the others talked, as if the waste-land chatter of their tongues, the waste-land vacancy of their lost waste-land souls was something that he knew he must endure, but would endure with his cold faint disdainful smile, his soul steeped in cold and patient weariness till death should mercifully release him.
The other man was a Jew named Fried, and that man Eugene could never forget. Eugene didn’t know where he came from, how he got there, who made him a Rhodes scholar, but he knew that of them all, save Johnny, he was the only one who had maintained his integrity, the only one who did not have a spurious, fearful, uneasily evasive quality, the only one who came out with it, the whole packed load of bitterness and hate within him, the only one who had remained himself.
Perhaps it was a bad self to remain: it was certainly a self that was lacking in charm, that had the aggressive, abusive, curiously unrighteous quality of his race—but there he was, terrifically himself and unashamed of it—with a naked formidable integrity of self that blazed with a hard and naked light of a cut jewel, and that Eugene could never forget even when the characters of the rest of them had grown blurred and shapeless and obscure.
Eugene didn’t know where he came from, but he was sure it was from one of the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard—from New York, Boston, Baltimore or Philadelphia. He had seen his face, his figure, and his kind a million times upon the pavements of those cities and incredibly now, that dark unhappy face which never before had seemed to him to be a face at all, nothing but a tidal flood of nameless faces, that strident and abusive tongue which had never before seemed to him to be a single tongue, but just a common, nameless, and unnumbered ugliness of rasping voices, an anathema of bitter cries and harsh derisions—a constant phrase, a dissonance, a weather of the city’s life—all that had been nameless, faceless, characterless and obscure—the look, the sound, the smell of the man-swarm ciphers of the city as dark-eyed, dark-faced, and bitter-tongued they swarmed along the pavements of the cities—all this, in that strange place, was suddenly, weirdly, resumed into a single character—a character that was hard, bitter, unforgettably itself, and that no change of sky or land or custom, nor the huge impact of all the alien and formidable pageantry of the earth, could ever alter by a jot.
Theirs was a wretched, hopeless, lonely life, a futile, feeble, barren life, an impossible, groping, wretched insecure life—and Fried was the only
