The Web and The Root (37 page)

They pushed him up and back, in through the ropes. He reeled in glassy-eyed, tottering like a drunken man. He fell into a clinch and hung on desperately; his brain cleared, the fight was on again—and again the riveting thud, thud, thud of those relentless hands. The bull halted, stunned, and collapsed again like broken straw.

It was all over in the first round, really, a round that lasted for three minutes, but that had attained such a focal concentration of intensity that men asserted later that it seemed to last for hours. In the second round it was ended definitely. The killer had learned caution now. He came out craftily this time, with his black jaw tucked in below his shoulder. It was all over then. The great bull had no weapons for methods such as these. He lowered his head and charged. The riveter shot him down.

That night the city was a boiling of excitement. It was like a war, like the announcement of a general mobilization order. After the fight, Jim Randolph, Monty Bellamy, Harvey Williams, Perce Smead, and Monk got together again at one of the exits to the grounds and went downtown. By the time they reached midtown New York the news was there. Broadway and the triangulated space before the Times Building
was a seething horde of wildly excited, milling, fiercely argumentative people. Monk had never seen anything like it before. It was passionately and desperately exciting, but it was also sinister.

The crowd was composed, for the most part, of men of the Broadway type and stamp, men with vulpine faces, feverish dark eyes, features molded by cruelty and cunning, corrupted, criminal visages of night, derived out of the special geography, the unique texture, the feverish and unwholesome chemistries of the city’s nocturnal life of vice and crime. Their unclean passion was appalling. They snarled and cursed and raged at one another like a pack of mongrel curs. There were raucous and unclean voices, snarls of accusation and suspicion, with hatred and infuriating loathing, with phrases of insane obscenity and filth.

Monk could not understand it. He was so new to the city, and the image of those livid faces, those convulsed and snarling mouths, those feverish eyes shining there in the glare of night, evoked a sense of some sinister and yet completely meaningless passion. He listened to their words. He heard their epithets of hatred and of filth. He tried to find the meaning of it, and there was no meaning. Some hated Firpo, some hated Dempsey, some hated the fight and the result. Some charged that the fight had been “fixed,” others that it should never have been held. Some asserted that Firpo had been doped, others that he had been bribed; still others, that he was “nothing but a tramp,” that Dempsey was “a yellow bum,” that a former champion could have beaten both of them at the same time.

But what was behind their snarling hatred? Unable to explain it any other way, Monk at last concluded that what they really hated was not so much the fight, the fighters, and the fight’s result: it was themselves, one another, every living thing on earth. They hated for the sake of hate. They jeered, reviled, cursed one another because of the black poison in their souls. They could believe in nothing, and neither could they believe in themselves for not believing. They were a race that had been drugged by evil, a tribe that got its only nourishment
from envenomed fruit. It was so blind, so willful, and so evil, so horrible and so meaningless, that suddenly it seemed to Monk that a great snake lay coiled at the very heart and center of the city’s life, that a malevolent and destructive energy was terribly alive and working there, and that he and the others who had come here from the little towns and from the country places, with such high passion and with so much hope, were confronted now with something evil and unknown at the heart of life, which they had not expected, and for which all of them were unprepared.

Monk was to see it, feel it, know it later on in almost every facet of the city’s life, this huge and baffling malady of man’s brain, his spirit, and his energy. But now he witnessed it for the first time. He could see no reason for this idiot and blind malevolence. Yet it was there, it was everywhere, in the hateful passion of those twisted faces and the unwholesome radiance of those fevered eyes.

And now Monk heard Jim speaking. They had moved about from group to group and listened to these hate-loving men, and, now Jim Randolph began to speak, quietly, in his rather soft and husky tones, good-naturedly and yet commandingly, telling them they were mistaken, that the fighters were not drugged, that the fight had not been fixed, that the result had been inevitable and just. And then Monk heard one of those mongrel voices snarl back at him in hatred and derision, a twisted and corrupted mouth spat out at him a filthy epithet. Then, quicker than the eye could wink, the thing had happened. Jim seized the creature with one hand, draping his garments together in his powerful fingers, lifting him clear off his feet into the air, and shaking him like a rat.

“Listen, mister!” his husky voice was now charged with a murderous intensity of passion that struck silence through the whole raucous and disputing crowd and turned the creature’s face a dirty grey, “No man alive is going to say that to me! Another word from you and I’ll break your dirty neck!” And he shook him once again till the creature’s head snapped like a broken doll’s. And then Jim dropped him like a
soiled rag, and, turning to his companions, said quietly: “Come on, boys. We’ll get out of here.” And the creatures of the night held back before him as he passed.

Poor Jim! He, too, was like a creature from another world. With all his folly and his sentiment, with all his faults and childish vanities, he was still the heroic remnant of a generation that had already gone, and that perhaps we needed. But he was lost.

G
EORGE
W
EBBER HAD
grown into a youth somewhat above the middle height, around five feet nine or ten, but he gave the impression of being shorter than that because of the way he had been shaped and molded, and the way in which he carried himself. He walked with a slight stoop, and his head, which was carried somewhat forward with a thrusting movement, was set down solidly upon a short neck, between shoulders which, in comparison with the lower part of his figure, his thighs and legs, were extremely large and heavy. He was barrel-chested, and perhaps the most extraordinary feature of his make-up—which accounted for the nickname he had had since childhood—were the arms and hands: the arms were unusually long, and the hands, as well as the feet, were very big with long, spatulate fingers which curved naturally and deeply in like paws. The effect of this inordinate length of arms and hands, which dangled almost to the knees, together with the stooped and heavy shoulders and the out-thrust head, was to give his whole figure a somewhat prowling and half-crouching posture.

His features, his face, were small, compact—somewhat pugnosed, the eyes set very deep in beneath heavy brows, the forehead rather low, the hair beginning not far above the brows. When he was listening or talking to someone, his body prowling downward, his head thrust forward and turned upward with a kind of packed attentiveness, the simian analogy was inevitable; therefore the name of “Monk” had stuck. Moreover, it had never occurred to him, apparently, to get his figure clothed in garments suited to his real proportions. He just walked into
a store somewhere and picked up and wore out the first thing he could get on. Thus, in a way of which he was not wholly conscious, the element of grotesqueness in him was exaggerated.

The truth of the matter is that he was not really grotesque at all. His dimensions, while unusual and a little startling at first sight, were not abnormal. He was not in any way a freak of nature, although some people might think so. He was simply a youth with big hands and feet, extremely long arms, a trunk somewhat too large and heavy, with legs too short, and features perhaps too small and compact for the big shoulders that supported them. Since he had added to this rather awkward but not distorted figure certain unconscious tricks and mannerisms, such as his habit of carrying his head thrust forward, and of peering upward when he was listening or talking, it was not surprising if the impression he first made on people should sometimes arouse laughter and surprise. Certainly he knew this, and he sometimes furiously and bitterly resented it; but he had never inquired sufficiently or objectively enough into the reasons for it.

Although he had a very intense and apprehensive eye for the appearance of things, the eager, passionate absorption of his interest and attention was given to the world around him. To his own appearance he had never given a thought. So when, as sometimes happened, the effect he had on people was rudely and brutally forced upon his attention, it threw him into a state of furious anger. For he was young—and had not learned the wisdom and tolerant understanding of experience and maturity. He was young—still over-sensitive. He was young—not able to forget himself, to accept the jokes and badinage good-naturedly. He was young—and did not know that personal beauty is no great virtue in a man, and that this envelope of flesh and blood, in which a spirit happened to be sheathed, could be a loyal and enduring, though ugly, friend.

All this—and many more important things besides—had got him into a lot of confusion, a lot of torture, and a lot of brute unhappiness. And the same thing was happening to a million other young men at
that time. Monk was a hard-pressed kid. And because he was hard pressed, he had wangled himself into a lot of nonsense. It wouldn’t be true to say, for example, that he hadn’t got anything out of his “education.” Such as it was, he had got a great deal out of it, but, like most of the “education” of the time, it had been full of waste, foolishness, and misplaced emphasis.

The plain, blunt truth of the matter was that, essentially, although he did not know it, Monk was an explorer. And so were a million other young people at that time. Well, exploring is a thrilling thing. But, even for the physical explorers, it is a hard thing, too. Monk had the true faith, the true heroism, of an explorer. He was a lot more lonely than Columbus ever was, and for this reason he was desperately confused, groping, compromising, and unsure.

It would be nice to report that he was swift and certain as a flame, always shot true to the mark, and knew what he knew. But this wasn’t true. He knew what he knew, but he admitted that he knew it only seldom. Then when he did, he asserted it; like every other kid, he “went to town.” He said it, he shot it home, he made no apologies—he was passionate and fierce and proud, and true—but the next morning he would wake up feeling that he had made a fool of himself and that he had something to explain.

He “knew,” for example, that freight cars were beautiful; that a spur of rusty box cars on a siding, curving off somewhere into a flat of barren pine and clay, was as beautiful as anything could be, as anything has ever been. He knew all the depths and levels of it, all the time evocations of it—but he couldn’t say so. He hadn’t found the language for it. He had even been told, by implication, that it wasn’t so. That was where his “education” came in. It wasn’t really that his teachers had told him that a freight car was not beautiful. But they had told him that Keats, Shelley, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, West-minister Abbey, the Louvre, the Isles of Greece, were beautiful. And they had told it to him so often and in such a way that he not only thought it true—which it is—but that these things were everything
that beauty is.

When the freight car occurred to him, he had to argue to himself about it, and then argue with other people about it. Then he would become ashamed of himself and shut up. Like everyone who is a poet, and there really are a lot of poets, he was an immensely practical young man, and suddenly he would get tired of arguing, because he knew there was not anything to argue about, and then shut up. Furthermore, he had the sense that some people who
said
that a freight car was beautiful were fake æsthetes—which they were. It was a time when smart people were going around saying that ragtime or jazz music were the real American rhythms, and likening them to Beethoven and Wagner; that the comic strip was a true expression of American art; that Charlie Chaplin was really a great tragedian and ought to play Hamlet; that advertising was the only “real” American literature.

The fellow who went around saying that advertising was the only “real” American literature might be either one of two things: a successful writer or an unsuccessful one. If he was a successful one—a writer, say, of detective stories which had had an enormous vogue and had earned the man a fortune—he had argued himself into believing that he was really a great novelist. But “the times were out of joint,” and the reason he did not write great novels was because it was impossible to write great novels in such times: “the genius of America was in advertising,” and since there was no use doing anything else, the whole spirit of the times being against it, he had become a writer of successful detective stories.

That was one form of it. Then there was the fellow who was not quite good enough to be good at anything. He sneered at the writer of detective stories, but he also sneered at Dreiser and O’Neill and Sinclair Lewis and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He was a poet, or a novelist, or a critic, or a member of Professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard or at Yale, but nothing that he did came off; and the reason that it didn’t was because “the times were out of joint,” and “the real literature of America was in the advertising in
popular magazines.” So this fellow sneered at everything from a superior elevation. Dreiser, Lewis, Robinson, O’Neill, and the advertising in the
Saturday Evening Post
were all the same, really—“
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
.”

A
T THAT TIME
in George Webber’s life, amidst all the nonsense, confusion, torture, and brute unhappiness that he was subject to, he was for the first time trying to articulate something immense and terrible in life which he had always known and felt, and for which he thought he must now find some speech, or drown. And yet it seemed that this thing which was so immense could have no speech, that it burst through the limits of all recorded languages, and that it could never be rounded, uttered, and contained in words. It was a feeling that every man on earth held in the little tenement of his flesh and spirit the whole ocean of human life and time, and that he must drown in this ocean unless, somehow, he “got it out of him”—unless he mapped and charted it, fenced and defined it, plumbed it to its uttermost depths, and knew it to its smallest pockets upon the remotest cores of the everlasting earth.