Joel and his friend did not return immediately to the house with Joel’s mother and her other guests. Instead, leaving old Mr. Joel’s house, they turned left, and struck out for a walk through the fields and slopes and wooded country of the great estate. The day was hot, the broad fields brooded in the powerful and fragrant-clovered scent of afternoon, the woods were dense with tangled mystery, immensely still and green, yet dark incredibly, and filled with drowsy silence, brooding calm, ringing with the lovely music of unnumbered birds, alive with the swift and sudden bullet-thrum of wings, and haunted with the cool and magical incantation of their hidden waters.
It was the wild, sweet, casual, savage, and incredibly lovely earth of America, and of the wilderness, and it haunted them like legends, and pierced them like a sword, and filled them with a wild and swelling prescience of joy that was like sorrow and delight.
They toiled upward through the tangled forest-jungle of a wooded slope, and down again into the cool green-gladed secrecies of a hollow, and up through the wild still music of the woods again and out into the great rude swell of unmown fields, alive with all their brooding potency, their powerful and silent energy of the hot and fragrant earth of three o’clock, the drowsy and tremulous ululation of afternoon.
Their feet trod pathways in the hot and fragrant grasses; where they trod, a million little singing things leaped up to life, and hot dry stalks brushed crudely at their knees: the earth beneath their feet gave back a firm and unsmooth evenness, a lumpy resiliency.
Once in a field before them they saw a tree dense-leaved and burnished by hot light: the sun shone on its leaves with a naked and ungreen opacity, and Joel, looking towards it, whispered thoughtfully:
“ . . . Hm . . . It’s nice, that — I mean the way the light falls on it — It would be hard to paint: I’d like to come out here and try it.”
And the other assented, not, however, without a certain nameless desolation in his heart that broad and naked lights, the white and glacial opacity of brutal day aroused in him — and wanting more the wooded grove, the green-gold magic of a wooded grass, the woodland dark and thrum and tingled mystery, and the sheer sheeting silence of the hidden water.
It was a swelling, casual, nobly lavish earth, for ever haunted by a drowsy spell of time, and the unfathomed mystery of an elfin enchantment, the huge dream-sorcery of the mysterious and immortal river.
It was what he had always known it to be in his visions as a child, and he came to it with a sense of wonder and of glorious discovery, but without surprise, as one who for the first time comes into his father’s country, finding it the same as he had always known it would be, and knowing always that it would be there.
And finally the whole design of that earth, with the casual and powerful surveys of its great fields, its dense still woods of moveless silence ringing with the music of the birds, its far-off hills receding into time as haunting as a dream, and the central sorcery of its shining river — that enchanted thread which ran through all, from which all swept away, and towards which all inclined — was unutterably the language of all he had ever thought or felt or known of America: the great plantation of the earth abundant to the sustenance of mighty men, and enriching all its glamorous women with the full provender of its huge compacted sweetness, an America that was so casual and rich and limitless and free, and so haunted by dark time and magic, so aching in its joy with all the bitter briefness of our days, so young, so old, so everlasting, and so triumphantly the place of man’s good earth, his ripe fulfilment and of the most fortunate, good, and happy life that any man alive had ever known.
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-à-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 a............