mad and savage concentration, such terrific energy, that time would pass by him incredibly, while he tried to eat and drink the earth, stare his way through walls of solid masonry into the secret lives of men, until he had made the substance of all life his own.

      And during all this time, although he was living a life of the most savage conflict, the most blazing energy, wrestling day by day with the herculean forces of the million-footed city, listening to a million words and peering into a hundred thousand faces, he would nevertheless spend a life of such utter loneliness that he would go for days at a time without seeing a face or hearing a voice that he knew, and until the sound of his own voice seemed strange and phantasmal to him.

      Then suddenly he would seem to awake out of this terrific vision, which had been so savage, mad, and literal that its very reality had a fabulous and dreamlike quality, and time, strange million-visaged time, had been telescoped incredibly, so that weeks had passed by like a single day. He would awake out of this living dream and see the minutes, hours, and days, and all the acts and faces of the earth pass by him in their usual way. And instantly, when this happened, he would feel a bitter and intolerable loneliness — a loneliness so acrid, grey, and bitter that he could taste its sharp thin crust around the edges of his mouth like the taste and odour of weary burnt-out steel, like a depleted storage battery or a light that had gone dim, and he could feel it greyly and intolerably in his entrails, the conduits of his blood, and in all the substance of his body.

      When this happened, he would feel an almost unbearable need to hear the voice and see the face again of someone he had known and at such a time as this he would go to see his Uncle Bascom, that strange and extraordinary man who, born like the others in the wilderness, the hills of home, had left these hills for ever.

      Bascom now lived alone with his wife (for his four children were grown up and would have none of him) in a dingy section of one of the innumerable suburbs that form part of the terrific ganglia of Boston, and it was here that the boy would often go on Sundays.

      After a long confusing journey that was made by subway, elevated, and street car, he would leave the chill and dismal street car at the foot of a hill on a long, wide, and frozen street lined with tall rows of wintry elms, with smoky wintry houses that had a look of solid, closed and mellow warmth, and with a savage frozen waste of tidal waters on the right — those New England waters that are so sparkling, fresh and glorious, like a tide of sapphires, in the springtime, and so grim and savage in their frozen desolation in the winter.

      Then the street car would bang its draughty sliding doors together, grind harshly off with its cargo of people with pinched lips, thin red pointed noses, and cod-fish faces, and vanish, leaving him with the kind of loneliness and absence which a street car always leaves when it has gone, and he would turn away from the tracks along a dismal road or street that led into the district where his uncle had his house. And stolidly he would plunge forward against the grey and frozen desolation of that place to meet him.

      And at length he would pause before his uncle’s little house, and as he struck the knocker, he was always glad to hear the approaching patter of his Aunt Louise’s feet, and cheered by the brightening glance of her small birdy features, as she opened the door for him, inwardly exultant to hear her confirm in her bright ladylike tones his own prediction of what she would say: “Oh, THEAH you ah! I was wondering what was keeping you.”

      A moment later he would be greeted from the cellar or the kitchen by his uncle Bascom’s high, husky and yet strangely remote yell, the voice of a prophet calling from a mountain:

      “Hello, Eugene, my boy. Is that YOU?” And a moment later the old man would appear, coming up to meet him from some lower cellar-depth, swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward him howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed and faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching his great hands together at his waist; then hold one gaunt hand out to him and howl:

      “Hello, hello, hello, sit down, sit down, sit down,” after which, for no apparent reason, he would contort his gaunt face in a horrible grimace, convolve his amazing rubbery lips, and close his eyes and his mouth tightly and laugh through his nose in forced snarls: “Phuh! Phuh Phuh! Phuh! Phuh!”

      time_

      Bascom Pentland had been the scholar of his amazing family: he was a man of powerful intelligence and disordered emotions. Even in his youth, his eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, manner had made him an object of ridicule to his Southern kinsmen, but their ridicule was streaked with pride, since they accepted the impact of his personality as another proof that theirs was an extraordinary family. “He’s one of ’em, all right,” they said exultantly, “queerer than any of us!”

      Bascom’s youth, following the war between the States, had been seared by a bitter poverty, at once enriched and warped by a life that clung to the earth with a rootlike tenacity that was manual, painful, spare and stricken, and that rebuilt itself — fiercely, cruelly, and richly — from the earth. And because there burned and blazed in him from the first a hatred of human indignity, a passionate