The Web and the Rock Read online

  That vision of the city blazed outward not only from those images and objects which would evoke it literally, as the picture of the Bridge had done: it was now mixed obscurely and powerfully into his whole vision of the earth, into the chemistry and rhythm of his blood, into a million things with which it had no visible relation. It came in a woman's laughter in the street at night, in sounds of music and the faint thrumming of a waltz, in the guttural rise and fall of the bass violin; and it was in the odor of new grass in April, in cries half-heard and broken by the wind, and in the hot daze and torpid drone of Sun day afternoon.

  It came in all the sounds and noises of a carnival, in the smell of confetti, gasoline, the high, excited clamors of the people, the wheeling music of the carousel, the sharp cries and strident voices of the barkers.

  And it was in the circus smells and sounds as well--in the ramp and reek of lions, tigers, elephants, and in the tawny camel smell. It came somehow in frosty Autumn nights, in clear, sharp, frosty sounds of Hallowe'en. And it came to him intolerably at night in the receding whistle-wail of a distant and departing train, the faint and mournful tolling of its bell, and the pounding of great wheels upon the rail.

  It came also in the sight of great strings of rusty freight cars on the tracks, and in the sight of a rail, shining with the music of space and flight as it swept away into the distance and was lost from sight.

  In things like these, and countless others, the vision of the city would come alive and stab him like a knife.

  BOOK II

  THE HOUND OF DARKNESS

  Until his sixteenth year, George Webber, whom the boys called "Monk"--a name that was to stick to him throughout his life and come to seem more natural than the one his parents gave him--grew up among his Joyner kin. And he was one of them, knit closely in the web and fabric of their narrow, mountain-rimmed, and self-sufficient world.

  And yet he was a Webber, too, a fact of family shame and secret pride to him, and something from beyond the mountains was at work within his spirit.

  Thus the strong, conflicting pulls of Joyner and of Webber blood which met but never fused in his own veins produced a ceaseless ebb and flow within his mind and heart, and from these motions of his spirit came a strangely sentient vision of the world, a richly varied tapestry of life, woven in contrasting tones of light and dark, of sunshine and deep shadow.

  5

  Aunt Mag and Uncle Mark

  FOR MARK JOYNER'S WIFE, AUNT MAG, THE BOY GEORGE HAD LITTLE LOVE.

  She was of a family of mountain peasants, and she had done every thing she could to advance her position in life by a liberal use of Mark's purse.

  "She needn't give herself airs," said Aunt Maw. "When Mark first saw her, she was hoein' corn in a field."

  Childless at forty-five, Mag was a tall, rather gaunt, white-faced woman, with cold eyes, a thin nose, and a bitter, sneering mouth. She had been handsome, but for twenty years she had been under the spell of a neurosis which had held her in the unshakable conviction that she was suffering from consumption, cancer, heart disease, and pernicious anïmia. She was under constant medical attention. She spent half her waking hours extended in white terror on her bed, in a room chemical with shelves and tables full of bottles, and sealed against a draft of air.

  She was, as a matter of fact, a strong, healthy, and well-nourished woman.

  George sometimes went along with Aunt Maw when she crossed the intervening strip of lawn to visit Mag in her new and ugly house of bright red brick. They would find her in her sealed room in a sickening enervation of red-hot stove heat.

  "Come here!" Aunt Mag would say in her harsh, sneering voice, drawing the boy's unwilling figure beside her bed. "Lord a' mercy!" she would add, staring up into his face with her bitter laugh. "He smells like a Webber! Do your feet stink, boy?"

  These pleasantries, delivered to the accompaniment of sneering laughter, and a bending down of her thin, pious mouth as she pretended to sniff the air with disgust, did not increase George's love for his aunt.

  "You don't know how lucky you are, boy!" she would scream at him.

  "You ought to get down on your knees every night and thank the Lord for having a good Christian home like this! Where would you be if it wasn't for me? I made your Uncle Mark take you in! If it wasn't for me, you'd have been sent to an orphan asylum--that's where you'd be!"

  Under this goading, the boy would mumble his gratitude, but in his heart he often wished he had been sent to an orphanage.

  Mag was a Baptist, and very active in her church. She donated liberally; she fattened the preacher at her Sunday table; above all, she contributed large sums for the maintenance of the Baptist orphanage, and kept in her service at all times two or three children whom she had taken under her generous wing. This charity got the thick coatings of flattery which assure a Baptist of success on earth and favor in heaven.

  The minister, speaking to his Sunday hundreds, would say: "... And now I know we will all be glad to hear that the heart of another orphan child has been made happy through the generosity of Sister Joyner, who, in the great goodness of her heart, is giving a com fortable home to Betsy Belcher, a little girl who lost both her parents before she was eight years old. This makes the sixth orphan that the good woman has taken into her loving care. I know, when we see her giving to the Lord so freely, that there are others here who will be led to give a little in the furtherance of the great work which the good Brothers and Sisters at the orphanage are doing."

  And as Mag, bridling and ludicrously humble, advanced to the pulpit after the preacher's harangue, he would bend with greased unction over her hand, saying: "And how is the good woman today?"

  Mag took in these wretched children and made them drudges of all trades about the house. One of them was a boy of fourteen whose name was Willie, a thick-headed, smiling, perpetually bewildered idiot.

  Willie never played with the boys in the neighborhood because he was always kept busy doing chores, and George rarely saw him except on his visits of duty to Aunt Mag, when the orphan boy would be summoned into her room on a fire-building errand.

  "Did you ever see such an idiot?" Mag would say, with her sneering laugh. "Lord a' mercy!"

  And the boy would smile back at her, doubtfully, idiotically, fear fully, not knowing why.

  One time Willie was left with Aunt Maw when Mark and Mag went to Florida. He worked like a dog. Aunt Maw stuffed him with food and gave him a little room in which to sleep. She did not abuse him. She and George laughed constantly at him, and he was absurdly pleased and grateful to know that he amused them, smiling his wide, idiot grin.

  His hair was a tangled, uncut jungle which fell in matted lengths al most to his shoulder. Nebraska Crane told him solemnly, one day, that he was an experienced barber, and Willie submitted joyfully to the operation. Nebraska capped his large head with an inverted chamber pot, and laughed quietly from time to time as he sheared off all the hair that fell below the edges of the pot. And Willie, under the pot, continued to smile at them in friendly, puzzled idiocy while Nebraska and George caved slowly inward with laughter.

  Mag had two nephews who lived in the big house with her and Mark. They were the sons of her brother who had died, and when the mother of the boys died not long after their father, Mag had taken them in. Since they were her own blood, she had brought them up with as much misguided indulgence as though they had been her sons, and had lavished upon them all the affection of which her narrow and thwarted nature was capable. Mark's money was poured out for their benefit with a liberal hand, Mag having made it a cardinal point, in her system of educating them for their high position in life as her nearest kin, to deny them nothing.

  The older, Earl, was a heavy, florid, coarsely handsome young man with a loud, vacant, infectious laugh. He was well liked in the town. He had devoted all his time to the study of golf as a fine art, and was one of the best players in Libya Hill. It pleased Mag to know that he was a member of the Country Club. Her conception of gentility
was a life of complete idleness spent in the company of "the best people."

  The other nephew, the little golden apple of Mag's delight, was named Tad. He was now a young man of seventeen or eighteen, with a shiny red, porky face and an annoying, satisfied laugh. Tad had avoided expertly all of the inconvenient toil of life. He had all his aunt's skill in calling on physical collapse to aid him, and Mag was convinced that a weak heart ran in her family and that the boy had inherited it.

  Tad, too delicate for the rough uses of a school, received his instruction at home, peripatetically, in the Greek manner, between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, from a withered hack who ran a small school for boys, and who, for a substantial sum, winked considerately and assured Mag that her nephew had already received the equivalent of a university education.

  A good part of his time Tad spent in his "laboratory," a little gabled room in the attic to which he brought the subjects of his experiments- small, panting birds, vibrating cats, stray curs--noting with minute curiosity their sensory responses when he drove pins into their eyes, cut off portions of their tails, or seared them with a heated poker.

  "That boy's a born naturalist," said Mag.

  Mark Joyner was frugal for himself, but open-handed with Mag. He had toast and two boiled eggs for breakfast, which he cooked on top of a little wood stove in his room, estimating among his friends the cost of kindling, eggs, and bread at twelve cents. Later he used the hot water for shaving.

  "By God!" said the townsmen, "that's the reason he's got it!"

  He sought for his clothing among the Jews; he smoked rank, weedy "threefers"; he cobbled his own shoes; he exulted equally in his par simony to himself and his liberality to his household. From the first years of his marriage he had given Mag a generous allowance, which had increased as his business prospered, and she had turned over a considerable part of it to her two nephews. They were her own blood, and whatever she had was theirs.

  Most of the time Mag held her husband in iron subjection, but there was a hidden volcano of anger in him that increased from year to year of his living with her, and when it was roused, all her weapons of harsh laughter, incessant nagging, and chronic invalidism were impotent. He would grow silent, doing his utmost to control himself, and in the effort contorting his lips in a terrible grimace; but finally his emotion would become too much for him, and he would storm out of the house, away from Mag and the sound of her voice, and, turning his gaunt face towards the western hills, he would tramp through the woods for hours until his spirit grew calm again.

  6

  The Street of the Day

  WHEN GEORGE WEBBER WAS A CHILD, LOCUST STREET, THE STREET ON which he lived with his Joyner relatives, seemed fixed for him into the substance of immemorial antiquity. It had a beginning and a history, he had no doubt, but a history that began so long ago that countless men had come and lived and died and been forgotten since the street began, and no man living could remember when that was.

  Moreover, it seemed to him that every house and tree and garden had been framed to the pattern of an immutable design: they were there be cause they had to be there, they were built that way because that was the only way in which they could be built.

  This street held for him a universe of joy and magic which seemed abundant for a thousand lives. Its dimensions were noble in their space and limitless surprise. Its world of houses, yards, and orchards and its hundred people seemed to him to have the incomparable grandeur of the first place on earth, the impregnable authority of the center of the universe.

  In later years, George plainly saw that the world in which he lived had been a little place. All of the dimensions of the street had dwindled horribly. The houses that had seemed so imposing in their opulence and grandeur, the lawns that were so spacious, the backyards and the vistaed orchards that went on in limitless progressions of delight and new discovery that never had an end--all this had shrunken pitifully, incredibly, and now looked close, and mean, and cramped. Yet even then, years later, the street and all its million memories of a buried life awoke for him with the blazing and intolerable vividness of a dream. It was a world which he had known and lived with every atom of his blood and brain and spirit, and every one of its thousand images was rooted into the structure of his life forever, as much a part of him as his inmost thoughts.

  At first it was just the feel of the grass and the earth and the ground under your naked feet in May when you were going barefoot for the first time and walking gingerly. It was the cool feel of the sand up through your toes, and the feel of the soft tar in the streets and walking on a wall of concrete blocks, and the feel of cool, damp earth in shaded places. It was the feel of standing on the low edge of a roof or in a barn loft opening or on the second story of a house that was being built and daring another boy to jump; and looking over, waiting, knowing you must jump; and looking down, and waiting, daring, taunting, with a thudding heart, until you jumped.

  And then it was the good feel of throwing a small, round, heavy stone through the window of a vacant house when the red and ancient light of evening was blazing on its windows; and it was like feeling a base ball in your hands for the first time in the Spring, and its round and solid weight at the end of your arm and the way it shot away like a bullet the first time when you threw it with a feeling of terrific power and speed and it smacked into the odorous, well-oiled pocket of the catcher's mitt. And then it was like prowling round in dark, cool cellars, thinking you would come upon a buried treasure any moment, and finding rows of cobwebbed bottles and the rusty frame of an old bicycle.

  Sometimes it was like waking up on Saturday with the grand feeling of Saturday morning leaping in your heart, and seeing the apple blossoms drifting to the earth, and smelling sausage and ham and coffee, and knowing there would be no school today, no dreadful, morning, schoolhouse bell today, no thudding heart, and pounding legs, and shuddering nerves and bolted and uneasy food, and sour, distressful coffee in your guts, because there would be no school today and it was golden, shining, and triumphant Saturday.

  And then it was like Saturday night, and joy and menace in the air, and everyone waiting to get out on the streets and go "uptown," and taking a hot bath, and putting on clean clothes and eating supper, and going uptown on the nighttime streets of Saturday where joy and menace filled the air about you, and where glory breathed upon you, and yet never came, and getting far down towards the front and seeing Broncho Billy shoot the bad men dead three times until the last show of the night was over, and a cracked slide was shone on the screen which said "Good Night."

  Then it was like Sunday morning, waking, hearing the bus outside, smelling the coffee, brains and eggs, and buckwheat cakes, feeling peaceful, sweetly happy, not exultant as on Saturday, a slumberous, drowsy, and more mournful joy, the smell of the Sunday newspapers, and the Sunday morning light outside, bright, golden, yet religious light, and church bells, people putting on good clothes to go to church, and the closed and decent streets of Sunday morning, and going by the cool side where the tobacco store was, and the Sunday morning sports inside who didn't have to go to church, and the strong, clean, pungent smell of good tobacco, and the good smell and feel of the church, which was not so much like God as like a good and decent substance in the world--the children singing, "Shall we gather at the River the Bew-tee ful the Bew-tee-ful R-hiv-er!"--and the drone of voices from the class rooms later on, and the dark walnut, stained-glass light in the church, and decent, never-gaudy people with good dinners waiting for them when they got home, and the remote yet passionate austerity of the preacher's voice, the lean, horselike nobility of his face as he craned above his collar saying "heinous"--and all remote, austere, subdued, and decent as if God were there in walnut light and a choker collar; and then the twenty-minute prayer, the organ pealing a rich benison, and people talking, laughing, streaming out from the dutiful, weekly, walnut disinfection of their souls into bright morning-gold of Sunday light again, and standing then in friendly and yet lau
ghing groups upon the lawn outside, and streaming off towards home again, a steady liquid Sunday shuffle of good leather on the quiet streets--and all of it was good and godly, yet not like God, but like an ordered destiny, like Sun day morning peace and decency, and good dinners, money in the bank, and strong security.

  And then it was the huge winds in great trees at night--the remote, demented winds--the sharp, clean raining of the acorns to the earth, and a demon's whisper of evil and unbodied jubilation in your heart, speaking of triumph, flight, and darkness, new lands, morning, and a shining city.

  And then it was like waking up and knowing somehow snow was there before you looked, feeling the numb, white, brooding prescience of soft-silent, all-engulfing snow around you, and then hearing it, soft, almost noiseless, fluff and fall to earth, and the scraping of a shovel on the sidewalk before the house.

  And then it was like stern and iron Winter, and days and nights that ate intolerably the slow grey ash of time away, and April that would never come, and waiting, waiting, waiting dreamily at night for some thing magical that never happened, and bare boughs that creaked and swayed in darkness, and the frozen shapes of limbs that swung stiff shadows on the street below a light, and your aunt's voice filled with the fathomless sea-depths of Joyner time and horror, and of a race that lived forever while you drowned.

  And then it was like the few days that you liked school, when you began and ended in September and in June. It was like going back to school again in September and getting some joy and hope out of the book-lists that the teacher gave you the first day, and then the feel and look and smell of the new geography, the reader and the composition books, the history, and the smells of pencils, wooden rules, and paper in the bookstore, and the solid, wealthy feel of the books and bookstrap, and taking the books home and devouring them--the new, richly illustrated geography and history and reading books--devouring them with an insatiate joy and hunger until there was nothing new left in them, and getting up in the morning and hearing the morning school house bell, and hoping it would not be so bad this year after all.