The Web and the Rock - Thomas Wolfe by Thomas Wolfe

Author:Thomas Wolfe [Wolfe, Thomas]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-04-09T03:17:47.389566+00:00

12

The Torch

ALSOP HAD TAKEN MONK WEBBER UNDER HIS PROTECTIVE WING WHEN the younger boy had arrived at Pine Rock in his freshman year, and for a period the association between them was pretty close. The younger one had quickly become a member of the coterie of devoted freshmen who clustered about their leader like chicks around a mother hen. For some months, definitely he was sealed of the tribe of Alsop.

Evidences of what journalists call a "rift" began to appear, however, before the end of the first year--began to appear when the younger student began to look around him and ask questions of this small but new and comparatively liberal world in which, for the first time in his life, he began to feel himself untrammeled, free, the beginning of a man. The questions multiplied themselves furiously.

Monk had heard the president of the college, the late Hunter Gris wold McCoy, described by Alsop not only as "the second greatest man since Jesus Christ," but as a thinker and philosopher of the first water, a speaker of the most eloquent persuasion, and the master of a literary style which, along with that of Woodrow Wilson, by which he was undoubtedly strongly influenced, was unsurpassed in the whole range of English literature. Now, having, as most boys of that age do have, a very active and questioning mind, he began to feel distinctly uncomfortable when Alsop said these things, to squirm uneasily in his chair, to keep silence, or to mumble respectful agreements, while all the time he asked himself rather desperately what was wrong with him. Because, the truth of the matter was that "the second greatest man since Jesus Christ" bored him passionately, even at the tender age of seventeen.

And as for that triumphant style which Alsop assured him was practically unsurpassed in the whole field of English letters, he had made repeated attempts to read it and digest it--it had been fittingly embalmed in a volume which bore the title of Democracy and Leader ship--and he simply could not get through it. As for the famous Chapel talks, which were considered masterpieces of simple eloquence and gems of philosophy, he hated them. He would rather have taken a bitter laxative than sit through one of them; but sit through them he did, hundreds of times, and endured them, until he came to have a positive dislike for Hunter Griswold McCoy. His pale, pure face, some what gaunt and emaciated, a subtle air he conveyed always of bearing some deep, secret sorrow, and of suffering in some subtle, complicated way for humanity, began to afflict Monk with a sensation that was akin to, and in fact was scarcely distinguishable from, the less acute stages of nausea. And when Alsop assured him, and the rest of the reverent clique, that Hunter Griswold McCoy was and had always been "as pure and sweet as a fine, sweet gul--yes, suh!"--his dislike for Hunter Griswold McCoy became miserably acute. He disliked him because Hunter

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