| ◄ BOOK SIX | Of Time and the River BOOK SEVEN written by Thomas Wolfe |
BOOK EIGHT ► |
| Charles Scribner’s Sons 1935 (pages 853-899) |
XCVI
Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten tune, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlour, and let us hear the sound of the ladies’voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day. Let us hear the sound of the voices of the Greeks, and observe closely if they were all wise and beautiful at ten o’clock in the morning; let us see if their limbs were all perfect, and their gestures grave and stately, also let us smell their food and observe them eating, and hear, if only once, the sound of a wheel in a street, the texture of just four forgotten moments.
Give us the sounds of Egypt on a certain day; let us hear the voice of King Menkaura and some of the words of the Lady Sennuwy; also the voices of the cotton-farmers. Let us hear the vast and casual sound of life, in these old peoples: their greetings in the street, the voices of the housewives and the merchants. And let us hear the laughter of a woman in the sixteenth century.
The cry of the wolf would always be the same; the sound of the wheel will always be the same; and the hoof of the horse on the roads of every time will be the same. But play us a tune on an unbroken spinet; and let us hear the voices of the knights at dinner. The cry of a man to his dog, and the barking of the dog; the call of the plough-driver to his horse, and the sound of the horse; the noise of the hunt, and the sound of the flowing water, will always be the same.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let us hear the actual voices of old fairs; let us move backward through our memories, and through the memory of the race, let us relive the million forgotten moments of our lives, and let us see poor people sitting in their rooms in 1597, and let us see the rich man standing with his back before the fire, in the Middle Ages, and his wife knitting by the table, and let us hear their casual words.
Let us see the men who built the houses of Old Frankfort; let us see how they worked, and let us see them sitting on hewn timbers when they ate their lunches; let us hear their words, the sound of their voices. Unwind the fabric of lost time out of our entrails, repair the million little threads of actual circumstance until the seconds grow grey, bright and dusty with the living light, and we see the plain unfabled faces of the people; let us awake, and hear the people in the streets, and see Tobias Smollett pass our window.
Then, play us a tune on the unbroken spinet, let time be as the road to London and we a traveller on it; and let us enter London and find out what year it is there in the Mile End Road; let it be dark, and let us enter London in the dark, and hear men’s voices, and let us see if we could understand them; and let us then find out what year it is, a lodging for the night, and see if they read mystery on us, or would fly away from us.
But there are times that are stranger yet, there are times that are stranger than the young knights and the horses, and the sounds of the eating taverns. The far time is the time of yesterday: it is the time of early America, it is the voices of the people on Broadway in 1841, it is the sounds of the streets in Des Moines in 1887, it is the engines of the early trains at Baltimore in 1853, it is the faces and voices of the early American people, who are lapped up in the wilderness, who are hid from us, whose faces are in mystery, whose lives are more dark and strange than the lives of the Saxon thanes.
The time that is lovely is the time of the fatness and of the bright colours; it is the elfin time of the calendars, and the sad and mysterious time of the early photographs. It is the time of the early lithographs, it is the time when the word was green and red and yellow. It is the time of the red barn and the windmill, and the house of the seven thousand gables; it is the time of the green lawn and the blue sky and the white excursion-steamer in the river, and the flags, the streamers, and gay brown-and-white buntings, the brass bands and the tumult of all the people who cry out Hurray, hurray!
It is the time of the boy rolling his hoop down the pink path, and of Mama in a bonnet and with a muff, and a stuck-out bottom, and Papa with a derby; it is the time of peace and plenty and the fair stripes of colour, and the iron stag. It is the time of the lightning-rod salesman and the summer boarder, it is the time of Farmer Hayseed and of Dusty Rhodes the tramp, it is the time when boys started on the downward path through cigarettes; it is a lovely time. It is the time of the lures and snares of the wicked city and of the Great White Way; it is the time of pitfalls that await the innocent country girl with a whaleboned collar and a small waist; it is the time of Palaces of Sin or the Devil on Sunday; it is the time of the Tenderloin, of the nests of vice; it is the time of the gilded resorts with mirrors and soft carpets, where the mechanical piano played and you bought champagne, and of the High Class places and the Madam who would not stand for any ungentlemanly behaviour, the time of the girls who wore evening dresses and were Perfect Ladies.
It is the time of the opera and theatre parties, and the Horse Show, and of late jolly suppers in the walnut dining-rooms; it is the time of elegant ladies with long gloves on naked arms, and Welsh rarebit in the chafing-dish; it is the time of the Four Hundred, and the great names of the millionaires—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Goulds—it is the time of the powdered flunkeys and the twenty-dollar favours; it is the time of Newport, and the canopied red-carpeted sidewalks, and the great mansions on Fifth Avenue, and the splendid gilt and plush marble halls, and the time of the fortune-hunting foreign noblemen (London papers please copy).
It is the time of the effeminate fop, and the lisping ass (Oh, Percy! I’ll slap you on your wrist, you rough, rude thing, you!); it is the time of the Damned Dude who wears English clothes and has cuffs on his trousers (Hey, mister! Is it raining in London?), and he never did anything in his life but spend his old man’s money, he never did an honest lick of work in his life, he’s not worth powder enough to kill him, and if the son of a bitch comes fooling around any sister of mine I’ll beat the everlasting tar out of him.
When the songs that they sang were old and sweet, when the songs that they sang were like beauty’s from afar, and when people sitting on their porches in the dusk could hear (O sweet and low!) the corner quartette sing, “Sweet Adeline”; when the songs that they sang were “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer True.”
It is the time of the wharves and the tangled shipping, the horse-cars by the docks, of piled-up casks and kegs of rum and molasses. There are forgotten fume-flaws of bright smoke above Manhattan; where are the lost faces that came towards us over Brooklyn bridge, where are the parted ripples and the proud forgotten ships?
By the waters of life, before we knew that we must die, before we had seen our father’s face, before we had sought the print of his foot: by the waters of time (the tide! the tide!), before we had seen the shadows in the haunted woods, before lost moments lived again, before the shades were fleshed. Who are we, that must follow in the footsteps of the king? Who are we, that had no kings to follow? We are the unkinged men. Have we left shadows on forgotten walls? Have we crossed running water and lived for seven timeless years with the enchantress, and shall we find our son who is ourself, and will he know us?
Shall your voices unlock the gates of my brain? Shall I know you, though I have never seen your face? Will you know me, and will you call me “son”? Father, I know that you live, though I have never found you.
In the old town of Tours he quickly found lodging in an ancient hotel or tavern—really a congeries of old, whited buildings with separate doors, looking out on a cobbled courtyard through whose gate, in former times perhaps, the horses and post-chaise of weary travellers had often clattered. In a cold, little room in one of the buildings facing on the court, he now settled down, and there began for him one of the most extraordinary and phantasmal time-experiences of his life. Day passed into night, night merged into day again like the unbroken weaving of a magic web, and he stayed on, week after week, plunged in a strange and legendary spell of time that seemed suspended and detached from the world of measurable event, fixed in unmoving moment, unsilent silence, changeless change.
Later, it seemed to him that that strange reverie and dream of time, in which his life was now so strangely fixed, had been induced by a series of causes, easy to understand in the light of experience, and almost logical in their consequence. It was five months since he had left America. After the overwhelming impact of impression and event which a new world, a new life, had brought to him in so many varied, chance, and unexpected ways—after the ship, the voyage, the enormous isolation, the whole earth-detachment of the sea (itself a life, a world, a universe of new experience), after the weeks in England, the huge web of London, the brief but poignantly illuminating days in Bristol, Bath, and Devonshire, with fleeting glimpses of something so strange, yet so familiar, so near, yet never to be touched, that it seemed to him he was looking in through a lighted window at a life which he had always known, but which he could never make his own; after the terrific impact of France and Paris—the month of bewildered, desperate and almost terror-stricken isolation in a new and hostile world—an atom, wordless, tongueless, almost drowned among the strange, dark faces of the Frenchmen; after all the confusion, grief, and error of that month—the night-time kaleidoscope of cafés, brothels, alcohol, and women, the frenzied day-time prowling through museums, bookstalls, thronging streets—the thousand monuments of an alien culture, the million faces of an alien race, until every atom of him was wrung, trembling, maddened and exhausted, sick with loss and hopelessness, weary with despair—after the huge first shock and flood-tide of immersion in an alien life—had come his meeting with Starwick, Elinor, and Ann, the brief, fatal, furious weeks of their relation, the bitter loss and waste and rankling pain of parting; and finally the sweltering and incurable ache, the blind and driven aimlessness of wandering, the chance encounter with the Countess, and the brief interlude of forgetfulness and oblivion that had come to him while he was with her—and now, blank, silent loneliness again, the blind fortuity of chance, the arbitrary halt and desperate entrenchment of his spirit in this town of Tours.
Now, after the savage kaleidoscope of these months of hope and grief and ecstasy, of desolation and despair, of passion, love, and suffering, of maddened hunger and infuriate desire, after all the restless and insatiable seeking of his goaded, driven, and unresting soul, he had come at last to a place of quietness and pause; and suddenly he was like a desperate and bewildered man who has come in from the furious street of life to seek sanctuary and repose in the numb stillness of a tomb.
Day and night now, from dawn to dark, from sleeping until waking, in that strange spell of time and silence that was neither dream nor sleep nor waking vision, but that like an enchantment was miraculously composed of all, obsessed as a man exiled, banished, or condemned by fate to live upon a desert island without possibility of escape or return—he thought of home.
In that enchanted spell of time and silence, as men who gaze in visions across misty and illimitable seas, with the terrible homelessness of a man for whom there can never be return, with the terrible homelessness of a man who longs for home and has no home—with the impossible, hopeless, incurable and unutterable homesickness of the American, who is maddened by a longing for return, and does not know to what he can return, whose brain burns night and day with the maddened hope, whose heart aches night and day with the smothering and incurable ache of the houseless, homeless, and forsaken atom of the earth who has no goal or ending for his hunger, no final dwelling-place for his desire—he thought of home.
What was it? It was the furious desire, unceasing, unassuaged, of wandering and forsaken man—the lost American—who longs for ever for return—and who has no door to enter, no room to dwell in, no single hand’s-breadth of certain, consecrated earth upon that continent of wild houseless space to which he can return.
An astounding—an almost incredible thing—now happened. He had come to Tours telling himself that now at last, at last, he was going “to settle down and write,” that he was going to justify his voyage by the high purpose of creation. In his mind there swarmed various projects, cloudy, vague, and grandiose in their conception, of plays, books, stories, essays he must write: with desperate resolve he sat down grimly now to shape these grand designs into the stern and toilsome masonry of words. A few impatient, fragmentary beginnings, the opening pages of a story, the beginning speeches of a play—all crumpled in a wad and impatiently tossed aside—were the final results of this ambitious purpose.
And yet, write he did. Useless, fragmentary, and inchoate as were these first abortive efforts, he began to write now like a madman—as only a madman could write—driven by an insanity of sense and soul and feeling which he no longer could master or control, tranced in a hypnosis by whose fatal and insatiate compulsions he was forced, without will, to act. Gripped by that ungovernable desire, all ordered plans, designs, coherent projects for the work he had set out to do went by the board, were burned up in the flame of a quenchless passion, like a handful of dry straw. Seated at a table in his cold, little room that overlooked the old cobbled court of the hotel, he wrote ceaselessly from dawn to dark, sometimes from darkness on to dawn again—hurling himself upon the bed to dream, in a state of comatose awareness, strange sleeping-wakeful visions, dreams mad and terrible as the blinding imagery that now swept constantly across his brain its blaze of fire.
The words were wrung out of him in a kind of bloody sweat, they poured out of his finger-tips, spat out of his snarling throat like writhing snakes; he wrote them with his heart, his brain, his sweat, his body; he wrote them with his blood, his spirit; they were wrenched out of the last secret source and substance of his life.
And in those words was packed the whole image of his bitter homelessness, his intolerable desire, his maddened longing for return. In those wild and broken phrases was packed the whole bitter burden of his famished, driven, over-laden spirit—all the longing of the wanderer, all the impossible and unutterable homesickness that the American, or any man on earth, can know.
They were all there—without coherence, scheme, or reason—flung down upon paper like figures blasted by the spirit’s lightning stroke, and in them was the huge chronicle of the billion forms, the million names, the huge, single, and incomparable substance of America.
XCVII
At morning, in a foreign land, whether upon the mournful plains of Hungary or in some quiet square of Georgian houses, embedded in the immensity of sleeping London, he awakes and thinks of home; or in some small provincial town of France, he starts up from his sleep at night, he starts up in the living, brooding stillness of the night, for suddenly he thinks that he has heard there the sounds of America and the wilderness, the things that are in his blood, his heart, his brain, in every atom of his flesh and tissue, the things for which he draws his breath in labour, the things that madden him with an intolerable and nameless pain.
And what are they? They are the whistle-wail of one of the great American engines as it thunders through the continent at night, the sound of the voices of the city streets—those hard, loud, slangy voices, full of violence, humour, and recklessness, now stronger and more remote than the sounds of Asia—the sounds that come up from the harbour of Manhattan in the night—that magnificent and thrilling music of escape, mystery, and joy, with the mighty orchestration of the transatlantics, the hoarse little tugs, the ferry boats and lighters, those sounds that well up from the gulf and dark immensity of night and that pierce the entrails of the listener.
For this will always be one of the immortal and living things about the land, this will be an eternal and unchanging fact about that city whose only permanence is change: there will always be the great rivers flowing around it in the darkness, the rivers that have bounded so many nameless lives, those rivers which have moated in so many changes, which have girdled the wilderness and so much hard, brilliant, and sensational living, so much pain, beauty, ugliness, so much lust, murder, corruption, love, and wild exultancy.
They’ll build great engines yet, and grander towers, but always the rivers run, in the day, in the night, in the dark, draining immensely their imperial tides out of the wilderness, washing and flowing by the coasts of the fabulous city, by all the little ticking sounds of time, by all the million lives and deaths of the city. Always the rivers run, and always there will be great ships upon the tide, always great horns are baying at the harbour’s mouth, and in the night a thousand men have died while the river, always the river, the dark eternal river, full of strange secret time, washing the city’s stains away, thickened and darkened by its dumpings, is flowing by us, by us to the sea.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land and he thinks of home. He cannot rest, his heart is wild with pain and loneliness, he sleeps, but then he knows he sleeps, he hears the dark and secret spell of time about him; in ancient towns, thick tumbling chimes of the cathedral bells are thronging through the dark, but through the passages of his diseased and unforgetful sleep the sounds and memory of America make way: now it is almost dawn, a horse has turned into a street and in America there is the sound of wheels, the lonely clop-clop of the hooves upon deserted pavements, silence, then the banging clatter of a can.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land, he draws his breath in labour in the wool-soft air of Europe: the wool-grey air is all about him like a living substance; it is in his heart, his stomach, and his entrails; it is in the slow and vital movements of the people; it soaks down from the sodden skies into the earth, into the heavy buildings, into the limbs and hearts and brains of living men. It soaks into the spirit of the wanderer; his heart is dull with the grey weariness of despair, it aches with hunger for the wilderness, the howling of great winds, the bite and sparkle of the clear, cold air, the buzz, the tumult and the wild exultancy. The wet, woollen air is all about him, and there is no hope. It was there before William the Conqueror; it was there before Clovis and Charles “the Hammer”; it was there before Attila; it was there before Hengist and Horsa; it was there before Vercingetorix and Julius Agricola.
It was there now; it will always be there. They had it in Merry England and they had it in Gay Paree; and they were seldom merry, and they were rarely gay. The wet, woollen air is over Munich; it is over Paris; it is over Rouen and Madame Bovary; it soaks into England; it gets into boiled mutton and the Brussels sprouts; it gets into Hammersmith on Sunday; it broods over Bloomsbury and the private hotels and the British Museum; it soaks into the land of Europe and keeps the grass green. It has always been there; it will always be there. His eyes are mad and dull; he cannot sleep without the hauntings of phantasmal memory behind the eyes; his brain is overstretched and weary, it gropes ceaselessly around the prison of the skull, it will not cease.
The years are walking in his brain, his father’s voice is sounding in his ears, and in the pulses of his blood the tom-tom’s beat. His living dust is stored with memory: two hundred million men are walking in his bones; he hears the howling of the wind around forgotten eaves; he cannot sleep. He walks in midnight corridors; he sees the wilderness, the moon-drenched forests; he comes to clearings in the moonlit stubble, he is lost, he has never been here, yet he is at home. His sleep is haunted with the dreams of time; wires throb above him in the whiteness, they make a humming in the noonday heat.
The rails are laid across eight hundred miles of golden wheat, the rails are wound through mountains, they curve through clay-yellow cuts, they enter tunnels, they are built up across the marshes, they hug the cliff and follow by the river’s bank, they cross the plains with dust and thunder, and they leap through flatness and the dull scrub-pine to meet the sea.
Then he awakes at morning in a foreign land and thinks of home.
For we have awaked at morning in a foreign land and heard the bitter curse of their indictment, and we know what we know, and it will always be the same.
“One time!” their voices cried, leaning upon a bar the bitter weight of all their discontent. “One time! I’ve been back one time—just once in seven years,” they said, “and Jesus! that was plenty. One time was enough! To hell with that damned country! What have they got now but a lot of cheap spaghetti joints and skyscrapers?” they said. “If you want a drink, you sneak down three back-alleyways, get the once-over from a couple of ex-prize-fighters, and then plank down a dollar for a shot of varnish that would rot the stomach out of a goat!… And the women!”—the voices rose here with infuriated scorn—“What a nice lot of cold-blooded gold-digging bastards they’ve turned out to be!… I spent thirty dollars taking one of’em to a show, and to a night-club afterward! When bedtime came do you think I got anything out of it?…’You may kiss my little hand,’she says….’You may kiss my little—that’s what you may do,’” the voices snarled with righteous bitterness. “When I asked her if she was goin’to come through she started to yell for the cops!… A woman who tried to pull one like that over here would get sent to Siberia!… A nice country, I don’t think!… Now, get this! Me, I’m a Frenchman, see!” the voice said with a convincing earnestness. “These guys know how to live, see! This is my country where I belong, see!… Johnny, luh même chose pour mwah et m’seer!… Fill’em up again, kid.”
“Carpen-teer!” the voices then rose jeeringly, in true accents of French pugnacity. “Sure, I’m a Frenchman—but Carpen-teer! Where do yuh get that stuff? Christ! Dempsey could’a' took that frog the best day that he ever saw!… An accident!” the voices yelled. “Whattya mean—an accident? Didn’t I see the whole thing with my own eyes? Wasn’t I back there then?… Wasn’t I talkin’t’Jack himself an hour after the fight was over?… An accident! Jesus! The only accident was that he let him last four rounds.’I could have taken him in the first if I wanted to,’Jack says to me…. Sure, I’m a Frenchman!” the voice said with belligerent loyalty. “But Carpenteer! Jesus! Where do you get that stuff?”
And, brother, I have heard the voices you will never hear, discussing the graces of a life more cultured than any you will ever know—and I know and I know, and yet it is still the same.
Bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more! the flying leaf, the broken cloud—“I think,” said they, “that we will live here now. I think,” they said, “that we are running down to Spain next week, so Francis can do a little writing…. And really,” their gay yet cultivated tones continued, “it’s wonderful what you can do here if you only have a little money…. Yes, my dear!” their refined accents continued in a tone of gay conviction. “It’s really quite incredible, you know…. I happen to know of a real honest-to-goodness château near Blois that can be had for something less than $7000!… It’s all rather incredible, you know,” those light, half-English tones went on, “when you consider what it takes to live in Brookline!… Francis has always felt that he would like to do a little writing, and I feel somehow the atmosphere is better here for all that sort of thing—it really is, you know. Don’t you think so?” said those gay and cultivated tones of Boston which you, my brother, never yet have heard. “And after all,” those cultivated tones went on in accents of a droll sincerity, “you see all the people here you really care to see, I mean, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or another—I mean, the trouble really is in getting a little time alone for yourself…. Or do you find it so?” the voices suavely, lightly, asked…. “Oh, look! look at that—there!” they cried with jubilant elation, “I mean, that boy and his girl there, walking along with their arms around each other!… Don’t you just a-do-o-re it?… Isn’t it too ma-a-rvellous?” those refined and silvery tones went on with patriotic tenderness. “I mean, there’s something so perfectly sweet and unselfconscious about it all!” the voices said with all the cultivated earnestness of Boston! “Now where?—where?—would you see anything like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.
(Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade—did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and sultry month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove—it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)
“… I mean—these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do…. They’re so much simpler about it…. I mean, so much more graceful with that kind of thing…. Il faut un peu de sentiment, n’est-ce pas?… Or do you think so?” said those light, those gay, those silvery, and half-English tones of cultivated Boston, which you, my brother, never yet have heard.
(I got you, lady. That was French. I know…. But if I felt your leg, if I began by fondling gracefully your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg, and said, “Chérie! Petite chérie!”—would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but brother, there are corn-haired girls named Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they’re still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish made. Big brother’s still waiting for you with his huge, red fist, behind the barn up in the State of Maine, and they’re still having shotgun marriages at home.
Oh, brother, there are voices you will never hear—ancestral voices prophesying war, my brother, and rare and radiant voices that you know not of, as they have read us into doom. The genteel voices of Oxenford broke once like chimes of weary, unenthusiastic bells across my brain, speaking to me compassionately its judgment on our corrupted lives, gently dealing with the universe, my brother, gently and without labour—gently, brother, gently, it dealt with all of us, with easy condescension and amused disdain.
“I’m afraid, old boy,” the genteel voices of Oxenford remarked, “you’re up against it over thöh…. I really am…. Thöh’s no peace thö faw the individual any longah,”—the genteel voice went on, un-individual brother. “Obviously,” that tolerant voice instructed me, “obviously, thöh can be no cultuah in a country so completely lackin’in tradition as is yoähs…. It’s all so objective—if you see what I main—thöh’s no place left faw the innah life,” it said, oh, outward brother! “… We Europeans have often obsöhved (it’s very curious, you know) that the American is capable of any real feelin’—it seems quite impawsible faw him to distinguish between true emotion an’sentimentality—an’he invayably chooses the lattah!… Curious, isn’t it?—or do you think so, brother? Of co’se, thöh is yoäh beastly dreadful sex-prawblem…. Yoäh women!… Oh, deah, deah!… Perhaps we’d bettah say no moah… but, thöh you ah!”—right in the eye, my brother. “Yoäh country is a matriahky, my deah fellah… it really is, you know.”… if you can follow us, dear brother. “The women have the men in a state of complete subjection… the male is rapidly becomin’moah sexless an’emasculated”—that genteel voice of doom went on—“No!—Decidedly you have quite a prawblem befoah you…. Obviously thöh can be no cultuah while such a condition puhsists…. That is why when my friends say to me,’You ought to see America,… you really ought, you know.’… I say,’No, thanks…. If you don’t mind, I’d rathah not…. I think I’ll stay at home… I’m sorry,’” the compassionate tones of Oxenford went on, “but that’s the way I feel—it really is, you know…. Of co’se, I know you couldn’t undahstand my feelin’—faw aftah all, you ah a Yank—but thöh you ah! Sorry!” it said regretfully, as it spoke its courteous but inexorable judgments of eternal exile, brother, and removed for ever the possibility of your ever hearing it. “But that’s the way I feel! I hope you don’t mind,” the voice said gently, with compassion.
No, sir, I don’t mind. We don’t mind, he, she, it, or they don’t mind. Nobody minds, sir, nobody minds. Because, just as you say, sir, oceans are between us, seas have sundered us, there is a magic in you that we cannot fathom—a light, a flame, a glory—an impalpable, indefinable, incomprehensible, undeniable something or other, something which I can never understand or measure because—just as you say, sir—with such compassionate regret, I am—I am—a Yank.
’Tis true, my brother, we are Yanks. Oh,’tis true,’tis true! I am a Yank! Yet, wherefore Yank, good brother? Hath not a Yank ears? Hath not a Yank lies, truths, bowels of mercy, fears, joys, and lusts? Is he not warmed by the same sun, washed by the same ocean, rotted by the same decay, and eaten by the same worms as a German is? If you kill him, does he not die? If you sweat him, does he not stink? If you lie with his wife or his mistress, does she not whore, lie, fornicate and betray, even as a Frenchman’s does? If you strip him, is he not naked as a Swede? Is his hide less white than Baudelaire’s? Is his breath more foul than the King of Spain’s? Is his belly bigger, his neck fatter, his face more hoggish, and his eye more shiny than a Munich brewer’s? Will he not cheat, rape, thieve, whore, curse, hate, and murder like any European? Aye—Yank! But wherefore, wherefore Yank—good brother?
Brother, have we come then from a fated stock? Augured from birth, announced by two dark angels, named in our mother’s womb? And for what? For what? Fatherless, to grope our feelers on the sea’s dark bed, among the polyped squirms, the blind sucks and crawls and sea-valves of the brain, loaded with memory that will not die? To cry our love out in the wilderness, to wake always in the night, smiting the pillow in some foreign land, thinking for ever of the myriad sights and sounds of home?
“While Paris Sleeps!”—By God! while Paris sleeps, to wake and walk and not to sleep; to wake and walk and sleep and wake, and sleep again, seeing dawn come at the window-square that cast its wedge before our glazed, half-sleeping eyes, seeing soft, hated foreign light, and breathing soft, dull languid air that could not bite and tingle up the blood, seeing legend and lie and fable wither in our sight as we saw what we saw, knew what we knew.
Sons of the lost and lonely fathers, sons of the wanderers, children of hardy loins, the savage earth, the pioneers, what had we to do with all their bells and churches? Could we feed our hunger on portraits of the Spanish king? Brother, for what? For what? To kill the giant of loneliness and fear, to slay the hunger that would not rest, that would not give us rest.
Of wandering for ever, and the earth again. Brother, for what? For what? For what? For the wilderness, the immense and lonely land. For the unendurable hunger, the unbearable ache, the incurable loneliness. For the exultancy whose only answer is the wild goat-cry. For a million memories, ten thousand sights and sounds and shapes and smells and names of things that only we can know.
For what? For what? Not for a nation. Not for a people, not for an empire, not for a thing we love or hate.
For what? For a cry, a space, an ecstasy. For a savage and nameless hunger. For a living and intolerable memory that may not for a second be forgotten, since it includes all the moments of our lives, includes all we do and are. For a living memory; for ten thousand memories; for a million sights and sounds and moments; for something like nothing else on earth; for something which possesses us.
For something under our feet, and around us and over us; something that is in us and part of us, and proceeds from us, that beats in all the pulses of our blood.
Brother, for what?
First for the thunder of imperial names, the names of men and battles, the names of places and great rivers, the mighty names of the States. The name of The Wilderness; and the names of Antietam, Chancellorsville, Shiloh, Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbour, the Wheat Fields, Ball’s Bluff, and the Devil’s Den; the names of Cowpens, Brandywine, and Saratoga; of Death Valley, Chickamauga, and the Cumberland Gap. The names of the Nantahalahs, the Bad Lands, the Painted Desert, the Yosemite, and the Little Big Horn; the names of Yancey and Cabarrus counties; and the terrible name of Hatteras.
Then, for the continental thunder of the States: the names of Montana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Dakotas; the names of Oregon and Indiana, of Kansas and the rich Ohio; the powerful name of Pennsylvania, and the name of Old Kentucky; the undulance of Alabama; the names of Florida and North Carolina.
In the red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear—the rattle of arrows in laurel leaves, the war-cries round the painted buttes, and the majestical names of the Indian nations: the Pawnees, the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Blackfeet, the Seminoles, the Cherokees, the Sioux, the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Navajos, the Utes, the Omahas, the Onondagas, the Chippewas, the Crees, the Chickasaws, the Arapahoes, the Catawbas, the Dakotas, the Apaches, the Croatans, and the Tuscaroras; the names of Powhatan and Sitting Bull; and the name of the great Chief, Rain-In-The-Face. Of wandering for ever, and the earth again: in red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear. The arrows rattle in the laurel leaves, and the elm-roots thread the bones of buried lovers. There have been war-cries on the Western trails, and on the plains the gun-stock rusts upon a handful of bleached bones. The barren earth? Was no love living in the wilderness?
The rails go westward in the dark. Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails? Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?
Of wandering for ever, and the earth again—the names of the mighty rails that bind the nation, the wheeled thunder of the names that net the continent: the Pennsylvania, the Union Pacific, the Santa Fé, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chicago and Northwestern, the Southern, the Louisiana and Northern, the Seaboard Air Line, the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul, the Lackawanna, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the Florida East Coast, the Rock Island, and the Denver and Rio Grande.
Brother, the names of the engines, the engineers, and the sleeping-cars: the great engines of the Pacific type, the articulated Mallets with three sets of eight-yoked driving-wheels, the 400-ton thunderbolts with J. T. Cline, T. J. McRae, and the demon hawk-eyes of H. D. Campbell on the rails.
The names of the great tramps who range the nation on the fastest trains: the names of the great tramps Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, Dixie Joe, Iron Mike, The Frisco Kid, Nigger Dick, Red Chi, Ike the Kike, and The Jersey Dutchman.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the rocks, and stared. He had long hair, his eyes were deep and sombre, and he wore a cape; he was a poet, and there was magic and mystery in his touch, for he had heard the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. And by the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the cold, grey rocks, and commanded the sea to break—break—break! And the sea broke, by the waters of life, by time, by time, as Lord Tennyson commanded it to do, and his heart was sad and lonely as he watched the stately ships (of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, fares forty-five dollars and up, first-class) go on to their haven under the hill, and Lord Tennyson would that his heart could utter the thoughts that arose in him.
By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of the mighty rivers, the alluvial gluts, the drains of the continent, the throats that drink America (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song). The names of the men who pass, and the myriad names of the earth that abides for ever: the names of the men who are doomed to wander, and the name of that immense and lonely land on which they wander, to which they return, in which they will be buried—America! The immortal earth which waits for ever, the trains that thunder on the continent, the men who wander, and the women who cry out, “Return!”
Finally, the names of the great rivers that are flowing in the darkness (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song.)
By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of great mouths, the mighty maws, the vast, wet, coiling, never-glutted and unending snakes that drink the continent. Where, sons of men, and in what other land will you find others like them, and where can you match the mighty music of their names?—The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)—these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit.
Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber! You’d only be a suckling in that mighty land! And as for you, sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song: flow gently, gentle Thames, be well-behaved, sweet Thames, speak softly and politely, little Thames, flow gently till I end my song.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, and of the yellow cat that smites the nation, of the belly of the snake that coils across the land—of the terrible names of the rivers in flood, the rivers that foam and welter in the dark, that smash the levees, that flood the lowlands for two thousand miles, that carry the bones of the cities seaward on their tides: of the awful names of the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and even the little mountain rivers, brothers, in the season of the floods.
Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station: the canoe glides gently through the portals of the waiting-room (for whites). Full fathom five the carcass of old man Lype is lying (of his bones is coral made) and delicately they dive for luncheon-room Greeks before the railway station.
Brother, what fish are these? The floatage of sunken rooms, the sodden bridal-veils of poverty, the slime of mined parlour plush, drowned faces in the family album; and the blur of long-drowned eyes, blurred features, whited, bloated flesh.
Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station. The stern, good, half-drowned faces of the brothers Trade and Mark survey the tides. Cardui! Miss Lillian Leitzell twists upon one arm above the flood; the clown, half-sunken to his waist, swims upward out of swirling yellow; the tiger bares his teeth above the surges of a river he will never drink. The ragged tatters of the circus posters are plastered on soaked boards. And delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station.
Have we not seen them, brother?
For what are we, my brother? We are a phantom flare of grieved desire, the ghostling and phosphoric flicker of immortal time, a brevity of days haunted by the eternity of the earth. We are an unspeakable utterance, an insatiable hunger, an unquenchable thirst; a lust that bursts our sinews, explodes our brains, sickens and rots our insides, and rips our hearts asunder. We are a twist of passion, a moment’s flame of love and ecstasy, a sinew of bright blood and agony, a lost cry, a music of pain and joy, a haunting of brief, sharp hours, an almost captured beauty, a demon’s whisper of unbodied memory. We are the dupes of time.
For, brother, what are we?
We are the sons of our father, whose face we have never seen, we are the sons of our father, whose voice we have never heard, we are the sons of our father, to whom we have cried for strength and comfort in our agony, we are the sons of our father, whose life like ours was lived in solitude and in the wilderness, we are the sons of our father, to whom only can we speak out the strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit, we are the sons of our father, and we shall follow the print of his foot for ever.
XCVIII
How long he had remained at Tours he scarcely knew: suspended in this spell of time and memory, he seemed to have detached himself not only from the infinite connections that bound him to the past, but from every project and direction that he had considered for the future. Day after day he stayed in his little room above the cobbled court of the hotel; he ate his meals there, going out at nightfall to eat and drink in a café, to walk about the streets, once or twice to go home with a woman of the town, and finally to come back to his room, to write furiously for hours, and then, stretched out in bed, nailed to the rock of a furiously wakeful sleep, to live again through the immense and spaceless images of night, in an alert but comatose hypnosis of the will.
One morning he awoke with a shock of apprehension, the foreboding of calamitous mischance. It was the first time in weeks that he had taken thought of the state of his resources or felt any care or worry for the future. He counted his money with feverish haste, and discovered that less than 250 francs remained. For a moment he sat on the edge of the bed, holding the little wad of franc notes in his hand, stunned and bewildered by this sudden realization that his funds were exhausted, and for the moment not knowing what to do. His hotel bill for the week was due; he went at once to the bureau and asked for it; a hasty calculation assured him that when he had paid it, less than twenty francs would be left.
He knew no one in Tours to whom he could appeal for aid; one glance at the impeccable, cold courtesy of the female face, hard, dark and Gallic, in the bureau of the hotel—the basalt of the eyes, the line of hair across the brows—told him that he could as soon wring milk and honey from the cobble-stones as extract an ounce of charitable relief from the granite coffers of her soul. The brows drew in, the black eyes hardened with a cold narrowing of mistrust: even before he spoke he saw she had read the story of his profligate extravagance, and that from that moment the hard propriety of her suspicious soul had been turned against him with that virtuous dislike which such people feel for unmoneyed men. When he spoke, therefore, it was to tell her he was leaving that day: she inclined her dark, hard face impassively, saying: “Oui, monsieur,” and asked if he would have his room vacated by twelve o’clock.
He went to the railway station and looked up rates and distances. During the whole period of his stay in Tours—in fact, during the whole course of his wanderings since leaving Paris—he had been vaguely assured that he was moving in the general direction of Provence, Marseilles, and the South. He now discovered, on consulting a map, that he was off this course by some hundreds of kilometres, and on the southwest road to Bordeaux, the Pyrenees, and Spain. For a moment, he was decided to take the train for Bordeaux—a post card from Ann had been mailed from Carcassonne, and she had informed him that they were on their way to Biarritz. A brief inquiry, however, convinced him that his funds were by no means sufficient to get him even as far as Bordeaux and, over there, he felt, his case was more desperate than ever. He knew no one there and had no hope of meeting anyone he knew. He discovered also that the lowest fare back to Paris—the third-class fare—was about thirty-four francs, almost twice as much as he possessed.
Finally, with a feeling of malevolent joy—for, curiously, a growing realization of his plight, and the dark, hard eyes of the Frenchmen fixed on him in an expression of avaricious mistrust, had now wakened in him a jubilant indifference, a desire to roar with laughter—he thought of Orléans and the Countess.
He found that his funds were sufficient for third-class fare to Orléans, which was about seventeen francs, and that a train was leaving in an hour. Returning to the hotel, he packed his valise with frenzied haste, throwing his clothes in and stamping it down with his feet, rode to the station in the hotel’s horse-drawn bus, and an hour later was on his way back to Orléans.
Late March had come: the day was overcast with thin, grey clouds, an uncertain milky radiance of light; the fields and earth and forests, still bare, had a moist, thawed fertility that spoke of spring. On the way up, snow began to fall, a brief flurry of large, wet flakes that melted as they fell: it was soon over, and the sun broke through in thin, wavering gusts of light.
There were no other passengers in his compartment; he sat looking out of the window across the wet fields, and from time to time, as he visualized the look of startled, crafty apprehension on the Countess’s face when she saw him, he burst into wild, sudden whoops and yells of laughter that echoed loudly above the steady pounding of the wheels.
It was noon when he reached Orléans: he took his heavy bag and went limping out across the station square, pausing once to rest his aching arms and change his grip. On entering the hotel he found Yvonne in the bureau. She looked up from her ledger as he entered, her dark face hardening with a mistrust of cold surprise as she saw him.
“Monsieur has returned to stay?” she inquired, and looking towards his valise. “You wish a room?”
“I do not know yet,” he said easily. “I shall let you know in a few minutes. At present, I should like to speak to the Countess. Is she here?”
She did not answer for a moment, her black brows gathered in a line, and her eyes grew perceptibly harder, colder, more mistrustful as she looked at him.
“Yes. I s’ink she is in her room,” she said at length. “I vill see…. Jean!” she called sharply, and struck a bell.
The porter appeared, started with surprise when he saw the youth, and then smiled cordially and greeted him in friendly fashion. Then he turned inquiringly to Yvonne. She spoke curtly:
“Dites à Madame la Comtesse que Monsieur le jeune Américain est revenu. Il attend.”
“Mais oui, monsieur,” the porter said briskly, turning towards him. “Et votre bagage?” he looked inquiringly at the valise. “Vous restez ici?”
“Je ne sais pas. Je vous dirai plus tard. Merci,” he said, as the porter took the valise and put it away behind the office desk.
The porter departed with his message. Yvonne returned to her books, and he waited, pacing the hall in a state of nervous elation, until he heard the old woman’s voice, sharp, startled, excited, speaking to the porter on the floor above. Then he heard her coming down the stairs, turned and faced her sharply-inquiring, apprehensive face as she came down, and was vigorously pumping her uncertain and unwilling little claw, before she had time to stammer out a greeting:
“But what—why—what brings you here?” she said. “I thought you had returned to Paris by now. Where have you been?” she asked sharply.
“In Tours,” he answered.
“Tours! But what were you doing there all this time?… What happened to you?” she asked suspiciously.
“Ah, Countess,” he said solemnly, “it is a long story.” Then, with a deliberate burlesque of portentous gravity, he lowered his voice and whispered hoarsely, “I fell among thieves.”
“What—?” she said in a faltering tone. “What are you saying?… You mean you have come back here… that you have no… how much money have you left?” she demanded sharply.
He thrust his hand into his trousers pocket, fished around and pulled out a few small coins: four two-franc pieces, a franc, two twenty-five-centime coins, a ten— and a five-centime piece—
“That’s all,” he said, counting them over. “Nine francs sixty-five.”
“W-w-w-w-what?” she stammered. “Nine francs sixty-five—do you mean that’s all you have left?”
“That’s all,” he said cheerfully, “but now that I’m here at last it doesn’t matter.”
“Here!” she gasped. “Do you mean you are going—what do you intend to do?” she said sharply.
“Oh,” he said easily, “I shall wait here until I get money from America.”
“And—and how long do you think that will take?” the old woman was twisting her skinny fingers with feverish apprehension.
“Oh, not long,” he said airily. “I wrote my mother yesterday, and it ought not to take over four weeks to get an answer.”
“Four or five weeks!” the old woman said hoarsely. “What are you saying? Four or five weeks, and you have nine francs sixty-five in your pockets! My God! the man is mad!”
“Oh, that part of it will be all right, I guess,” he said with an easy laugh. “I told my mother all about you and Monsieur and Madame Vatel, and all my other friends here, and how good you had been to me, and how you were always befriending Americans, and how they call you Little Mother. I told her you couldn’t have been kinder to me if you’d been my own mother, and that she didn’t need to worry about me at all. So I guess that part of it’s all right,” he concluded comfortably. “I told her that I’d just put up here at the hotel, and that you and the Vatels would take good care of me until the money comes from home.”
“Put up here!… For four or five weeks!… Hush, my boy! Hush!” she whispered, clutching him feverishly with her bony little claw and casting an apprehensive glance towards Yvonne, whose dark head was lowered studiously above her ledger, but who suggested, by a certain strained attentiveness of posture, that she was missing none of the conversation.
“Come,” the Countess whispered feverishly again, pulling him towards the stairway as she spoke. “You come with me, my boy. I want to talk to you alone.”
They went upstairs to a parlour on the first floor, deserted, closed, a little stale with its sumptuous bordello furnishings of gilt and crimson plush. There the Countess turned to him and said directly:
“See here, my boy. What you want to do is out of the question. It will be impossible for you to stay here for four or five weeks! Impossible!” she cried, twisting her bony little hands with growing agitation. “It cannot be done!”
He looked surprised, a little pained.
“Why?” he said.
“Because,” she said, and now at last her tone was simple and direct in its quiet assertion, “the Vatels will not keep you here—they will not give you credit for so long a time—”
“And you?” he said quietly.
“My friend,” the old woman answered simply, “I have not got it.” She raised her bony little shoulders in a shrug. “At the present moment I have nothing—not a sou! I get a little money from America on the first and fifteenth of each month—if I had it, I would give it to you, but I have nothing now. And what I get would not be nearly enough to pay your expenses here for five weeks. It cannot be done.”
For the first time since his return he felt respect and sympathy for her; in face of the plain and honest directness of her confession all of his former humour of cynical mockery had vanished. He said:
“In that case it cannot be done. You are right. I must try to get help elsewhere.”
“You have friends in Paris, haven’t you? You know people there—Americans?”
“Yes—I think I could get help from someone if I were in Paris.”
“Then I shall try to help you to get there,” she said quickly. “How much will you need?”
“I think the third-class fare from here is about seventeen francs,” he said.
“And you have—how much? Nine sixty-five?” She calculated swiftly, was silent a moment, and then, with an air of decision, marked by a faint flush of painful embarrassment on her withered cheek as she thought of the unpleasant task before her, she said: “If you will wait here, I will go below and see what I can do with these people…. I do not know,” she said shortly, the faint flush deepening as she spoke, “but I will try.”
She left him and presently he heard voices below, mixed in rapid and excited argument. In ten minutes the old woman returned. In her hand she held a ten-franc note.
“Here,” she said, giving it to him. “With what you have, it will be enough to get you to Paris. I have inquired. There is a train in twenty minutes. Now, my boy,” she said quickly, taking him by the arm, “you must go. You will just have time to buy your ticket and get on the train. You have no time to lose.”
He had been surprised and disappointed at the meagre exactness of her loan: he had eaten nothing all day long and suddenly, with no funds to spare and the prospect of a continued and indefinite fast before him, he felt ravenously hungry. And now it was his turn to redden with embarrassment; he found it difficult to speak, and in a moment said hesitantly:
“I wonder if these people here would let me have a sandwich…. I’ve had nothing to eat.”
She did not answer; he saw the faint flush deepen on her sallow cheeks again and, already sorry for the additional distress his request had caused her, he said quickly:
“No, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get something when I get to Paris. Besides, there’s not time now, anyway. I’ll have to get that train.”
“Yes,” she said quickly, with relief. “I think you should. That is best…. And now, my boy, make haste. You have no more time to lose.”
“Good-bye, Countess,” he said, taking her by the hand, and suddenly feeling for the old, lonely, and penniless woman the deepest affection and respect he had ever felt for her. “You have really been my friend. I’m sorry that I’ve had to cause you this trouble. I’ll send you the money when I get to Paris. Good-bye, now, and good luck to you.”
When she answered, her voice was quiet and her old eyes were sad and tranquilly resigned:
“Ah,” she said, “I was afraid that this would happen to you. I have known so many Americans—they are so reckless, so extravagant, they do not watch their money…. Good-bye, my boy,” she now said quietly, clasping his hand. “Take care of yourself and do not get into any more trouble…. Let me know if all goes well with you…. Good-bye, good-bye…. Ah, you are so young, aren’t you? Some day you will learn…. Good-bye, God bless you—you must hurry now—good-bye. Good-bye.”
She followed him as he went quickly down the stairs, and stood on the stairs watching him as he departed. His valise had been put out before the bureau, where he could get it easily: Yvonne and Madame Vatel were waiting silently in the office. Yvonne did not speak at all; when he spoke to Madame Vatel, she cocked her head a little and said coldly: “Monsieur?”
He seized the valise and started for the door with it at a rapid limping stride. At the door he paused, turned, and saw the Countess, still standing on the stairs and looking at him with old, sad eyes.
“Good-bye,” he cried in jubilant farewell. “Good-bye, Countess.”
“Good-bye, my boy,” her voice was so weary, old, and sad he could scarcely hear her.
Then he limped rapidly away from the hotel, across the square, and towards the station and the train.
All through the afternoon the train roared up across the fat and fertile countryside towards Paris. A late sun broke through ragged clouds of torn gold: the light was wild and radiant with a prophecy of spring. In the compartment his only companion was a young soldier: a boy of eighteen, tall, gawky, big of hand and foot and limb, looking even clumsier than he really was in his thick-soled army shoes, his blue-olive uniform—his long shanks coarsely wound with bands of olive cloth.
The boy had a friendly, olive-coloured face, a little marred by pimples and fuzzy unshaved hair; he talked constantly, amiably indifferent to his companion’s foreign speech and manner, garrulously friendly in a hoarse boy’s voice.
In the middle of the afternoon he began to unpack various bundles from the staggering impedimenta of military equipment with which he was surrounded. From a pocket of his overcoat he solemnly fished out an enormous tin of sardines. From another package he took out a gigantic bottle of red wine, and with the same gravity began to unfold from its wrapping in a newspaper a three-foot loaf of crusty bread.
Then, with the same deliberate concentration, he opened the sardine tin, uncorked the wine-bottle and took a hearty preliminary swig, pulled out a clasp-knife with an evil-looking six-inch blade and, holding the loaf gripped firmly between his knees, began with a backward motion to carve a crisp and liberal slab out of the crusty loaf. This done, he put the bread aside, solemnly impaled a huge sardine upon the point of his gleaming knife, smacked it down upon the slab of bread and, furnishing himself with another hearty swig of the red wine, began to poke the sandwich happily away towards its intended destination, carrying on a choked but completely unperturbed conversation with his companion as he did so.
And his fellow traveller, gazing on that coarse but appetizing fare, felt the pangs of hunger awake in him again with such maddening insistence that the whole legend of his starved desire must have been written on his yearning face and in his greedy eyes. At any rate, the young soldier, his mouth still crammed with food, uttered some inarticulate but friendly sounds, in which the word “Mangez” alone was intelligible, suddenly thrust loaf, bottle, knife, and sardine tin towards his starved companion, and with a gesture of rude encouragement, hoarsely spattered forth again:
“Mangez!”
The fellow-traveller required no second bidding. He fell to ravenously on sardines, wine, and crusty loaf; they sat there cramming themselves enthusiastically, uttering choked and muffled sounds from time to time and grinning at each other amiably.
Nothing he had ever eaten tasted as good as that coarse fare; the strong, plain wine was pulsing warmly in his veins, the food made a warm glow in his grateful belly; outside, the sun had broken through in stripes of ragged gold and bronze, above the wheels he could hear great roars of hearty country laughter from another compartment, the high, rich, sanguinary voice of a Frenchman as he cried “Parbleu!”
And he was going back to Paris again, without a penny, a prospect, or a plan, and he felt no care nor pain nor trouble any longer—nothing but wild joy and jubilant happiness such as he had never felt before. He did not know why.
XCIX
Early in April money came from home, and he was on his way again. This time he started South in true earnest, hurtling southward on one of the crack trains of the P. L. M., his nose flattened against the window of the compartment and his eyes glued on the landscape with such an unwinking intensity, a desperate and insatiate greed, that his fellow-passengers stared at him curiously and then looked at one another with quiet smiles and winks.
As it had always done, the movement and experience of the train filled him with a sense of triumph, joy, and luxury. The crack express, with its gleaming cars, its richly furnished compartments, its luxurious restaurant, warm with wine and food and opulence and suave service, together with the appearance of the passengers, who had the look of ease and wealth and cosmopolitan assurance that one finds among people who travel on such trains, awoke in him again the feeling of a nameless and impending joy, the fulfilment of some impossible happiness, the feeling of wealth and success which a train had always given him, even when he had only a few dollars in his pocket, and that now, in the groomed luxury of this European express, was immeasurably enhanced.
On such a train, indeed, the compact density of the European continent became thrilling in its magical immediacy: one felt everywhere around him—in the assured and wealthy-looking men, the lovely and seductive-looking women—even in the landscape that stretched past with its look of infinite cultivation, its beautifully chequered design of fields, its ancient scheme of towns and villages and old farm buildings—the sense of a life rich with the maturity of centuries, infinitely various and fascinating in its evocation of a world given without reserve to pleasure, love, and luxury—in short, the American’s dream of “Europe,” a world with all the labour, pain, and fear, the rasping care and fury of his own harsh world, left out.
At Lyons, midway on his journey to the South, he left the train. And again, he did not know the reason for his stopping: he had been told that “there was nothing to be seen,” but the place was a great city; his old hunger for new cities conquered him, he paused to stay a day and stayed a week.
Later he could remember just four things that had held him there in that great provincial town. They were a river, two restaurants, and a girl. The river was the Rhône; it came foaming out of the Alps to form at Lyons its juncture with the Saône. Day after day he sat on a café terrace looking at the river; it foamed past bright and glacial, green as emerald, cold and shining, bearing in for ever its message of the Alps, the thaw of crystal ice, the coming on of spring. All of the coming of the spring was somehow written in the cold, sparkling and unforgettable green loveliness of that shining water; it haunted him like something he had always known, like something he had found, like something he would one day discover.
The food in the town was incomparable. It was a native cookery, a food belonging to the region—plain, pungent, peasant-like and nobly good; there is in all the world no better cooking than can be found in the great provincial town of Lyons.
At two places there, La Mère Guy’s and La Mère Filliou’s, they call their best cooks by the name of “mother.” They offer eating fit for kings, yet all so reasonable and plain that almost any man can afford it. La Mère Guy’s establishment is in an old house with various old rooms all used as restaurants. The floor is sanded, there are no suave carpets, no low murmuring of refined voices, no thin tinkle of musical glasses, none of the suave, worldly luxury that one finds in the great restaurants of Paris. It is a place not made for tourists—for Lyons is not a tourist town, and what tourist before ever came there to eat?—It is a place made for the Lyonnais—according to their taste—and one will find them there at Mother Guy’s and Filliou’s, in all their robust, straightforward eating earnestness. Mother Filliou’s is a more open sort of place than Mother Guy’s; it is across the river, away from the central part of Lyons, which is on an island formed by the green girdling of the Rhône and Saône. At Mother Filliou’s one can look inside; when the weather permits, most people eat outside on a terrace: Mother Filliou’s has more sunlight, open air, and gaiety, but the rooms at Mother Guy’s have a more convenient, closed, and homely appearance. Both places are crowded with solid-looking Lyonnais of both sexes, their faces filled with sanguinary life, their voices loud and robust, their napkins tucked in under their chins, as they set heartily to work.
The food is largely chicken, beef, and fish, superbly cooked. One will never forget the chicken at Mother Guy’s or Mother Filliou’s: the chicken is plump and tender country chicken, fresh from the lovely countryside near Lyons; it is so crisp and succulent it almost melts away in your mouth. The beef is thick and juicy and tender, everything is cooked plainly, but with all the peasant spice and pungency; they like spicy and robust relishes, and one eats whole onions, pickled in a kind of brine. There, people drink only one wine, but that is Beaujolais, a plain, grand wine that in this town is cheaper than mineral water, and seems made by nature to wash down such victuals as these people eat.
On the opposite side of the central isle of Lyons, which is the side bounded by the Saône, there is a steep hill surmounted by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, a famous place of pilgrimage for the devout. And there, one day, while pilgrims filed in to see the relics and pay devotion to their saint, and while some monks were chanting from their sonorous and reverberating litany through the great spaces, he saw a girl he could not forget: she sat down across the aisle from him, looked at him, smiled drowsily. She was small, plump; her figure was erotically seductive; she raised her head, and seemed to listen drowsily to chanting monks, and he saw that in her neck, a warm, slow pulse was beating—slowly, slowly, richly, warmly beating. She turned her eyes, which were grey and smoky with a cat-like potency, and looked at him again, smiled drowsily, and slowly crossed her heavy legs with a slow, sensual sliding of warm silk. And all the time the pulse beat slowly, richly, with a drowsy warmth of maddening and hot desire—and that was the last of the four things he saw, remembered, and could not forget of Lyons.
A shining river, emerald-green, and magic with its Alpine prescience of spring, of known, undiscovered loveliness; the noble cooking of Mother Guy and Mother Filliou; a pulse in the throat of an unknown girl that beat its slow, warm promise of fulfilled desire—these, of a town of more than six hundred thousand lives and faces, were all that later clearly would remain.
The rest was smoke and silence—some faces here and there, a scheme of streets, an enormous square, a hill crowned with a pilgrim’s church, a priest, broad-hatted, with slit mouth and gimlet eyes, some museum relics out of ancient Gaul—all fugitive and broken, gone like smoke.
… An emerald river and a shining light; some glorious cookery and drink; the pulse-beat in the warm throat of a girl—these would remain. Smoke! Smoke! has it been otherwise with any man?
And again, he was hurtling southward in a train.
C
Time, please, time…. What time is it?… Gentlemen, it’s closing time…. Time, gentlemen… that time of year thou mayst in me behold…. In the good old summer-time…. I keep thinking of you all the time… all the time… and all the time…. A long time ago the world began…. There goes the last bell, run, boy, run: you’ll just have time…. There are times that make you ha-a-ap-py, there are times that make you sa-a-ad…. Do you remember the night you came back to the University: it was that time right after your brother’s death, you had just come back that night; I know I was coming across the campus before Old East when I saw you coming up the path with a suitcase in your hand. It was raining, but we both stopped and began to talk there—we stepped in under one of the oak-trees because it was raining. I can still remember the old, wet, shining bark of the tree—the reason I can remember is that you put your hand out and leaned against the tree as you talked to me and I kept thinking how tall you were—of course you didn’t notice it, you weren’t conscious of it, but you had your head up and it must have been about eight feet above the ground. But I can remember everything we said that night—it was that time when you came back just after your brother’s death: that’s when it was all right, I guess that’s why I can remember it so well…. It’s time all little boys were in bed…. Now, boy, I’ll tell you when it was: it was that time your Papa made that trip to California—the reason that I know is I had just got a letter from him that morning written from Los Angeles telling me how he had seen John Balch and old Professor Truman, and how they had both gone into the real-estate business out there, and both of them getting rich by leaps and bounds—but that’s just exactly when it was, sir, the time he made that trip out there in 1906, along towards the end of February, and I had just finished reading his letter when—well, as I say now… Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes… time of my father’s time, life of his life. “Ah, Lord,” he said, “I knew them all—and all of them are gone. I’m the only one that’s left. By God! I’m getting old.”… In the year that the locusts came, something that happened in the year the locusts came, two voices that I heard there in that year…. Child! Child! It seems so long ago since the year the locusts came, and all of the trees were eaten bare: so much has happened, and it seems so long ago….
“To keep time with!”—To Eugene Gant, Presented to Him on the Occasion of His Twelfth Birthday, by His Brother, B. H. Gant, October 3, 1912…. “To keep time with!”… Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep in the hill, Ben, cold, cold, cold.
“Ces arbres—”
“Monsieur?” a thin, waxed face of tired Gaul, professionally attentive, the eyebrows arched perplexedly above old tired eyes, the waiter’s fatigued napkin on the arm.
“—Monsieur—?”
“Ces arbres—” he stammered, pointing helplessly—“J’ai—j’ai—mais je les ai vu—avant—”
“Monsieur?”—the eyebrows still more patient, puzzled and concerned, the voice wrought with attention—“vous dites, monsieur?”
“J’ai dit que—ces arbres—je les ai vu—” he blundered helplessly, and suddenly muttered, with a face gone sullen and ashamed—“Ça ne fait rien—l’addition, s’il vous plaît.”
The waiter stared at him a moment with courteous, slightly pained astonishment, then smiled apologetically, shrugged his shoulders slightly in a movement of defeat, and saying, “Bien, monsieur,” took the ten-franc note upon the table, counted the racked saucers, and made change for him.
When the waiter had gone, he sat for a moment staring at the trees. It was in the month of April, it was night, he was alone on the café terrace, and yet the chill air was touched with a fragrance that was soft, thrilling and mysterious—a citrous fume, the smell of unknown flowers, or perhaps not even this—but only the ghost of a perfume, the thrilling, barren, and strangely seductive odour of Provence.
It was a street in the little town of Arles, at night—an old, worn, rutted, curiously dirty-looking street, haunted by the trunks of immense and dusty-looking trees. He had never been here before, the scene was strange and haunting as a dream, and yet it was instantly and intolerably familiar. It was, somehow, he thought, like a street he had been to in some small town in the hot South at the faded end of summer—a South Carolina town, he thought it must be, and he was sure that he would hear the sound of familiar, unknown voices, the passing of feet, the rustling of quiet, tired leaves. And then he saw again how strange it was, and could see the tired waiter racking chairs and tables for the night, and in the café tired lights and emptiness, and the white, tired light upon the old dusty street, the huge haunting boles of the great trees; and he knew that he had never been along that way before.
Then he got up and walked away, and put his hand upon the trunk of one of the old trees: it was white and felt smooth to the touch, and was somewhat like the sycamores at home—and yet it was not this that haunted him with troubling memory. He felt, intolerably, that the place, the scene, the great wreathed branches of the trees, were something he had seen before—that he had seen it here from the same spot where now he sat—but when, when, when?
And suddenly, with a thrill of recognition that flashed across his brain like an electric spark, he saw that he was looking at the same trees that Van Gogh had painted in his picture of the roadmenders at their work in Arles, that the scene was the same, that he was sitting where the painter had sat before. And he noted that the trees had tall, straight, symmetrical trunks, and remembered that the trees that Vincent had painted had great, tendoned trunks that writhed and twisted like creatures in a dream—and yet were somehow more true than truth, more real than this reality. And the great vinelike trunks of these demented trees had wound and rooted in his heart, so that now he could not forget them, nor see this scene in any other way than that in which Van Gogh had painted it.
When he got up, the waiter was still racking chairs upon the tables, and the white and quiet light from the café fell like a tired stillness on the dusty street, and he walked away, haunted by unfathomed memories of home, and with something in his heart he could not utter.
In all the dreams and visions that now swarmed across his sleep, dreams and visions which can only be described as haunted fatally by the sense of time—his mind seemed to exercise the same complete control it ever had shown in all the operations of its conscious memory. He slept, and knew he slept, and saw the whole vast structure of the sleeping world about him as he slept; he dreamed, and knew he dreamed, and like a sorcerer, drew upward at his will, out of dark deeps and blue immensities of sleep, the strange, dark fish of his imagining.
Sometimes they came with elvish flakings of a hoary light, sometimes they came like magic and the promise of immortal joy; they came with victory and singing and a shout of triumph in his blood, and again he felt the strange and deathless joy of voyages: he was a passenger upon great ships again, he walked the broad, scrubbed decks exultantly, and smelled the hot, tarred roofs of powerful and ugly piers; he smelled the spermy sea-wrack of the harbour once again, the wastes of oil, the sharp, acrid and exultant smoke from busy little tugs, the odour of old, worn plankings, drenched with sunlight, and the thousand strange compacted spices of the laden piers. Again he felt the gold and sapphire loveliness of a Saturday in May, and drank the glory of the earth into his heart, and heard in lucent and lyrical air the heavy shattering “baugh” of the great ship’s whistle, as it spoke gloriously, of springtime, new lands and departure. Again he saw ten thousand faces, touched with their strange admixture of sorrow and joy, swarm past the openings of the pier, and again he saw the flashing tides that girdled the city, whitened around the prows of a hundred boats and gleaming with a million iridescent points of light. Again the great walled cliff, the crowded isle, the fabulous spires and ramparts of the city, as delicate as the hues of light that flashed around them, slid away from him, and one by one, the great ships, with the proud sweep of their breasts of white, their opulent storeyed superstructure, their music of power and speed, fell into line at noon on Saturday. And now, like bridled horses held in leash, with princely chafe and curvetings, they breach the mighty harbour, nose the narrows, circle slowly to brief pauses at the pilot’s boat, and then, like racers set loose from the barriers, they are sent away, their engines tremble to a mighty stroke, the ships are given to the sea, to solitude, and to their proper glory once more.
And again he walked the decks, he walked the decks alone, and saw the glittering sea-flung city melt within his sight, and watched the sandy edges of the land fade away, and felt the incredible gold and sapphire glory of the day, the sparkle of dancing waters, and smelled salt, seaborne air again, and saw upon the decks the joyful and exultant faces of the passengers, their looks of wonder, hope, and speculation, as they looked into the faces of strange men and women, now by the miracle of the voyage and chance isled with them in the loneliness of water, upon the glorious prison of a ship. And again he saw the faces of the lovely women, and saw the lights of love and passion in their eyes, and again he felt the plangent and depthless undulance, the unforgettable feeling of the fathomless might of the sea beneath a ship; a wild cry was torn from his throat, and a thousand unutterable feelings of the voyage, of white coasts and sparkling harbours and the creaking, eerie cries of gulls, of the dear, green dwelling of the earth again, and of strange, golden cities, potent wines, delicious foods, of women, love, and amber thighs spread amorously in ripe golden hay, of discovery and new lands, welled up in him like deathless song and certitude.
But just as these visions of delight and joy thronged upward through the deep marine of sleep, so, by the same fiat, the same calm order of an imperial will, the visions of a depthless shame, a faceless abomination of horror, an indefinable and impalpable corruption, returned to haunt his brain with their sentences of inexpiable guilt and ruin: under their evil spell he lay tranced upon his bed in a hypnosis of acquiescent horror, in a willing suspension of all his forces of resistance, like some creature held captive before the hypnotic rhythm of a reptile’s head, the dull, envenomed fascination of its eye.
He moved on ceaselessly across a naked and accursed landscape and beneath a naked and accursed sky, an exile in the centre of a planetary vacancy that, like his guilt and shame, had neither place among things living nor among things dead, in which there was neither vengeance of lightning nor mercy of burial, in which there was neither shade nor shelter, curve nor bend, nor hill, nor tree, nor hollow, in which—earth, air, sky, and limitless horizon—there was only one vast naked eye, inscrutable and accusing, from which there was no escape, and which bathed his naked soul in its fathomless depths of shame.
And then the vision faded, and suddenly, with the bridgeless immediacy of a dream, he found himself within the narrow canyon of a street, pacing interminably along on endless pavements where there was neither face nor footfall save his own, nor eye, nor window, nor any door that he might enter.
He thought he was walking through the harsh and endless continuity of one of those brown stone streets of which most of the city was constructed fifty years ago, and of which great broken lengths and fragments still remain. These streets, even if visited by someone in his waking hours, by some stranger in the fullness of health and sanity, and under the living and practical light of noon or, more particularly, by some man stunned with drink, who came there at some desolate and empty hour of night, might have a kind of cataleptic horror, a visionary unreality, as if some great maniac of architecture had conceived and shaped the first harsh, ugly pattern of brown angularity, and then repeated it, without a change, into the infinity of illimitable repetition, with the mad and measureless insistence of an idiotic monotony.
And for ever he walked the street, under the brown and fatal light that fell upon him. He walked the street, and looked for a house there that was his own, for a door he knew that he must enter, for someone who was waiting for him in the house, and for the merciful dark wall and door that would hide and shelter him from the immense and naked eye of shame that peered upon him constantly. For ever he walked the street and searched the bleak, untelling façades for the house he knew and had forgotten; for ever he prowled along before the endless and unchanging façades of the street, and he never found it, and at length he became aware of a vast sibilant whispering, of an immense conspiracy of subdued and obscene laughter, and of the mockery of a thousand evil eyes that peered in silence from these bleak façades, and that he could never find or see; and for ever he walked the streets alone and heard the immense and secret whisperings and laughter, and was bathed in the bottomless depths of a wordless shame, and could never find the house he had lost, the door he had forgotten.
He was sitting in Marseilles, at a table on the terrace of a café on La Canebière, when he saw them. Suddenly, above the rapid and vociferous animation of the café crowd, he heard Starwick’s strangely timbred voice, and turning, saw them seated at a table not a dozen feet away. Starwick had just turned to Elinor and was saying something quietly, in his tone of grave yet casual seriousness that often introduced his drolleries, and then he could see Starwick’s ruddy face suffuse and deepen with his laughter, and Elinor’s heavy shoulders begin to tremble, and then heard her shriek of high, astounded, and protesting merriment. Ann was seated listening, dark, silent, sullenly intent, with one long, slender hand resting upon the neck of the big dog who crouched quietly beside her, and suddenly her dark and sullen face was lighted by its rare and radiant smile that gave her features the instant configuration of noble beauty.
The world rocked before him as if shattered by the force of an explosion: all the life seemed to have been blown out of him, and he sat there staring at them, blind, numb, hollow, emptied to a shell, and conscious of only one sensation—a kind of horrible fear that they would turn and see him, a kind of horrible fear that they would not. They did not turn or notice him: completely absorbed in one another, it seemed to him that they had forgotten him as completely as if they had never known him, and he was suddenly stabbed with a horrible chagrin at sight of their free gaiety, a bitter anguish of despair because of the triumph of their laughter. Then he was conscious of a single, blind and overpowering desire—to get away from them, to get away unseen, to get away somewhere—anywhere—so long as he could escape the agony of meeting, the naked shame of revelation. He signalled to a waiter, paid his bill, and quickly made his way out among the tables into the noisy crowd that thronged for ever past upon the pavement. He set his face blindly away from them and plunged ahead: it seemed to him that he could hear Starwick’s shout of recognition, his voice calling to him above the thousand mixed vociferations of the crowd—and like a man pursued by devils, he set his head down blindly and fled.
His life had passed into a state which, if not insane, was distinguished from insanity chiefly by a kind of quiescent understanding which surveyed the passage of time and his own actions with the powerless detachment of a spectator in a dream. Now, after this encounter with his three lost friends, even this sense of valuation was taken from him. In the weeks that followed he was caught in a spell of time in which his life passed in a kind of evil dream, and later he was no more able to recall what he had done, how he had lived, where he had gone during this period, than if he had been the subject of a powerful and complete hypnosis. He was only vaguely conscious of what had happened, he felt a numb sense of horrible catastrophe, such as a drowning man might feel, or an anæsthetized patient who is bleeding to death under the surgeon’s knife. He had a blind consciousness that some central governance of his life and reason had been exploded, that he was spinning down out of control like a shattered aeroplane—and that there was nothing he could do to save himself, that he could not get control again, that he could not “get back.”
He lost the time-sense utterly—and it was his consciousness of this that filled him with numb terror. He would return to his room at night telling himself that he must work, then sleep, then rise by day and work again, and suddenly his room would be filled with light, the street below his window would be loud with all the noisy business of noon, and he would be seated at his table, with no knowledge how the time had passed.
He was now haunted constantly by a sense of the overwhelming nearness of his three lost friends. This feeling, indeed, would become so overpowering that at times the living presences of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann seemed invisibly to be with him, beside him. And the knowledge that they were here—for his conviction had become the obsession of an unshakable belief—seemed to give to the strange and sinister life of the evil and mysterious city an unutterable magic, to infect the very air he breathed with an intolerable anguish and delight. His whole life—heart and mind and spirit, and every nerve and sense and sinew of his body—was now passionately, indefatigably on the search for them. If he slept, it only brought to him an unbelievable ecstasy, an unbearable pain.
When he went out into the streets now it was only with the thought that he would find them—with an overwhelming conviction of his impending meeting with them. It seemed to him that every step he took was bringing him nearer to them, that he would meet them face to face around every corner that he turned—and this knowledge palsied his flesh with excitement, joy, and terror.
The two priests had finished eating, and provided with small cups of black coffee and small glasses of green Chartreuse, they had settled back against the wall to enjoy in relaxed comfort the peace that passeth understanding. Both of the priests were Franciscans, they were on their way to Rome for the Holy Year, and apparently they had come well bestowed. Beside their table a frosty silver bucket, over the rim of which floated the gold necks of two empty champagne bottles, gave evidence of a meal from which nothing had been lacking. A waiter brought a box of Coronas and offered them prayerfully. The priests selected their cigars with an appeased and drowsy air: they bit the ends and grunted slightly at the flame the waiter offered them; then collapsing slowly against the cushioned wall, they meditated the ceiling in silence for several minutes through a blue, fragrant mist of dreamful ease.
It was a fine evening towards the end of May, and the two priests were in the best place to observe it. They had the first table on the right as you entered the café, and at this season of the year there was no door: the front was open. Just outside, the priests could see all the gaily painted little chairs and tables of the terrace, which was empty, and just beyond, the sidewalk and the Avenue de la Victoire, the chief thoroughfare of Nice. The street itself was quiet: from time to time a motor car flashed past or an old nag with clopping hooves, pulling a dilapidated-looking victoria and urged on by a driver hunting for a fare. The trees along the street were in their full green leaf now and the air was sweet with the smell of the trees, the fragrance of earth and gardens and of unknown flowers. From time to time people came by with the strolling movement which a fine evening of this sort always seems to induce; and sometimes there would be young couples, lovers with arms around each other’s waists, the women walking with a movement of voluptuous and languorous appeasement as if they were just coming from the act of love. But probably all they felt was the sensuous mystery, beauty and fragrance of the night, the smell of the trees and the earth and the flowers, which seemed to impregnate the whole continent of dark with the thrilling promises of desire almost made palpable, of unknown joys about to be realized.
It was a wonderfully seductive scene that opened from the entrance of the café, and all the more exciting because of its homely familiarity, its small framed limits into which life passed briefly with a ring of jaunting hooves, a sudden casual nearness and loudness of passing voices, and then—the fading and lonely recession of these homely sounds, a woman’s burst of low and sensual laughter in the dark, the far-off dying-out of jaunting hooves—and silence.
The two priests missed nothing of the quiet scene: they drank it in with the air of men who have eaten nobly and who, fumed to contentment with the drugs of good tobacco and an old liqueur, are enormously pleased with life.
They were a strangely sorted pair and, once seen, would never be forgotten. The larger of the two was a huge tub and belly of a man, a kind of mammoth creature out of Rabelais, whose great moon of face flared fiercely, from the excess of his eating and his drinking. His fat neck and triple chin exuded over the neck-band of his robe, so that the garment he wore seemed to be stained and larded with the man’s own grease. Everything about the great priest cried out with swingeing openness: his whole nature seemed to be permeated by a good humour so mountainously all-engulfing that nothing in the world could stop it: the huge red face would swell, suffuse, and purple with its choking laughter, the whole huge torso—the shoulders, arms and breast, and the great heaving belly—would shake and tremble like a hogshead full of jelly. And so far was he from being troubled by a thought of judgment, by fear of censure or the world’s reproving eye, that the sight of a shocked or unconceding face was enough to send him off in a renewed paroxysm of volcanic mirth. There was no concealment in the man, there was even a kind of mountainously good-natured contempt for what the world might say or think of him, and for this reason his association with his fellow-priest was all the more grotesquely humorous—a humour which was certainly not lost on this great modern Friar John of the Funnels, but which he relished to the full. For, by contrast to this great flaring, heaving, roaring, full moon of a man, it would be impossible to imagine a more cautious and hypocritical figure than the other priest cut. The second priest was a little man with a grey, bleak, meagre and incredibly sly kind of face in which his native caution and fear of self-exposure were constantly waging a grotesque and open warfare with the sly, cunning, avaricious greed and sensual desire obscenely legible in his countenance. At the present moment this tormented struggle between lust and caution was comically evident: the fellow’s face was a grotesque painting of desire, and his furtive little eyes kept darting around in his head like rodents’and he peered slyly right and left all round the café to see if anyone had noticed the naked exposure of his passions. The reason for his confusion, the very sight of which set his huge companion off in great breast-and belly-heavings of tremendous laughter, was not hard to find: at the table next to the two priests were seated two comely young prostitutes, who had ogled and enticed the two holy men all through the evening and whose seductive cajoleries, encouraged by the great priest’s explosions of mountainous belly-gushing laughter, had now become naked, open, and outrageous. The little fellow was in a cold, grey sweat of fear and longing: afraid to look at the two women, he could yet hardly keep his eyes off them; and terrified lest his conduct be observed and followed, he was nevertheless unable to conceal the feverish eagerness of desire which held him fascinated in a kind of trance.
So the indecent comedy proceeded: the two women, emboldened by the huge priest’s mountainous heavings of laughter, passed swiftly from flirtatious raillery to proposals of a more serious character: at the end, something certain, swift and serious passed between the women and the huge fat priest: one of them spoke to him in a low hoarse tone, he lowered his great moon of face a trifle, and without looking at her, answered. In a moment the two girls rose with an elaborate casualness, the priest paid their bill, and the women sauntered out, turned left, moved slowly towards the corner and, crossing to the other side, advanced a few yards down the quiet intersecting street, where they paused and turned, waiting, in the obscuring shadow of a tree.
In a moment the huge priest called for the bill, paid it, tipped the waiter generously, and rising with a mountainous grunt, deliberately launched his huge bulk towards the street, closely followed by the sly and terror-stricken figure of the little priest. Outside the café the great priest paused deliberately, looking both ways with a kind of huge and rotund benevolence; then turning left in the direction the girls had gone, he set out again in leisurely, unperturbed pursuit. And the little priest trotted along beside him like a frightened puppy beside an elephant; in every step, in every stride and movement that they made, the separate characters of the two men were grotesquely and powerfully evident. The huge priest barged along with a tremendous and deliberate majesty, swinging his great belly right and left before him as an elephant swings its trunk, and magnificently indifferent to what anyone might think or say. But the little man trotted along in a state bordering on terror; he tried desperately to look casual and unconcerned, but his shifting eyes darted furtive glances right and left, and beneath the hem of his rough gown his sandalled feet kept slatting up and down in a movement that was somehow comically sly and that revealed the man’s whole character. At the corner the big priest paused deliberately again, turned, surveyed the scene and then, espying the white of the girls’dresses below the trees across the street, set out in deliberate pursuit. And the little priest trotted along beside, his head lowered, his eyes darting furtive glances right and left, his sandalled feet slatting slyly up and down. Then they caught up with the girls below the trees and, half obscured in darkness, they stood for a moment talking in low voices. Then each of the girls took one of the priests by the arm and they all walked off together down the street and soon were lost in leafy darkness and the mystery of the night. Then the waiter, who had served the priests and who, standing in the entrance, had observed the meeting across the street, turned and, glaring at the youth, said quietly:
“C’est tres joli, eh?… Moi,” he continued, after a brief pause, “je n’ai pas le sentiment religieux.” And having delivered himself without rancour or surprise of that devastating statement, he dismissed the subject from his mind completely and, turning to the table that the priests had left, he racked the saucers up and wiped the table clean.
From a distance there came suddenly a woman’s low, rich burst of sensual laughter, the receding hoof-beats of a horse, and then all around there was silence, the overpowering fragrance of the earth, the huge thrill and mystery of night, and the sense of an intolerable desire, close and palpable and lovely, and never to be grasped or found: and from the huge and haunting familiarity of all these things a thousand receding and unuttered memories of time arose, a feeling of bitter loss, wild joy and pain—of a door that closed, a cloud-shadow that had gone for ever. He thought of home.
Among the dreams that returned to haunt his waking, watchful sleep during the strange, living vision of that green spring, as he lay hearted at the pulse of time, there was one which remained ever after in his memory.
He was striding along a wide and sandy beach and by the side of a calm and tranquilly flowing sea. The waves broke quietly and evenly in a long, low roll upon the beach, rushing up the sand in small hissing eddies of foam and water. Below his feet the firm, brown sand sprang back with an elastic vitality, a warm and vital wind was blowing, and he drew into his lungs exultantly the smell of the sea and of the warm, wet, fragrant beach, ribbed evenly with braided edges of brown seaweed.
He did not recognize the scene as one which he had ever visited before, and yet he felt an instant and complete familiarity with it, as if he had known it for ever. Behind him, drumming evenly upon the hard, elastic sand, and fading away into the distance with a hard, wooden thunder of wheels, he heard the furious rhythm of pounding hooves of driven horses. He knew that he had just descended from a ship and that he was living in one of the antique and early ages of the earth; and all of this he knew with joy and wonder, and without surprise, with the thrill of recovering something he had always known and had lost for ever.
It was a scene out of the classic period of the earth, and yet it was wholly different from every image he had ever had about this earth in his imagination. For where, in every vision of his mind and reading, that earth had come to him in a few sharp and radiant colours, in a structure of life as glowing and proportionate as one of its faultless temples, as remote from the world he lived in as all its fables, myths, and legends, this earth he now walked on was permeated with the living tones and weathers of life.
The world of Homer was the world of first light, sunlight, and of morning: the sea was wine-dark, a gold and sapphire purity of light fell on the walls of Troy, a lucent depthless purity of light welled from the eyes of Helen, as false, fatal, and innocently corrupt a woman as ever wrought destruction on the earth. The light that fell on Nausicaa and her maidens was all gold and crystal like the stream they bathed in, as lucent in purity as their limbs, as radiant as joy and morning on the earth; and even the lights of vengeance and the rout of the dread furies that fell upon the doomed and driven figure of Orestes were as fatal as blood, as relentless as an antique tragedy, as toneless as a destiny.
And in his pictures of a later time, of Athens in the period of recorded history, of Pericles and Plato and the time of the wars with Sparta, the scenes of history were bathed in these radiant and perfect lights and weathers. He knew these men were made of living, breathing flesh and subject to the errors and imperfections of mortal men, and yet when he tried to think of a slum in Athens, of people with bad teeth, blemished skins, muddy complexions—of disease, filth, and squalor among them, and of the million weary, beaten, dusty, sweating moments of their lives, he could not. Even human grief, pain, and trouble took on a colour of classical perfection, of tragic grandeur, and the tortured and distressful skein of human life, with all that is ugly, trivial, and disgusting in it, took on the logical pattern of design and ordered destiny.
The light that fell upon them was of gold and sapphire, and of singing, or as ominous and fatal as a certain and inexorable doom; but now he walked this beach in one of the classical periods of the earth, and nothing was as he had tried to picture it, and yet all was as familiar as if he had known it for ever.
There was no gold and sapphire in the air: it was warm and sultry, omened with some troubling, variable and exultant menace, fraught with the sulphurous promise of a storm, pregnant with mystery and discovery, touched with a hundred disturbing elements and weathers of man’s soul, and scented with a thousand warm and spermy odours of the land and sea, that touched man’s entrails with delight and prophecy.
And the sea also was neither lyrical with gold and blue nor wine-dark in its single harmony: the sea was dark and sultry as the sky that bent above it, murked greenly, thickly, milkily, as it rolled quietly and broke upon the beach, as omened with impalpable prophecy as the earth and air.
He did not know the reason for his being there, and yet he knew beyond a doubt that he had come there for a purpose, that someone was waiting for him there, that the greatest joy and triumph he had ever known was impending in this glorious meeting.
== CI ==
That year, in June, he was sitting one day at a table before a little café that looked out across a quiet, cobbled square in the ancient city of Dijon. He was on his way to Paris from Italy and Switzerland and he had stopped here on impulse, remembering that the town was the capital of the old kingdom of Burgundy—a name which, in some way, since childhood, had flourished in his mind with a green magic, evoking images of a fair, green country, noble wine and food, a golden, drowsy legendry of old wars and heroes, women, gallantry, and knightly acts.
And he had not been disappointed. The old town with its ancient palaces—the worn and age-grimed façades of a forgotten power, a storeyed architecture—and the fair, green earth, the deep, familiar green of the intimate and yet enchanted hills, awoke in him all the old drowsy gold of legendry, the promise of a fair and enfabled domain, fat with plenty.
He had been here three days now, flooded with living green and gold, a willing captive in the spell of time, drinking the noblest wine, eating some of the noblest cookery he had ever known. After the dull Swiss food, the food and wine of Burgundy were good beyond belief; and everything—old town, the fair, green country and the hills—made a music in him again which was like all the green-gold magic of his childhood’s dream of France.
Now he sat there at a table before a little café, already meditating with slow, lustful reverie his noonday meal at an ancient, famous inn where for eighteen francs one was served a stupendous meal—a succession of succulent native dishes such as he had dreamed about but had never thought that he would find outside of dreams or legends, in a town so small as this.
As he thought of this gourmet’s heaven with a feeling of wonder and disbelief, the memory of a hundred little towns and cities in America returned to him, with the hideous and dyspeptic memory of their foods—the greasy, rancid, sodden, stale, dead, and weary foods of the Greek restaurants, of the luncheon rooms, coffee shops and railway cafeterias—hastily bolted and washed down to the inevitable miseries of dyspepsia with gulping swallows of sour, weak coffee.
Yes, even the noble food and wine had made a magic in this ancient place, and suddenly he was pierced again by the old hunger that haunts and hurts Americans—the hunger for a better life—an end of rawness, newness, sourness, distressful and exacerbated misery, the taking from the great plantation of the earth and of America our rich inheritance of splendour, ease, and abundance—good food, and sensual love, and noble cookery—the warmth of radiant colour and of wine—pulse of the blood—an end of misery, bitterness, hunger and unrest upon the breast of everlasting plenty—the inheritance of exultancy and joy for ever, which some foul, corrosive poison in our lives—bitter enigma that it is!—has taken from us.
Now, as he thought these things, sitting before the café and looking across the quiet square of whitened cobbles, a bell struck and noon came. Slowly a great clock began to strike in the old town. In a cool, dark church, which he had seen the day before, a bell-rope, knotted at the ends, hung down before the altar-steps from an immense distance in the ceiling. The moment the town bell had finished its deep reverberation, a sexton walked noisily across the old flagged church-floor and took the bell-cord in his hands. Slowly, with a gentle rhythm, he began to swing upon the rope, and one could hear at first an old and heavy creaking from the upper air, but as yet no bell.
Then the sexton’s body stiffened in its rhythm, he hung hard upon the knotted rope in punctual sway, and there began, far up in the church, the upper air of that old place, a sweet and ponderous beating of the bells. At first they beat in threes—ding-dong-dong; ding-dong-dong; then swiftly the man changed his rhythm, and the bells began to beat a faster double measure.
And now the youth remembered old, distant chimes upon a street at night; and the memory of his own bells came back into his heart. He remembered the great bell at college that rang the boys to classes, and how the knotted bell-rope came down into the room of the student who rang it; and how often he had rung the bell himself, and how at first there was the creaking noise in the upper air of the bell-tower, there as here; and how, as the great bell far above him swung into its rhythm, he would be carried off the floor by that weight of thronging bronze; and he remembered still the lift and power of the old college bell, as he swung at the knotted rope, and the feeling of joy and power that surged up in him as he was lifted on the mighty upward stroke, and heard above him in the tower the dark music of the grand old bell and the students running on the campus paths below the window, and then the loose rope, the bell tolling brokenly away to silence, the creaking sound again, and finally nothing but silence, the day’s green spell and golden magic of the drowsy campus in the month of May.
And now the memory of that old bell, with all its host of long-forgotten things, swarmed back with living and intolerable pungency, as he sat there at noon in the old French town and heard the sexton swinging on the bell of the old church.
He thought of home.
And now, with the sound of that old bell, everything around him burst into instant life. Although the structure of that life was foreign to him, and different from anything he had known as a child, everything instantly became incredibly living, near, and familiar, like something he had always known.
The little café before which he was sitting was old and small, and had a warm, worn look of use and comfort. Inside, in the cool, dark depth of the place, were two old men sitting at a table playing cards—with a faded, green cloth upon the table; and two waiters. One of the old men had long, pointed moustaches, and a thin, distinguished face; the other was more ruddy and full-fleshed and had a beard. They played quietly, bending over the old, green cloth with studious deliberation, making each play slowly. Sometimes they spoke quietly to each other, only a few words at a time; sometimes the ruddy old man’s thick shoulders would heave and tremble, and his face would flush rosily with satisfaction; but the other one laughed thinly, quietly, in a more gentle, weary way.
The two waiters were polishing up the silverware and getting the tables set and put in order for the midday meal. One of the waiters was an old man with the sprouting, energetic moustaches one sees so often in France, and with the weary, hawk-like, cynical, yet not ill-natured face that one often sees on old waiters. The other—really just a bus-boy—was a young, clumsy, thick-fingered and thick-featured country lad, with the wine-dark, vital, sanguinary colouring some Frenchmen have.
The young fellow was full of exuberant good spirits; he was polishing up the knives and forks and spoons with enthusiastic gusto, humming the snatches of a song as he did so, and slamming each piece of silver down into a drawer with such vigour, when he had finished, that it was obvious that he got great pleasure from the musical jingle thus created.
Meanwhile the old waiter moved quietly, softly, and yet wearily about, setting the tables. At length, however, at the end of a particularly violent and enthusiastic jingle of silverware from his polishing companion, he looked up, with a slight cynical arching of his eyebrows, and then, without ill-nature but with perfect urbanity, he said ironically:
“Ah! On fait la musique!”
This was all, but one saw the young fellow’s face flush and redden with exuberant laughter; his thick shoulders rose and for a moment trembled convulsively, then he went on polishing, singing to himself, and hurling the noisy silverware into the drawer with more enthusiasm than ever.
And that brief, pleasant, and somehow poignantly unforgettable scene now seemed, like everything else, to be intolerably near and familiar to the youth, and something he had always known.
Before him the quiet, faded, strangely pleasant square was waking briefly to its moment of noonday life. Far off he could hear the little shrill fifing whistle of a French locomotive and the sound of slow trains; an ice-wagon, with a tin interior and large, delicately carved cakes of ice, clattered across the cobbles of the square; and he remembered how he had seen, the day before, some barge people eating on a barge beneath the trees. From where he sat he could see workmen, wearing shapeless caps and baggy corduroy trousers streaked with lime and cement, and talking in hoarse, loud, disputatious voices as they leaned above their drinks on the zinc bar of a little bistro on the corner.
Some young, dull-looking women, wearing light-coloured stockings and light, grey-tannish overcoats, came by, with domesticity written in every movement that they made, looking, somehow, their wedded propriety and the stern dullness of provincial places everywhere.
And then the lost, the irrevocable, the lonely sounds which he had not heard for fifteen years awoke there in the square, and suddenly he was a child, and it was noon, and he was waiting in his father’s house to hear the slam of the iron gate, the great body stride up the high porch steps, knowing his father had come home again.
At first, before him, in that little whitened square, it was just the thring of the bicycle bells, the bounding of the light-wired wheels. And at first he could see some French army officers riding home upon their bicycles. They were proper and assured-looking men, with solid, wine-dark faces, and they rode solidly and well, driving the light-wired wheels beneath them with firm propulsions of their solid legs.
Then, with a thring of bells, an army sergeant came by, riding fast and smoothly on his way home to dinner. And then, with sudden rush, the thring of bells, the thrum of wheels increased: the clerks, the bank clerks, the bookkeepers—the little proper and respectable people of all sorts—were riding home across the quiet little square at noon.
On the other side of the square he could see two workmen who were still at work upon a piece of stone; one was holding an iron spike and one a sledge, and they worked slowly, with frequent pauses.
A young buck, with a noisy, sporty little car, sped over the square and vanished; and the youth wondered if he was one of the daring blades of Dijon, and what young women of the town’s best families he had taken out in the car, and if he boasted to other young town blades in cafés of his prowess at seduction, as did the bucks before Wood’s Pharmacy at home.
Then for a moment there was a brooding silence in the square again, and presently there began the most lonely, lost and unforgettable of all sounds on earth—the solid, liquid leather-shuffle of footsteps going home one way, as men had done when they came home to lunch at noon some twenty years ago, in the green-gold and summer magic of full June, before he had seen his father’s land, and when the kingdoms of this earth and the enchanted city still blazed there in the legendary magic of his boyhood’s vision.
They came with solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of their decent leather, going home, the merchants, workers, and good citizens of that old town of Dijon. They streamed across the cobbles of that little square; they passed, and vanished, and were gone for ever—leaving silence, the brooding hush and apathy of noon, a suddenly living and intolerable memory, instant and familiar as all this life around him, of a life that he had lost, and that could never die.
It was the life of twenty years ago in the quiet, leafy streets and little towns of lost America—of an America that had been lost beneath the savage roar of its machinery, the brutal stupefaction of its days, the huge disease of its furious, ever-quickening and incurable unrest, its flood-tide horror of grey, driven faces, stolid eyes, starved, brutal nerves, and dull, dead flesh.
The memory of the lost America—the America of twenty years ago, of quiet streets, the time-enchanted spell and magic of full June, the solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of men in shirt-sleeves coming home, the leafy fragrance of the cooling turnip-greens, and screens that slammed, and sudden silence—had long since died, had been drowned beneath the brutal flood-tide, the edict stupefaction of that roaring surge and mechanical life which had succeeded it.
And now, all that lost magic had come to life again here in the little whitened square, here in this old French town, and he was closer to his childhood and his father’s life of power and magnificence than he could ever be again in savage new America; and as the knowledge of these strange, these lost yet familiar things returned to him, his heart was filled with all the mystery of time, dark time, the mystery of strange, million-visaged time that haunts us with the briefness of our days.
He thought of home.