And oh! for beauty, that wild, strange song of magic, aching beauty, the intolerable, unutterable, ungraspable glory, power, and beauty of this world, this earth, this life, that is, and is everywhere around us, that we have seen and known at ten thousand moments of our lives, that has broken our hearts, maddened our brains, and torn the sinews of our lives asunder as we have lashed and driven savagely down the kaleidoscopic fury of the years in quest of it, unresting in our frenzied hope that some day we shall find it. hold it, fix it, make it ours forever—and that now haunts us strangely, sorrowfully, with its wild song and aching ecstasy as we lean upon the sills of evening in the city. We feel the sorrow and the hush of evening in the city, the voices, quiet, casual, lonely, of the people, far cries and broken sounds, and smell the sea, the harbor, and the huge, slow breathing of deserted docks, and know that there are ships there! And beauty swells like a wild song in our heart, beauty bursting like a great grape in our throat, beauty aching, rending, wordless, and unutterable, beauty in us, all around us, never to be captured—and we know that we are dying as the river flows! Oh, then will pity come, strange, sudden pity with its shrewd knife and the asp of time to stab us with a thousand wordless, lost, forgotten, little things!
And how, where, why it came we cannot say, but we feel pity now for all men who have ever lived upon the earth, and it is night, now, night, and the great stars are flashing in the lilac dark, the great stars are flashing on a hundred million men across America, and it is night, now, night, and we are living, hoping, fearing, loving, dying in the darkness, while the great stars shine upon us as they have shone on all men dead and living on this earth, on all men yet unborn, and yet to live who will come after us!
Yet, when Monk looked at these foul, pregnant hags in slum-town’s gulch and hill and hollow, he could feel no pity, but only loathing, sickness of the flesh, disgust and nameless fear and dread and horror, so overwhelming in their tidal flood that he looked upon the filth and misery of these people with a shuddering revulsion and hated them because of it. For joy, faith, hope, every swelling certitude of glory, love, and triumph youth can know went dead and sick and rotten in that foul place. In the casual, filthy, and incessant littering of these ever-pregnant hags was evident not a love for life, but a contempt and carelessness for it so vile and criminal that it spawned its brood of rickety, scabby, mangy, foredoomed brats as indifferently as a bitch might drop its litter, and with a murderous nonchalance and bestial passivity that made man less than dung and instantly destroyed every proud illusion of the priceless value, dignity, and sanctity of his individual life.
How had man been begotten? Why, they had got him between brutish snores at some random waking of their lust in the midwatches of the night! They had got him in a dirty corner back behind a door in the hideous unprivacy of these rickety wooden houses, begotten, him standing in a fearful secrecy between apprehensive whisperings to make haste, lest some of the children hear! They had got him in some bestial sudden wakening of lust and hunger while turnip greens boiled with their humid fragrance on the stove! He had been begotten in some casual and forgotten moment which they had snatched out of their lives of filth, poverty, weariness, and labor, even as a beast will tear at chunks of meat; begotten in the crude, sudden, straddling gripe of half-rape on the impulsion of a casual opportunity of lust; begotten instantly as they were flung back rudely on the edge of an untidy bed in the red waning light of some forgotten Saturday when work was done, the week’s wages given, the week’s brief breathing space of rest, repose, and brutal dalliance come! He had been begotten without love, without beauty, tenderness, magic, or any nobleness of spirit, by the idiot, blind hunger of lust so vile that it knew no loathing for filth, stench, foulness, haggish ugliness, and asked for nothing better than a bag of guts in which to empty out the accumulations of its brutish energies.
The thought of it was not to be endured, and suddenly the boy cranes his neck, he grips his throat hard with his fingers, he squirms like something caught in a steel trap, a bestial grimace contracts his features—it is like drowning, drowning, not to be endured. The congress of their foul and bloody names—the loathsome company of these Iras, Docks and Reeses, the Jeters, Zebs and Greeleys of these poor-white slums—return to torment memory now with the white sear of horrible and instant recognition. Why? Because these people are the mountain people. These people are the poor-white litter of the hills. These people—Oh! it is intolerable, but true—these people came out of his mother’s world, her life! He hears lost voices in the mountains long ago! They return to him from depths of sourceless memory, from places he has never viewed, from scenes that he has never visited—the whole deposit of inheritance, the lives and voices of lost people in the hills a hundred years ago.
They were a sharp-distinguished and strong-fibered people of his mother’s stock, a race eccentric, powerful, thoughtful, honest, energetic—much better than this brutish and degraded kind. They were a race that lived upon the mountain slopes and river bottoms of old wild and rugged Zebulon; a kind that mined for mica in the hills, and hewed for tan-bark on the mountains; a kind that lived along a brawling mountain stream, and tilled the good land of the bottoms. It was a kind apart from these, hard-bitten in its pride, and hard-assured in its complacence, scornful in its own superiority, conceited, individual, strongly marked—but kinsman of this kind, as well.