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.
