And instantly he would see the town below now, coiling in a thousand fumes of homely smoke, now winking into a thousand points of friendly light its glorious small design, its aching, passionate assurances of walls, warmth, comfort, food, and love. It spoke to him of something deathless and invincible in the souls of men, like a small light in a most enormous dark that would not die. Then hope, hunger, longing, joy, a powerful desire to go down to the town again would fill his heart. For in the wild and stormy darkness of oncoming night there was no door, and the thought of staying there in darkness on the mountain top was not to be endured.
Then his uncle and he would go down the mountain side, taking the shortest, steepest way they knew, rushing back down to the known limits of the town, the streets, the houses, and the lights, with a sense of furious haste, hairbreadth escape, as if the great beast of the dark was prowling on their very heels. When they got back into the town, the whole place would be alive with that foggy, smoky, immanent, and strangely exciting atmosphere of early Winter evening and the smells of supper from a hundred houses. The odors of the food were brawny, strong, and flavorsome, and proper to the Winter season, the bite and hunger of the sharp, strong air. There were the smells of frying steak, and fish, and the good fat fragrance of the frying pork chops. And there were the smells of brawny liver, frying chicken, and, most pungent and well-savored smell of all, the smell of strong, coarse hamburger and the frying onions.
The grand and homely quality of this hamburger-onion smell had in it not only the deep glow and comfort of full-fed, hungry bellies, but somehow it made the boy think also of a tender, buxom, clean, desirable young wife, and of the glorious pleasures of the night, the bouts of lusty, loving dalliance when the lights were out, the whole house darkened, and the stormy and demented winds swooped down out of the hills to beat about the house with burly rushes. That image filled his heart with swelling joy, for it evoked again the glorious hope of the plain, priceless, and familiar happiness of a wedded love that might belong to any man alive—to butcher, baker, farmer, engineer, and clerk, as well as to poet, scholar, and philosopher.
It was an image of a wedded love forever hungry, healthy, faithful, clean, and sweet, never false, foul, jaded, wearied out, but forever loving, lusty in the dark midwatches of the night when storm winds beat about the house. It was at once the priceless treasure and unique possession of one man, and it was, like hamburger steak and frying onions, the plain glory and impossible delight of all humanity, which every man alive, he thought, might hope to win.
Thus the strong and homely fragrance of substantial food smells proper to the Winter evoked a thousand images of warmth, closed-in security, roaring fires, and misted windows, mellow with their cheerful light. The doors were shut, the windows were all closed, the houses were all living with that secret, golden, shut-in life of Winter, which somehow pierced the spirit of a passer-by with a wild and lonely joy, a powerful affection for man’s life, which was so small a thing against the drowning horror of the night, the storm, and everlasting darkness, and yet which had the deathless fortitude to make a wall, to build a fire, to close a door.
The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out from the palpable and passionate integument of life and fellowship, and of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand, enter it by a door, possess it with a word—a word that, somehow, he could never speak, a door that, somehow, he would never open.
BOOK III
The Web and the World
When George Webber’s father died, in 1916, the boy was left disconsolate. True, he had been separated from his father for eight years, but, as he said, he had always had the sense that he was there. Now, more strongly than before, he felt himself caught fast in all that web of lives and times long past but ever present in which his Joyner blood and kin enmeshed him, and some escape from it became the first necessity of his life.
Fortunately, John Webber left his son a small inheritance—enough to put the boy through college, and, with careful management, to help him get his bearings afterwards. So that Autumn, with sadness and with exultation, he bade good-bye to all his Joyner relatives and set forth on his great adventure.
And, after college, he dreamed a dream of glory in new lands, a golden future in the bright and shining city.
CHAPTER 10
Olympus in Catawba