You Can't Go Home Again/Book IV

◄  BOOK III. - AN END AND A BEGINNING

You Can't Go Home Again BOOK IV. - THE QUEST OF THE FAIR MEDUSA written by Thomas Wolfe

BOOK V. - EXILE AND DISCOVERY  ►

The Sun Dial Press 1942 (pages 397-508)

George took Randy’s advice and moved. He did not know where to go. All he wanted was to get away as far as possible from Park Avenue, from the aesthetic jungles of the lion hunters, from the half-life of wealth and fashion that had grown like a parasite upon the sound body of America. He went to live in Brooklyn.

He had made a little money from his book, so now he paid his debts and quit the job he held as a teacher at the School for Utility Cultures. From this time on, he earned his precarious living solely by what he wrote.

For four years he lived in Brooklyn, and four years in Brooklyn are a geologic age—a single stratum of grey time. They were years of poverty, of desperation, of loneliness unutterable. All about him were the poor, the outcast, the neglected and forsaken people of America, and he was one of them. But life is strong, and year after year it went on round him in all its manifold complexity, rich with its unnoticed and unrecorded little happenings. He saw it all, be took it all in hungrily as part of his experience, he recorded much of it, and in the end he squeezed it dry as he tried to extract its hidden meanings.

And what was he like inside while these grey years were slipping by? What was he up to, what was he doing, what did he want?

That’s rather hard to tell, because he wanted so many things, but the thing he wanted most was Fame. Those were the years of his concentrated quest of that fair Medusa. He had had his little taste of glory, and it was bitter in his mouth. He thought the reason was that he had not been good enough—and he had not been good enough. Therefore he thought that what be had had was not Fame at all, but only a moment’s notoriety. He had been a seven-day wonder—that was all.

Well, he had learned some things since he wrote his first book. He would try again.

So he lived and wrote, and wrote and lived, and lived there by himself in Brooklyn. And when he had worked for hours at a stretch, forgetting food and sleep and everything, he would rise from his desk at last and stagger forth into the night-time streets, reeling like a drunkard with his weariness. He would eat his supper at a restaurant, and then, because his mind was feverish and he knew he could not sleep, he would walk to Brooklyn Bridge and cross It to Manhattan, and ferret out the secret heart of darkness in all the city’s ways, and then at dawn come back across the Bridge once more, and so to bed in Brooklyn.

And in these nightly wanderings the old refusals dropped away, the old avowals stood. For then, somehow, it seemed to him that he who had been dead was risen, be who had been lost was found again, and be who in his brief day of glory bad sold the talent, the passion, and the belief of youth into the keeping of the fleshless dead, until his heart was corrupted and all hope gone, would win his life back bloodily, in solitude and darkness. And be felt then that things would be for him once more as they had been, and he saw again, as be bad once seen, the image of the shining city. Far-flung, and blazing into into tiers of jewelled light, it burned forever in his vision as he walked the Bridge, and strong tides were bound round it, and the great ships called. So he walked the Bridge, always be walked the Bridge.

And by his side was that stern friend, the only one to whom be spoke what in his secret heart he most desired. To Loneliness he whispered: “Fame!”—and Loneliness replied: “Aye, brother, wait and see.”

27. The Locusts Have No King

The tragic light of evening falls upon the huge and rusty jungle of South Brooklyn. It falls without glare or warmth upon the faces of all the men with dead eyes and flesh of tallow-grey as they lean upon their window-sills at the sad, hushed end of day.

If at such a time you walk down this narrow street, between the mean and shabby houses, past the eyes of all the men who lean there quietly at their open windows in their shirt-sleeves, and turn in at the alley here and follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley on one side, and go to the very last shabby house down at the end, and climb up the flight of worn steps to the front entrance and knock loudly at the door with your bare knuckles (the bell is out of order) and then wait patiently until someone comes, and ask whether Mr. George Webber lives here, you will be informed that he most certainly does, and that if you will just come in and go down this stairway to the basement and knock at the door there on your right, you will probably find him in. So you go down the stairway to the damp and gloomy basement hall, thread your way between the dusty old boxes, derelict furniture, and other lumber stored there in the passage, rap on the door that has been indicated to you, and Mr. Webber himself will open it and usher you right into his room, his home, his castle.

The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in. It is long and narrow, running parallel to the hall from front to rear, and the only natural light that enters it comes through two small windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at the opposite ends, and these are heavily guarded with iron bars, placed there by some past owner of the house to keep the South Brooklyn thugs from breaking in.

The room is furnished adequately but not so luxuriously as to deprive it of a certain functional and Spartan simplicity. In the back half there is an iron bed with sagging springs, a broken-down dresser with a cracked mirror above it, two kitchen chairs, and a steamer trunk and some old suitcases that have seen much use. At the front end, under the yellow glow of an electric light suspended from the ceiling by a cord, there is a large desk, very much scarred and battered, with the handles missing on most of the drawers, and in front of it there is a straight-backed chair made out of some old, dark wood. In the centre, ranged against the walls, where they serve to draw the two ends of the room together into aesthetic unity, stand an ancient gate-legged table, so much of its dark green paint flaked off that the dainty pink complexion of its forgotten youth shows through all over, a tier of book-shelves, unpainted, and two large crates or packing-cases, their thick top boards pried off to reveal great stacks of ledgers and of white and yellow manuscript within. On top of the desk, on the table, on the book-shelves, and all over the floor are scattered, like fallen leaves in autumn woods, immense masses of loose paper with writing on every sheet, and everywhere are books, piled up on their sides or leaning crazily against each other.

This dark cellar is George Webber’s abode and working quarters. Here, in winter, the walls, which sink four feet below the level of the ground, sweat continuously with clammy drops of water. Here, in summer, it is he who does the sweating.

His neighbours, he will tell you, are for the most part Armenians, Italians, Spaniards, Irishmen, and Jews—in short, Americans. They live in all the shacks, tenements, and slums in all the raw, rusty streets and alleys of South Brooklyn.

And what is that you smell?

Oh, that! Well, you see, he shares impartially with his neighbours a piece of public property in the vicinity; it belongs to all of them in common, and it gives to South Brooklyn its own distinctive atmosphere. It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smouldering rags, the odours of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.

And how does he stand it?

Well, one gets used to it. One can get used to anything, just as all these other people do. They never think of the smell, they never speak of it, they’d probably miss it if they moved away.

To this place, then, George Webber has come, and here “holed in” with a kind of dogged stubbornness touched with desperation. And you will not be far wrong if you surmise that he has come here deliberately, driven by a resolution to seek out the most forlorn and isolated hiding spot that he could find.

Mr. Marple, a gentleman who has a room on the second floor, comes stumbling down the darkened basement stairway with a bottle in his hand and knocks upon George Webber’s door.

“Come in!”

Mr. Marple comes in, introduces himself, does the right thing with the bottle, sits down, and begins to make talk.

“Well, now, Mr. Webber, how d’yah like that drink I mixed for yah?”

“Oh, I like it, I like it.”

“Well, now, if yah don’t, I want yah t’come right out an’say so.”

“Oh, I would, I would.”

“I mean I’d like to know. I’d appreciate yah tellin’me. What I mean is, I made that stuff myself from a little private formuler I got—I wouldn’t buy no stuff from a bootlegger—I wouldn’t take no chance wit’the bastards. I buy the alcohol that goes into that drink from a place I know, an’I always know what I’m gettin’—d’yah know what I mean?”

“Yes, I certainly do.”

“But I’d like to know what yah think of it, I’d appreciate yah tellin’me.”

“Oh, it’s fine, it couldn’t be better.”

“I’m glad yah like it, an’you’re sure I didn’t disturb yah?”

“Oh, no, not at all.”

“Because I was on my way in when I sees your light there in the winder, so I says to myself, now that guy may think I’ve got an orful nerve buttin’in like this but I’m gonna stop an’get acquainted an’ast him if he’d like a little drink.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“But if I disturbed yah I wantcha t’say so.”

“Oh, no, not at all.”

“Because here’s the way it is wit’me. I’m interested in youman nature—I’m a great student of psychology—I can read faces the minute I look at a guy—it’s somethin’that I always had—I guess that’s why I’m in the insurance game. So when I sees a guy that interests me I wanta get acquainted wit’him an’get his reactions to things. So when I sees your light I says to myself, he may tell me to get the hell outa there but there ain’t no harm in tryin’.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Now Mr. Webber, I think I’m a pretty good judge of character——”

“Oh, I’m sure you are.”

“—an’I been lookin’at yah an’sorta sizin’yah up while yah been sittin’there. Yah didn’t know I was sizin’yah up but that’s what I been doin’all the time yah been sittin’there because I’m a great student of youman nature, Mr. Webber, an’I gotta size up all grades an’classes every day in my business—you know—I’m in the insurance game. An’ I wanna ast yah a question. Now if it’s too personal I wantcha t’come right out an’say so, but if yah don’t mind answerin’I’m gonna ast it to yah.”

“Not at all. What is it?”

“Well, Mr. Webber, I already reached my own conclusions, but I’m gonna ast it to yah just t’see if it don’t bear me out. Now what I’m gonna ast yah—an’yah don’t have to answer if yah don’t want to—is—What’s your line?—What business are yah in? Now yah don’t need to tell me if it’s too personal.”

“Not at all. I’m a writer.”

“A what?”

“A writer. I wrote a book once. I’m trying to write another one now.”

“Well now, it may surprise yah but that’s just what I figgered out myself. I says to myself, now there’s a guy, I says, that’s in some kind of intelleckshul work where he’s got t’use his head. He’s a writer or a newspaperman or in the advertisin’business. Y’see I’ve always been a great judge of youman nature—that’s my line.”

“Yes, I see.”

“An’now I wanna tell yah somethin’else, Mr. Webber. You’re doin’the thing yah was cut out for, you’re doin’the thing yah was born to do, it’s what yah been preparin’to do all your life sinct yah was a kid—am I right or wrong?”

“Oh, I guess you’re right.”

“An’that’s the reason you’re gonna be a big success at it. Stick to writin’, Mr. Webber. I’m a great judge of youman nature an’I know what I’m talkin’about. Just stick to the thing yah always wanted to be an’yah’ll get there. Now some guys never find theirselves. Some guys never know what they wanna be. That’s the trouble wit’some guys. Now wit’me it’s different. I didn’t find myself till I was a grown man. You’d have t’laugh, Mr. Webber, if I told yah what it was I wanted t’be when I was a kid.”

“What was it, Mr. Marple?”

“Say, Mr. Webber—y’know it’s funny—yah won’t believe me—but up to the time I was about twenty years old, a grown man, I was crazy to be a railway engineer. No kiddin’. I was nuts about it. An’I’d a-been just crazy enough to’ve gone ahead an’got a job on the railway if the old man hadn’t yanked me by the collar an’told me t’snap out of it. Yah know I’m a Down-Easter by birth—don’t talk like it any more—I been here too long—but that’s where I grew up. My old man was a plumber in Augusta, Maine. So when I tells him I’m gonna be a locomotive engineer he boots me one in the seat of the pants an’tells me I ain’t no such thing.’I've sent yah to school,’he says,’you’ve had ten times the schoolin’that I had, an’now yah tell me that you’re gonna be a railway hogger. Well, you’re not,’the old man says,’you’re gonna be one member of the fambly that’s comin’home at night wit’clean hands an’a white collar. Now you get the hell outa here an’hunt yah up a job in some decent high-class business where yah’ll have a chanct t’advance an’associate wit’your social ekals.’Jesus! It was a lucky thing for me he took that stand or I’d never a-got where I am to-day. But I was good an’sore about it at the time. An’say, Mr. Webber—you’re gonna laugh when I tell yah this one—I ain’t actually over the darn thing yet. No kiddin’. When I see one of these big engines bargin’down the track I still get that funny crawly feelin’I usta have when I was a kid an’looked at’em. The guys at the office had t’laugh about it when I told’em, an’now when I come in they call me Casey Jones.—Well, what d’yah say yah have another little snifter before I go?”

“Thanks, I’d like to, but maybe I’d better not. I’ve still got a little work I ought to do before I turn in.”

“Well now, Mr. Webber, I know just how it is. An’that’s the way I had yah sized up from the first. That guy’s a writer, I says, or in some sort of intelleckshul occupation where he’s got to use his head—was I right or wrong?”

“Oh, you were right.”

“Wel!, I’m glad to’ve metcha, Mr. Webber. Don’t make yourself a stranger round here. Yah know, a guy gets sorta lonely sometimes. My wife died four years ago so I been livin’upstairs here ever sinct—sorta figgered that a single guy didn’t need no more room than I got here. Come up to see me. I’m interested in youman nature an’1 like to talk to people an’get their different reactions. So any time yah feel like chewin’the rag a bit, drop in.”

“Oh, I will, I will.”

“Good night, Mr. Webber.”

“Good night, Mr. Marple.”

Good night. Good night. Good night.

Across the basement hall, in another room similar to George Webber’s, lived an old man by the name of Wakefield. He had a son somewhere in New York who paid his rent, but Mr. Wakefield rarely saw his son. He was a brisk and birdy little man with a chirping, cheerful voice; and, although he was almost ninety, he always seemed to be in good health and was still immensely active. His son had provided him with a room to live in, and he had a little money of his own—a few dollars a month from a pension—enough to supply his meagre wants; but he lived a life of utter loneliness, seeing his son only on the occasion of a holiday or a rare visit, and the rest of the time living all by himself in his basement room.

Yet he had as brave and proud a spirit as any man on earth. He longed desperately for companionship, but he would have died rather than admit he was lonely. So independent was he, and so sensitive, that, while he was always courteous and cheerful, his tone when he responded to a greeting was a little cold and distant, lest anyone should think he was too forward and eager. But, once satisfied of one’s friendliness, no one could respond more warmly or more cordially than old man Wakefield.

George grew fond of him and liked to talk with him, and the old man would invite him eagerly into his part of the basement and proudly display his room, which he kept with a soldierlike neatness. He was a veteran of the Union Army in the Civil War, and his room was filled with books, records, papers, and old clippings bearing on the war and on the part his regiment had played in it. Although he was alert and eager towards the life round him, and much too brave and hopeful a spirit to live mournfully in the past, the Civil War had been the great and central event in old man Wakefield’s life. Like many of the men of his generation, both North and South, it had never occurred to him that the war was not the central event in everyone’s life. Because it was so with him, he believed that people everywhere still lived and thought and talked about the war all the time.

He was a leading figure in the activities of his Grand Army Post, and was always bustling about with plans and projects for the coming year. It seemed to him that the Grand Army organisation, whose thinning ranks of old and feeble men he still saw with the proud eyes of forty or fifty years before, was the most powerful society in the nation, and that its word of warning or stern reproof was enough to make all the kings of the earth quake and tremble in their boots. He was bitterly scornful and would bristle up immediately at mention of the American Legion: he fancied slights and cunning trickery on the part of this body all the time, and he would ruffle up like a rooster when he spoke of the Legionnaires, and say in an angry, chirping voice:

“It’s jealousy! Nothing in the world but sheer tar-nation jealousy—that’s what it is!”

“But why, Mr. Wakefield? Why should they be jealous of you?”

“Because we reely did some soldierin’—that’s why!” he chirped angrily. “Because they know we fit the Rebels—yes! and fit ’em good—and licked ’em, too!” he cackled triumphantly—“in a war that was a war!…Pshaw!” he said scornfully, in a lowered voice, looking out the window with a bitter smile and with eyes that had suddenly grown misty. “What do these fellows know about a war?—Some bob-tail—raggedy—two-by-two—little jackleg feller—of aLegionnary!” He spat the words out with a malignant satisfaction, breaking at the end into a vindictive cackle. “Standin’to their necks all day in some old trench and never gettin’within ten miles of the enemy!” he sneered. “If they ever saw a troop of cavalry, I don’t know what they’d make of it! I reckon they’d think it was the circus come to town!” he cackled. “A war! A war! Hell-fire, that warn’t no war!” he cried derisively. “If they wanted to see a war, they should’ve been with us at the Bloody Angle! But, pshaw!” he said. “They’d a-run like rabbits if they’d been there! The only way you could a-kept’em would’ve been to tie’em to a tree!”

“Don’t you think they could have beaten the Rebels, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Beat’em?” he shrilled. “Beat ’em! Why, boy, what are you talkin’about?…Hell! If Stonewall Jackson ever started for that gang, he’d run’em ragged! Yes, sir! They’d light out so fast they’d straighten out all the bends of the road as they went by!” cried old man Wakefield, cackling. “Pshaw!” he said quietly and scornfully again. “They couldn’t do it! It ain’t in’em!…But I’ll tell you this much!” he cried suddenly in an excited voice. “We’re not goin’to put up with it much longer! The boys have had just about as much of it as they can stand! If they try to do us like they done last year—pshaw!” he broke off again, and looked out the window shaking his head—“Why it’s all as plain as the nose on your face! It’s jealousy—just plain, confounded jealousy—that’s all in the world it is!”

“What is, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Why, the way they done us last year!” he cried. “Puttin’us way back there at the tail-end of the pee-rade, when by all the rights—as everybody knows—we should’ve come first! But we’ll fix’em!” he cried warningly. “We’ve got a way to fix’em!” he said with a triumphant shake of the head. “I know the thing we’re goin’to do this year,” he cried, “if they try another trick like that on us!”

“What are you going to do, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Why,” he cackled, “we won’t pee-rade! We simply won’t pee-rade! We’ll tell’em they can hold their derned pee-rade without us!” he chirped exultantly. “And I reckon that’ll fix’em! Oh yes! That’ll bring’em round, or I miss myguess!” he crowed.

“It ought to, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Why, boy,” he said solemnly, “if we ever did a thing like that, there would be a wave of protest—a wave of protest”—he cried with a sweeping gesture of the arm, as his voice rose strongly—“from here to Californy!…The people wouldn’t stand for it!” he cried. “They’d make those fellers back down in a hurry!”

And as George left him, the old man would come with him to the door, shake his hand warmly and, with an eager and lonely look in his old eyes, say:

“Come again, boy! I’m always glad to see you!…I got stuff in here—photygraphs an’books, an’such as that about the war—that you ain’t seen yet. No, nor no one else!” he cackled. “For no one else has got’em!…Just let me know when you’re comin’an’I’ll be here.”

Slowly the years crept by and George lived alone in Brooklyn. They were hard years, desperate years, lonely years, years of interminable writing and experimentation, years of exploration and discovery, years of grey timelessness, weariness, exhaustion, and self-doubt. He had reached the wilderness period of his life and was hacking his way through the jungles of experience. He had stripped himself down to the brutal facts of self and work. These were all he had.

He saw himself more clearly now than he had ever done before, and, in spite of living thus alone, he no longer thought of himself as a rare and special person who was doomed to isolation, but as a man who worked and who, like other men, was a part of life. He was concerned passionately with reality. He wanted to see things whole, to find out everything he could, and then to create out of what he knew the fruit of his own vision.

One criticism that had been made of his first book still rankled in his mind. An unsuccessful scribbler turned critic had simply dismissed the whole book as a “barbaric yawp”, accusing Webber of getting at things with his emotions rather than with his brains, and of being hostile towards the processes of the intellect and “the intellectual point of view.” These charges, if they had any truth in them, seemed to George to be the kind of lifeless half-truth that was worse than no truth at all. The trouble with the so-called “intellectuals” was that they were not intellectual enough, and their point of view more often than not had no point, but was disparate, arbitrary, sporadic, and confused.

To be an “intellectual” was, it seemed, a vastly different thing from being intelligent. A dog’s nose would usually lead him towards what he wished to find, or away from what he wished to avoid: this was intelligent. That is, the dog had the sense of reality in his nose. But the “intellectual” usually had no nose, and was lacking in the sense of reality. The most striking difference between Webber’s mind and the mind of the average “intellectual” was that Webber absorbed experience like a sponge, and made use of everything that he absorbed. He really learned constantly from experience. But the “intellectuals” of his acquaintance seemed to learn nothing. They had no capacity for rumination and digestion. They could not reflect.

He thought over a few of them that he had known:

There was Haythorpe, who when George first knew him was an esthete of the late baroque in painting, writing all the arts, author of one-act costume plays—“Gesmonder! Thy hands pale chalices of hot desire!” Later he became an esthete of the primitives—the Greek, Italian, and the German; then esthete of the nigger cults—the wood sculptures, coon songs, hymnals, dances, and the rest; still later, esthete of the comics—of cartoons, Chaplin, and the Brothers Marx; then of Expressionism; then of the Mass; then of Russia and the Revolution; at length, esthete of homo-sexuality; and finally, death’s esthete—suicide in a graveyard in Connecticut.

There was Collingswood, who, fresh out of Harvard, was not so much the esthete of the arts as of the mind. First, a Bolshevik from Beacon Hill, practitioner of promiscuous, communal love as the necessary answer to “bourgeois morality”; then back to Cambridge for post-graduate study at the feet of Irving Babbitt—Collingswood is now a Humanist, the bitter enemy of Rousseau, Romanticism, and of Russia (which is, he now thinks, Rousseau in modern form); the playwright, next—New Jersey, Beacon Hill, or Central Park seen in the classic unities of the Greek drama; at length, disgusted realist—“all that’s good in modern art or letters is to be found in advertisements”; then a job as a scenario writer and two years in Hollywood—all now is the moving picture, with easy money, easy love affairs, and drunkenness; and finally, back to Russia, but with his first love lacking—no sex triflings now, my comrades—we who serve the Cause and wait upon the day lead lives of Spartan abstinence—what was the free life, free love, enlightened pleasure of the proletariat ten years ago is now despised as the contemptible debauchery of “bourgeois decadence”.

There was Spurgeon from the teaching days at the School for Utility Cultures—good Spurgeon—Chester Spurgeon of the Ph.D.—Spurgeon of “the great tradition”—thin-lipped Spurgeon, ex-student of Professor Stuart Sherman, and bearer-onwards of the Master’s Torch. Noble-hearted Spurgeon, who wrote honeyed flatteries of Thornton Wilder and his Bridge—“The tradition of the Bridge is Love, just as the tradition of America and of Democracy is Love. Hence”—Spurgeon hences—Love grows Wilder as the years Bridge on across America. Oh, where now, good Spurgeon, “intellectual” Spurgeon—Spurgeon whose thin lips and narrowed eyes were always so glacial prim on Definitions? Where now, brave intellect, by passion uninflamed? Spurgeon of the flashing mind, by emotion unimpulsed, is now a devoted leader of the intellectual Communists (See Spurgeon’s article entitled: “Mr. Wilder’s Piffle”, in the New Masses).—So, Comrade Spurgeon, hail! Hail, Comrade Spurgeon—and most heartily, my bright-eyed Intellectual, farewell!

Whatever George Webber was, he knew he was not an “intellectual”. He was just an American who was looking hard at the life round him, and sorting carefully through all the life he had ever seen and known, and trying to extract some essential truth out of this welter of his whole experience. But, as he said to his friend and editor, Fox Edwards:

"What is truth? No wonder jesting Pilate turned away. The truth, it has a thousand faces—show only one of them, and the whole truth flies away! But how to show the whole? That’s the question…

“Discovery in itself is not enough. It’s not enough to find out what things are. You’ve also got to find out where they come from, where each brick fits in the wall.”

He always came back to the wall.

“I think it’s like this,” he said. “You see a wall, you look at it so much and so hard that one day you see clear through it. Then, of course, it’s not just one wall any longer. It’s every wall that ever was.”

He was still spiritually fighting out the battle of his first book, and all the problems it had raised. He was still searching for a way. At times he felt that his first book had taught him nothing—not even confidence. His feelings of hollow desperation and self-doubt seemed to grow worse instead of better, for he had now torn himself free from almost every personal tie which had ever bound him, and which formerly had sustained him in some degree with encouragement and faith. He was left, therefore, to rely almost completely on his own resources.

There was also the insistent, gnawing consciousness of work itself, the necessity of turning towards the future and the completion of a new book. He was feeling, now as never before, the inexorable pressure of time. In writing his first book, he had been unknown And obscure, and there had been a certain fortifying strength in that, for no one had expected anything of him. But now the spotlight of publication had been turned upon him, and he felt it beating down with merciless intensity. He was pinned beneath the light—he could not crawl out of it. Though he had not won fame, still he was known now. He had been examined, probed, and talked about. He felt that the world was looking at him with a critic eye.

It had been easy in his dreams to envision a long and fluent sequence of big books, but now he was finding it a different matter to accomplish them. His first book had been more an act of utterance than an act of labour. It was an impassioned expletive of youth—something that had been pent up in him, something felt and seen and imagined and put down at white-hot heat. The writing of it had been a process of spiritual and emotional evacuation. But that was behind him now, and he knew he should never try to repeat it. Henceforth his writing would have to come from unending labour and preparation.

In his effort to explore his experience, to extract the whole, essential truth of it, and to find a way to write about it, he sought to recapture every particle of the life he knew down to its minutest details. He spent weeks and months trying to put down on paper the exactitudes of countless fragments—what he called: “the dry, caked colours of America”—how the entrance to a subway looked, the design and webbing of the elevated structure, the look and feel of an iron rail, the particular shade of rusty green with which so many things are painted in America. Then he tried to pin down the foggy colour of the brick of which so much of London is constructed, the look of an English doorway, of a French window, of the roofs and chimney-pots of Paris, of a whole street in Munich—and each of these foreign things he then examined in contrast to its American equivalent.

It was a process of discovery in its most naked, literal, and primitive terms. He was just beginning really to see thousands of things for the first time, to see the relations between them, to see here and there whole series and systems of relations. He was like a scientist in some new field of chemistry who for the first time realises that he has stumbled upon a vast new world, and who will then pick out identities, establish affiliations, define here and there the outlines of sub-systems in crystalline union, without yet being aware what the structure of the whole is like, or what the final end will be.

The same processes now began to inform his direct observation of the life round him. Thus, on his nocturnal ramblings about New York, he would observe the homeless men who prowled in the vicinity of restaurants, lifting the lids of garbage cans and searching round inside for morsels of rotten food. He saw them everywhere, and noticed how their numbers increased during the hard and desperate days of 1932. He knew what kind of men they were, for he talked to many of them; he knew what they had been, where they had come from, and even what kind of scraps they could expect to dig out of the garbage cans. He found out the various places all over the city where such men slept at night. A favourite rendezvous was a corridor of the subway station at Thirty-third Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. There one night he counted thirty-four huddled together on the cold concrete, wrapped up in sheathings of old newspaper.

It was his custom almost every night, at one o’clock or later, to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and night after night, with a horrible fascination, he used to go to the public latrine or “comfort station” which was directly in front of the New York City Hall. One descended to this place down a steep flight of stairs from the street, and on bitter nights he would find the place crowded with homeless men who had sought refuge there. Some were those shambling hulks that one sees everywhere, in Paris as well as New York, in good times as well as bad—old men, all rags and bags and long white hair and bushy beards stained dirty yellow, wearing tattered overcoats in the cavernous pockets of which they carefully stored away all the little rubbish they lived on and spent their days collecting in the streets—crusts of bread, old bones with rancid shreds of meat still clinging to them, and dozens of cigarette-butts. Some were the “stumble bums” from the Bowery, criminal, fumed with drink or drugs, or half insane with “smoke”. But most of them were just flotsam of the general ruin of the time—honest, decent, middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want, and young men, many of them mere boys in their teens, with thick, unkempt hair. These were the wanderers from town to town, the riders of freight trains, the thumbers of rides on highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of America. They drifted across the land and gathered in the big cities when winter came, hungry, defeated, empty, hopeless, restless, driven by they knew not what, always on the move, looking everywhere for work, for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor crumbs. Here in New York, to this obscene meeting-place, these derelicts came, drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation.

George had never before witnessed anything to equal the indignity and sheer animal horror of the scene. There was even a kind of devil’s comedy in the sight of all these filthy men squatting upon those open, doorless stools. Arguments and savage disputes and fights would sometimes break out among them over the possession of these stools, which all of them wanted more for rest than for necessity. The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to render a man forever speechless with very pity.

He would talk to the men and find out all he could about them, and when he could stand it no more he would come out of this hole of filth and suffering, and there, twenty feet above it, he would see the giant hackles of Manhattan shining coldly in the cruel brightness of the winter night. The Woolworth Building was not fifty yards away, and, a little farther down were the silvery spires and needles of Wall Street, great fortresses of stone and steel that housed enormous hanks. The blind injustice of this contrast seemed the most brutal part of the whole experience, for there, all round him in the cold moonlight, only a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery, blazed the pinnacle of power where a large portion of the entire world’s wealth was locked in mighty vaults.

They were now dosing up the restaurant. The tired waitresses were racking the chairs upon the tables, completing the last formalities of their hard day’s work in preparation for departure. At the cash register the proprietor was totting up the figures of the day’s take, and one of the male waiters hovered watchfully near the table, in a manner politely indicating that while he was not in a hurry he would be glad if the last customer would pay his bill and leave.

George called for his check and gave the man some money. He took it and in a moment returned with the change. He pocketed his tip and said: “Thank you, sir.” Then as George said good night and started to get up and leave, the waiter hesitated and hung round uncertainly as if there was something he wanted to say but scarcely knew whether he ought to say it or not.

George looked at him inquiringly, and then, in a rather embarrassed tone, the waiter said:

“Mr. Webber…there’s…something I’d like to talk over with you sometime…I—I’d like to get your advice about something—that is, if you have time,” he added hastily and almost apologetically.

George regarded the waiter with another inquiring look, -in which the man evidently read encouragement, for now he went on quickly, in a manner of almost beseeching entreaty:

“It’s—it’s about a story.”

The familiar phrase awakened countless weary echoes in Webber’s memory. It also resolved that hard and honest patience with which any man who ever sweated to write a living line and to earn his bread by the hard, uncertain labour of his pen will listen, as an act of duty and understanding, to any other man who says he has a tale to tell. His mind and will wearily composed themselves, his face set in a strained smile of mechanical anticipation, and the poor waiter, thus encouraged, went on eagerly:

“It’s—it’s a story a guy told me several years ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The guy was a foreigner,” said the waiter impressively, as if this fact was enough to guarantee the rare colour and fascinating interest of what he was about to reveal. “He was an Armenian,” said the waiter very earnestly. “Sure! He came from over there!” He nodded his head emphatically. “And this story that he told me was an  Armenian story,” said the waiter with solemn emphasis, and then paused to let this impressive fact sink in. “It was a story that he knew about—he told it to me—and I’m the only other guy that knows about it,” said the waiter, and paused again, looking at his patron with a very bright and feverish eye.

George continued to smile with wan encouragement, and in a moment the waiter, after an obvious struggle with his soul, a conflict between his desire to keep his secret and to tell it, too, went on:

“Gee! You’re a writer, Mr. Webber, and you know about these things. I’m just a dumb guy working in a restaurant—but if I could put it into words—if I could get a guy like you who knows how it’s done to tell the story for me—why—why”—he struggled with himself, then burst out enthusiastically—“there’d be a fortune in it for the both of us!”

George felt his heart sink still lower. It was turning out just as he knew it would. But he still continued to smile pallidly. He cleared his throat in an undecided fashion, but then said nothing. And the waiter, taking silence for consent, now pressed on impetuously:

“Honest, Mr. Webber—if I could get somebody like you to help me with this story—to write it down for me the way it ought to be-I’d—I’d”—for a moment the waiter struggled with his lower nature, then magnanimity got the better of him and he cried out with t he decided air of a man who is willing to make a generous bargain and stick to it—“I’d go fifty-fifty with him! I’d—I’d be willing to give him half!…And there’s a fortune in it!” he cried. “I go to the movies and I read True Story Magazine—and I never seen a story like it! It’s got’em all beat! I’ve thought about it for years, ever since the guy told it to me—and I know I’ve got a gold mine here if I could only write it down!…It’s—it’s——”

Now, indeed, the waiter’s struggle with his sense of caution became painful to watch. He was evidently burning with a passionate desire to reveal his secret, but he was also obviously tormented by doubts and misgivings lest he should recklessly give away to a comparative stranger a treasure which the other might appropriate to his own use. I I is manner was very much that of a man who has sailed strange seas and seen, in some unknown coral island, the fabulous buried cache of forgotten pirates’plundering, and who is now being torn between two desperate needs—his need of partnership, of outward help, and his imperative need of secrecy and caution. The fierce interplay of these two powers discrete was waged there on the open battlefield of the waiter’s countenance. And in the end he took the obvious way out. Like an explorer who will take from his pocket an uncut gem of tremendous size and value and cunningly hint that in a certain place he knows of there are many more like it, the waiter decided to tell a little part of his story without revealing it.

“I—I can’t tell you the whole thing to-night,” he said apologetically. “Some other night, maybe, when you’ve got more time. But just to give you an idea of what’s in it”—he looked round stealthily to make sure he was in no danger of being overheard, then bent over and lowered his voice to an impressive whisper—“just to give you an idea, now—there’s one scene in the story where a woman puts an advertisement in the paper that she will give a ten-dollar gold piece and as much liquor as he can drink to any man who comes round to see her the next day!” After imparting this sensational bit of information, the waiter regarded his patron with glittering eyes. “Now!” said the waiter, straightening up with a gesture of finality. “You never heard of anything like that, did you? You ain’t never seen that in a story!”

George, after a baffled pause, admitted feebly that he had not. Then, when the waiter continued to regard him feverishly, with a look that made it plain that he was supposed to say something more, he inquired doubtfully whether this interesting event had really happened in Armenia.

“Sure!” cried the waiter, nodding vigorously. “That’s what I’m telling you! The whole thing happens in Armenia!” He paused again, torn fiercely between his caution and his desire to go on, his feverish eyes almost burning holes through his questioner. “It’s—it’s—” he struggled for a moment more, then surrendered; abjectly—“well, I’ll tell you,” he said quietly, leaning forward, with his hands resting on the table in an attitude of confidential intimacy. “The idea of the story runs like this. You got this rich dame to begin with, see?”

He paused and looked at George inquiringly. George did not: know what was expected of him, so he nodded to show that his min had grasped this important fact, and said hesitatingly:

“In Armenia?”

“Sure! Sure!” The waiter nodded. “This dame comes from over there—she’s got a big pile of dough—I guess she’s the richest dame in Armenia. And then she falls for this guy, see?” he went on. “He’s nuts about her, and he comes to see her every night. The way the guy told it to me, she lives up at the top of this big house—so every night the guy comes and climbs up there to see her—oh, a hell of a long ways up”—the waiter said—“thirty floors or more!”

“In Armenia?” George asked feebly.

“Sure!” cried the waiter, a little irritably. “That’s where it all takes place! That’s what I’m telling you!”

He paused and looked searchingly at George, who finally asked, with just the proper note of hesitant thoughtfulness, why the lover had had to climb up so far.

“Why,” said the waiter impatiently, “because the dame’s old man wouldn’t let him in! That was the only way the guy could get to her! The old man shut her up way up there at the top of the house because he didn’t want the dame to get married!…But then,” he went on triumphantly, “the old man dies, see? He dies and leaves all his dough to this dame—and then she ups and marries this guy!”

Dramatically, with triumph written in his face, the waiter paused to let this startling news soak into the consciousness of his listener. Then he continued:

“They lived together for a while—the dame’s in love with him—and for a year or two they’re sitting pretty. But then the guy begins to drink—he’s a booze hound, see?—only she don’t know it—she’s been able to hold him down for a year or two after they get married…Then he begins to step out again…The first thing you know he’s staying out all night and running round with a lot of hot blondes, see?…Well, then, you see what’s coming now, don’t you?” said the waiter quickly and eagerly.

George had no notion, but he nodded his head wisely.

“Well, that’s what happens,” said the waiter. “The first thing you know the guy ups and leaves the dame and takes with him a lot of her dough and joolry…He just disappears—just like the earth had opened and swallowed him up!” the waiter declared, evidently pleased with his poetic simile. “He leaves her cold, and the poor dame’s almost out of her head. She does everything—she hires detectives—she offers rewards—she puts ads in the paper begging him to come back…But it’s no use—she can’t find him—the guy’s lost…Well, then,” the waiter continued, “three years go by while the poor dame sits and eats her heart out about this guy…And then”—here he paused impressively, and it was evident that he was now approaching the crisis—“then she has an idea!” He paused again, briefly, to allow this extraordinary accomplishment on the part of his heroine to be given due consideration, and in a moment, very simply and quietly, he concluded: “She opens up a night club.”

The waiter fell silent now, and stood at ease with his hands clasped quietly before him, with the modest air of a man who has given his all and is reasonably assured it is enough. It now became compellingly apparent that his listener was supposed to make some appropriate comment, and that the narrator could not continue with his tale until this word had been given. So George mustered his failing strength, moistened his dry lips with the end of his tongue, and finally said in a halting voice:

“In—in Armenia?”

The waiter now took the question, and the manner of its utterance, as signs of his listener’s paralyzed surprise. He nodded his head victoriously and cried:

“Sure! You see, the dame’s idea is this—she knows the guy’s a booze hound and that sooner or later he’ll come to a place where there’s lots of bar-flies and fast women. That kind always hang together—sure they do!…So she opens up this joint—she sinks a lot of dough in it—it’s the swellest joint they got over there. And then she puts this ad in the paper.”

George was not sure that he had heard aright, but the waiter was looking at him with an expression of such exuberant elation that he took a chance and said:

“What ad?”

“Why,” said the waiter, “this come-on ad that I was telling you about. You see, that’s the big idea—that’s the plan the dame dopes out to get him back. So she puts this ad in the paper saying that any man who comes to her joint the next day will be given a ten-dollar gold piece and all the liquor he can drink. She figures that will bring him. She knows the guy is probably down and out by this time and when he reads this ad he’ll show up…And that’s just what happens. When she comes down next morning she finds a line twelve blocks long outside, and sure enough, here’s this guy the first one in the line. Well, she pulls him out of the line and tells the cashier to give all the rest of’em their booze and their ten bucks, but she tells this guy he ain’t gonna get nothing.’What’s the reason I ain’t?’he says—you see, the dame is wearing a heavy veil so he don’t recognise her. Well, she tells him she thinks there’s something phoney about him—gives him the old line, you know—tells him to come upstairs with her so she can talk to him and find out if he’s O.K…Do you get it?”

George nodded vaguely. “And then what?” he said.

“Why,” the waiter cried, “she gets him up there—and then”—he leaned forward again with fingers resting on the table, and his voice sank to an awed whisper—“she—takes—off—her—veil!”

There was a reverential silence as the waiter, still leaning forward with his fingers arched upon the table, regarded his listener with bright eyes and a strange little smile. Then he straightened up slowly, stood erect, still smiling quietly, and a long, low sigh like the coming on of evening came from his lips, and he was still. The silence drew itself out until it became painful, and at length George squirmed wretchedly in his chair and asked:

“And then—then what?”

The waiter was plainly taken aback. He stared in frank astonishment, stunned speechless by the realisation that anybody could be stupid.

“Why”—he finally managed to say with an expression of utter disillusion—“that’s all! Don’t you see? That’s all there is! The dame takes off her veil—he recognises her—and there you are!…She’s found him!…She’s got him back!…They’re together again!…That’s the story!” He was hurt, impatient, almost angry as he went on: “Why, anybody ought to be able to see——”

“Good night, Joe.”

The last waitress was just going out and had spoken to the waiter as she passed the table. She was a blonde, slender girl, neatly dressed Her voice was quiet and full of the casual familiarity of her daily work and association; it was a pleasant voice, and it was a little tired. Her face, as she paused a moment, was etched in light and shadow, and there were little pools of violet beneath her clear grey eyes. Her face had the masklike fragility and loveliness, the almost hair-drawn fine-MSS, that one often sees in young people who have lived in the great city and who have never had wholly enough of anything except work and their own hard youth. One felt instantly sorry for the girl, because one knew that her face would not long be what it was now.

The waiter, interrupted in the flood of his impassioned argument, had been alittle startled by the casual intrusion of the girl’s low voice turned towards her. When he saw who it was, his manner changed at once, and his own seamed face softened a little with instinctive and unconscious friendliness.

“Oh, hello, Billie. Good night, kid.”

She went out, and the sound of her brisk little heels clacked away on the hard pavement. For a moment more the waiter continued to look after her, and then, turning back to his sole remaining customer with a queer, indefinable little smile hovering in the hard lines about his mouth, he said very quietly and casually, in the tone men use to speak of things done and known and irrecoverable:

“Did you see that kid?…She came in here about two years ago and got a job. I don’t know where she came from, but it was some little hick town somewhere. She’d been a chorus girl—a hoofer in some cheap road show—until her legs gave out…You find a lot of’em in this game—the business is full of’em…Well, she worked here for about a year, and then she began going with a cheap gigolo who used to come in here. You know the kind—you can smell’em a mile off—they stink. I could’ve told her! But, hell, what’s the use? They won’t listen to you—you only get yourself in dutch all round—they got to find out for themselves—you can’t teach’em. So I left it alone—that’s the only way…Well, six or eight months ago, some of the girls found out she was pregnant. The boss let her out. He’s not a bad guy—but, hell, what can you expect? You can’t keep’em round a place like this when they’re in that condition, can you?…She had the kid three months ago, and then she got her job back. I understand she’s put the kid in a home somewhere. I’ve never seen it, but they say it’s a swell kid, and Billie’s crazy about it—goes out there to see it every Sunday…She’s a swell kid, too.”

The waiter was silent for a moment, and there was a far-off look of tragic but tranquil contemplation in his eyes. Then, quietly, wearily, he said:

“Hell, if I could tell you what goes on here every day—the things you see and hear—the people you meet and all that happens. Jesus, I get sick and tired of it. Sometimes I’m so fed up with the whole thing that I don’t care if I never see the joint again. Sometimes I get to thinking how swell it would be not to have to spend your whole life waiting on a lot of mugs—just standing round and waiting on’em and watching’em come in and out…and feeling sorry for some little kid who’ s fallen for some dope you wouldn’t wipe your feet on…and wondering just how long it’ll be before she gets the works…Jesus, I’m fed up with it!”

Again he was silent. His eyes looked off into the distance, and his face was set in that expression of mildly cynical regret and acceptance that one often notices in people who have seen much of life, and experienced its hard and seamy side, and who know that there is very little they can do or say. At last he sighed deeply, shook himself, threw off the mood, and resumed his normal manner.

“Gee, Mr. Webber,” he said with a return of his former eagerness, “it must be great to be able to write books and stories—to have the gift of gab—all that flow of language—to go anywhere you like—to work when you want to! Now, take that story I was telling you about,” he said earnestly. “I never had no education—but if I could only get some guy like you to help me—to write it down the way it ought to be—honest, Mr. Webber, it’s a great chance for somebody—there’s a fortune in it—I’d go fifty-fifty!” His voice was pleading now. “A guy I knew one time, he told it to me—and me and him are the only two that knows it. The guy was an Armenian, like I said, and the whole thing happened over there…There’d be a gold mine in it if I only knew how to do it.”

It was long after midnight, and the round disc of the moon was sinking westward over the cold, deserted streets of slumbering Manhattan.

The party was in full swing now.

The gold and marble ballroom of the great hotel had been converted into a sylvan fairyland. In the centre a fountain of classic nymphs and fauns sent up its lighted sprays of water, and here and there about the floor were rustic arbors with climbing roses trailing over them, heavy with scented blossoms. Flowering hot-house trees in tubs were banked round the walls, the shining marble pillars were wreathed about with vines and garlands, and overhead gay lanterns had been strung to illuminate the scene with their gentle glow. The whole effect was that of an open clearing in a forest glade upon Midsummer Night where Queen Titania had come to hold her court and revels.

It was a rare, exotic spectacle, a proper setting for the wealthy, carefree youth for whom it had been planned. The air was heavy with the fragrance of rich perfumes, and vibrant with the throbbing, pulsing rhythms of sensuous music. Upon the polished floor a hundred lovely girls in brilliant evening gowns danced languidly in the close embrace of pink-cheeked boys from Yale and Harvard, their lithe young figures accentuated smartly by the black and white of faultless tailoring.

This was the coming-out party of a fabulously rich young lady, and the like of it had not been seen since the days before the market crashed. The papers had been full of it for weeks. It was said that her father had lost millions in the debacle, but it was apparent that he still had a few paltry dollars left. So now he was doing the right thing, the expected thing, the necessary and inescapable thing, for his beautiful young daughter, who would one day inherit all that these ruinous times had left him of his hard-earned savings. To-night she was being “presented to Society” (whose members had known her since her birth), and all “Society” was there.

And from this night on, the girl’s smiling face would turn up with monotonous regularity in all the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers, and daily the nation would be kept posted on all the momentous trivia of her life—what she ate, what she wore, where she went, who went with her, what night clubs had been honoured by her presence, what fortunate young gentleman had been seen accompanying her to what race track, and what benefits she had sponsored and poured tea for. For one whole year, from now until another beautiful and rich young lady from next season’s crop of beautiful and rich young ladies was chosen by the newspaper photographers to succeed her as America’s leading debutante, this gay and care-free creature would be for Americans very much what a royal princess is for Englishmen, and for very much the same reason—because she was her father’s daughter, and because her father was one of the rulers of America. Millions would read about her every move and envy her, and thousands would copy her as far as their means would let them. They would buy cheap imitations of her costly dresses, hats, and underclothes, would smoke the same cigarettes, use the same lipsticks, eat the same soups, sleep on the same mattresses that she had allowed herself to be pictured wearing, smoking, using, eating, and sleeping on in the handsome coloured advertisements on the back covers of magazines—and they would do it, knowing full well that the rich young lady had set these fashions for a price—was she not her father’s daughter?—all, of course, for the sake of sweet charity and commerce.

Outside the great hotel, on the Avenue in front of it and on all the side streets in the near vicinity, sleek black limousines were parked. In some of them the chauffeurs slouched dozing behind their wheels. Others had turned on their inside lights and sat there reading the pages of the tabloids. But most of them had left their cars and were knotted together in little groups, smoking, talking, idling the time away until their services should be needed again.

On the pavement near the entrance of the hotel, beside the huge marquee which offered shelter from the wind, the largest group of them, neat in their liveried uniforms, had gathered in debate. They were discussing politics and theories of international economy, and the chief disputants were a plump Frenchman with a waxed moustache, whose sentiments were decidedly revolutionary, and an American, a little man with corky legs, a tough, seamed face, the beady eyes of a bird, and the quick, impatient movements of the city. As George Webber came abreast of them, brought thither by the simple chance of his nightly wanderings, the argument had reached its furious climax, and he stopped a while to listen.

The scene, the situation, and the contrast between the two principal debaters made the whole affair seem utterly grotesque. The plump Frenchman, his cheeks glowing with the cold and his own excitement, was dancing about in a frenzy, talking and gesticulating volubly. He would lean forward with thumb and forefinger uplifted and closed daintily in a descriptive circle—a gesture that eloquently expressed the man’s conviction that the case he had been presenting for immediate and bloody world revolution was complete, logical, unshakable, and beyond appeal. When any of the others interposed an objection, he would only grow more violent and inflamed.

At last his little English began to break down under the strain imposed upon it. The air about him fairly rang with objurgations, expletives, impassioned cries of “Mais oui!…Absolument!…C’est la vérité!”—and with laughs of maddened exasperation, as if the knowledge that anyone could be so obtuse as not to see it as he saw it was more than he could endure.

“Mais non! Mais non!” he would shout. “Vous avez tort!…Mais c’est stupide!” he would cry, throwing his plump arms up in a gesture of defeat, and turning away as if he could stand it no longer and was departing—only to return immediately and begin all over again.

Meanwhile, the chief target of this deluge, the little American with the corky legs and the birdy eyes, let him go on. He just leaned up against the building, took an occasional puff at his cigarette, and gave the Frenchman a steady look of cynical impassivity. At last he broke in to say:

“O.K…O.K., Frenchy…When you get through spoutin’, maybe I’ll have somethin’to say.”

“Seulement un mot!” replied the Frenchman, out of breath. “One vord!” he cried impressively, drawing himself up to his full five feet three and holding one finger in the air as if he were about to deliver Holy Writ—“I’ave to say one vord more!”

“O.K.! O.K.!” said the corky little American with cynical weariness. “Only don’t take more than an hour and a half to say it!”

Just then another chauffeur, obviously a German, with bright blue eyes and a nut-cracker face, rejoined the group with an air of elated discovery.

“Noos! I got noos for you!” he said. “I haf been mit a drifer who hass in Rooshia liffed, and he says that conditions there far worser are——”

“Non! Non!” the Frenchman shouted, red in the face with anger and protest. “Pas vrai!…Ce n’est par possible!”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the American said, tossing his cigarette away with a gesture of impatience and disgust. “Why don’t you guys wake up? This ain’t Russia! You’re in America! The trouble with you guys,” he went on, “is that you’ve been over there all your life where you ain’t been used to nothin’—and just as soon as you get over here where you can live like a human bein’you want to tear it all down.”

At this, others broke in, and the heated and confused dialogue became more furious than ever. But the talk just went round and round in circles.

George walked away into the night.

The lives of men who have to live in our great cities are often tragically lonely. In many more ways than one, these dwellers in the hive are modern counterparts of Tantalus. They are starving to death in the midst of abundance. The crystal stream flows near the lips but always falls away when they try to drink of it. The vine, rich-weighted with its golden fruit, bends down, comes near, but springs back when they reach to touch it.

Melville, at the beginning of his great fable,  Moby Dick, tells how the city people of his time would, on every occasion that was afforded them, go down to the dock, to the very edges of the wharf, and stand there looking out to sea. In the great city of to-day, however, there is no sea to look out to, or, if there is, it is so far away, so inaccessible, walled in behind such infinite ramifications of stone and steel, that the effort to get to it is disheartening. So now, when the city man looks out, he looks out on nothing but crowded vacancy.

Does this explain, perhaps, the desolate emptiness of city youth—those straggling bands of boys of sixteen or eighteen that one can always see at night or on a holiday, going along a street, filling the air with raucous jargon and senseless cries, each trying to outdo the others with joyless catcalls and mirthless quips and jokes which are so feeble, so stupidly inane, that one hears them with strong mixed feelings of pity and of shame? Where here, among these lads, is all the merriment, high spirits, and spontaneous gaiety of youth? These creatures, millions of them, seem to have been born but half-made up, without innocence, born old and stale and dull and empty.

Who can wonder at it? For what a world it is that most of them were born into! They were suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence and noise. They had to try to draw out moisture from the cobble-stones, their true parent was a city street, and in that barren universe no urgent sails swelled out and leaned against the wind, they rarely knew the feel of earth beneath their feet and no birds sang, t heir youthful eyes grew hard, unseeing, from being stopped for ever by a wall of masonry.

In other times, when painters tried to paint a scene of awful desolation, they chose the desert or a heath of barren rocks, and there would try to picture man in his great loneliness—the prophet in the desert, Elijah being fed by ravens on the rocks. But for a modern painter, the most desolate scene would be a street in almost any one of our great cities on a Sunday afternoon.

Suppose a rather drab and shabby street in Brooklyn, not quite tenement perhaps, and lacking therefore even the gaunt savagery of I overty, but a street of cheap brick buildings, warehouses, and garages, with a cigar store or a fruit stand or a barber shop on the corner. Suppose a Sunday afternoon in March—bleak, empty, slaty grey. And suppose a group of men, Americans of the working class, dressed in t heir “good” Sunday clothes—the cheap machine-made suits, the new cheap shoes, the cheap felt hats stamped out of universal grey. Just suppose this, and nothing more. The men hang round the corner before the cigar store or the closed barber shop, and now and then, through the bleak and empty street, a motor-car goes flashing past, and in the distance they hear the cold rumble of an elevated train. For hours they hang round the corner, waiting—waiting—waiting——

For what?

Nothing. Nothing at all. And that is what gives the scene its special quality of tragic loneliness, awful emptiness, and utter desolation. Every modern city man is familiar with it. And yet—and yet——

It is also true—and this is a curious paradox about America—that these same men who stand upon the corner and wait around on Sunday afternoons for nothing are filled at the same time with an almost quenchless hope, an almost boundless optimism, an almost indestructible belief that something is bound to turn up, something is sure to happen. This is a peculiar quality of the American soul, and it contributes largely to the strange enigma of our life, which is so incredibly mixed of harshness and of tenderness, of innocence and of crime, of loneliness and of good fellowship, of desolation and of exultant hope, of terror and of courage, of nameless fear and of soaring conviction, of brutal, empty, naked, bleak, corrosive ugliness, and of beauty so lovely and so overwhelming that the tongue is stopped by it, and the language for it has not yet been uttered.

How explain this nameless hope that seems to lack all reasonable foundation? I cannot. But if you were to go up to this fairly intelligent-looking truck-driver who stands and waits there with his crowd, and if you put to him your question, and if he understood what you were talking about (he wouldn’t), and if he were articulate enough to frame in words the feelings that are in him (he isn’t)—he might answer you with something such as this:

“Now is duh mont’of March, duh mont’of March—now it is Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn in duh mont’of March, an’we stand upon cold corners of duh day. It’s funny dat dere are so many corners in duh mont’of March, here in Brooklyn where no corners are. Jesus! On Sunday in duh mont’of March we sleep late in duh mornin’den we get up an’read duh papers—dub funnies an’duh sportin’news. We eat some chow. An’den we dress up in duh afternoon, we leave our wives, we leave dub funnies littered on duh floor, an’go outside in Brooklyn in duh mont’of March an’stand around upon ten t’ousand corners of duh day. We need a corner in, duh mont’of March, a wall to stand to, a shelter an’a door. Dere must be some place inside in duh mont’of March, but we never found it. So we stand around on corners where duh sky is cold an’ragged still wit’winter, in our good clothes we stand around wit’a lot of udder guys we know, before dub, barber shop, just lookin’for a door.”

Ah, yes, for in summer:

It is so cool and sweet to-night, a million feet are walking here across the jungle web of Brooklyn in the dark, and it’s so hard now to remember that it ever was the month of March in Brooklyn and that we couldn’t find a door. There are so many million doors tonight. There’s a door for everyone to-night, all’s open to the air, all’s interfused to-night: remote the thunder of the elevated trains on Fulton Street, the rattling of the cars along Atlantic Avenue, the glare of Coney Island seven miles away, the mob, the racket, and the barkers shouting, the cars swift-shuttling through the quiet streets, the people swarming in the web, lit here and there with livid blurs of light, the voices of the neighbours leaning at their windows, harsh, soft, all interfused. All’s illusive in the liquid air to-night, all mixed in with the radios that blare from open windows. And there is something over all to-night, something fused, remote, and trembling, made of all of this, and yet not of it, upon the huge and weaving ocean of the night in Brooklyn—something that we had almost quite forgotten in the month of March. What’s this?—a sash raised gently?—a window?—a near voice on the air?—something swift and passing, almost captured, there below?—there in the gulf of night the mournful and yet thrilling voices of the tugs?— the liner’s blare? Herethere—some otherwhere—was it a whisper?—a woman’s call?—a sound of people talking behind the screens and doors in Flatbush? It trembles in the air throughout the giant web to-night, as fleeting as a step—near—as soft and sudden as a woman’s laugh. The liquid air is living with the very whisper of the thing that we are looking for to-night throughout America—the very thing that seemed so bleak, so vast, so cold, so hopeless, and so lost as we waited in out good clothes on ten thousand corners of the day in Brooklyn in the month of March.

If George Webber had never gone beyond the limits of the neighbourhood in which he lived, the whole chronicle of the earth would have been there for him just the same. South Brooklyn was a universe.

The people in the houses all round him, whose lives in the cold, raw days of winter always seemed hermetic, sterile, and remote, as shut out from him as though they were something sealed up in a tin, became in spring and summer so real to him it seemed that he had known them from his birth. For, as the days and nights grew warmer, everybody kept their windows open, and all the dwellers in these houses conducted their most intimate affairs in loud and raucous voices which carried to the street and made the casual passer-by a confidant of every family secret.

God knows he saw squalor and filth and misery and despair enough, violence and cruelty and hate enough, to crust his lips for ever with the hard and acrid taste of desolation. He found a sinister and demented Italian grocer whose thin mouth writhed in a servile smile as he cringed before his customers, and the next moment was twisted in a savage snarl as he dug his clawlike fingers into the arm of his wretched little son. And on Saturdays the Irishmen would come home drunk, and then would beat their wives and cut one another’s throats, and the whole course and progress of their murderous rages would be published nakedly from their open windows with laugh, shout, scream, and curse.

But he found beauty in South Brooklyn, too. There was a tree that leaned over into the narrow alley where he lived, and George could stand at his basement window and look up at it and watch it day by day as it came into its moment’s glory of young and magic green. And then towards sunset, if he was tired, he could lie down to rest awhile upon his iron bed and listen to the dying birdsong in the tree. Thus, each spring, in that one tree, he found all April and the earth. He also found devotion, love, and wisdom in a shabby little Jewish tailor and his wife, whose dirty children were always tumbling in and out of the dingy suffocation of his shop.

In the infinite variety of such common, accidental, oft-unheeded things one can see the web of life as it is spun. Whether we wake at morning in the city, or lie at night in darkness in the country towns, or walk the streets of furious noon in all the dusty, homely, and enduring lights of present time, the universe round us is the same. Evil lives for ever—so does good. Man alone has knowledge of these two, and he is such a little thing.

For what is man?

First, a child, soft-boned, unable to support itself on its rubbery legs, befouled with its excrement, that howls and laughs by turns, cries for the moon but hushes when it gets its mother’s teat; a sleeper, eater, guzzler, howler, laugher, idiot, and a chewer of its toe; a little tender thing all blubbered with its spit, a reacher into fires, a beloved fool.

After that, a boy, hoarse and loud before his companions, but afraid of the dark; will beat the weaker and avoid the stronger; worships strength and savagery, loves tales of war and murder, and violence done to others; joins gangs and hates to be alone; makes heroes out of soldiers, sailors, prize-fighters, football players, cowboys, gunmen, and detectives; would rather die than not out-try and out-dare his companions, wants to beat them and always to win, shows his muscle and demands that it be felt, boasts of his victories and will never own defeat.

Then the youth: goes after girls, is foul behind their backs among the drug-store boys, hints at a hundred seductions, but gets pimples on his face; begins to think about his clothes, becomes a fop, greases his hair, smokes cigarettes with a dissipated air, reads novels, and writes poetry on the sly. He sees the world now as a pair of legs and breasts; he knows hate, love, and jealousy; he is cowardly and foolish, he cannot endure to be alone; he lives in a crowd, thinks with the crowd, is afraid to be marked off from his fellows by an eccentricity. He joins clubs and is afraid of ridicule; he is bored and unhappy and wretched most of the time. There is a great cavity in him, he is dull.

Then the man: he is busy, he is full of plans and reasons, he has work. He gets children, buys and sells small packets of everlasting earth, intrigues against his rivals, is exultant when he cheats them. He wastes his little three score years and ten in spendthrift and ingloriousliving; from his cradle to his grave he scarcely sees the sun or moon or stars; he is unconscious of the immortal sea and earth; he talks of he future and he wastes it as it comes. If he is lucky, he saves money. At the end his fat purse buys him flunkeys to carry him where his shanks no longer can; he consumes rich food and golden wine that his wretched stomach has no hunger for; his weary and lifeless eyeslook out upon the scenery of strange lands for which in youth his heart was panting. Then the slow death, prolonged by costly doctors, and finally the graduate undertakers, the perfumed carrion, the suave ushers with palms outspread to leftwards, the fast motor hearses, and the earth again.

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passion-site over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another’s work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false—yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.

This is man: for the most part a foul, wretched, abominable creature, a packet of decay, a bundle of degenerating tissues, a creature that gets old and hairless and has a foul breath, a hater of his kind, a cheater, a scorner, a mocker, a reviler, a thing that kills and murders in a mob or in the dark, loud and full of brag surrounded by his fellows, but without the courage of a rat alone. He will cringe for a coin, and show his snarling fangs behind the giver’s back; he will cheat for two sous, and kill for forty dollars, and weep copiously in court to keep another scoundrel out of jail.

This is man, who will steal his friend’s woman, feel the leg of his host’s wife below the table-cloth, dump fortunes on his whores, bow down in worship before charlatans, and let his poets die. This is man, who swears he will live only for beauty, for art, for the spirit, but will live only for fashion, and will change his faith and his convictions as soon as fashion changes. This is man, the great warrior with the flaccid gut, the great romantic with the barren loins, the eternal knave devouring the eternal fool, the most glorious of all the animals, who uses his brain for the most part to make himself a stench in the nostrils of the Bull, the Fox, the Dog, the Tiger, and the Goat.

Yes, this is man, and it is impossible to say the worst of him, for the record of his obscene existence, his baseness, lust, cruelty, and treachery, is illimitable. His life is also full of toil, tumult, and suffering. His days are mainly composed of a million idiot, repetitions—in goings and comings along hot streets, in sweatings and freezings, in the senseless accumulation of fruitless tasks, in decaying and being patched, in grinding out his life so that he may buy bad food, in eating bad food so that he may grind his life out in distressful defecations. He is the dweller in that ruined tenement who, from one moment’s breathing to another, can hardly forget the bitter weight of his uneasy flesh, the thousand diseases and distresses of his body, the growing incubus of his corruption. This is man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: “I have lived upon this earth and known glory!”

This is man, and one wonders why he wants to live at all. A third of his life is lost and deadened under sleep; another third is given to a sterile labour; a sixth is spent in all his goings and his comings, in the moil and shuffle of the streets, in thrusting, shoving, pawing. How much of him is left, then, for a vision of the tragic stars? How much of him is left to look upon the everlasting earth? How much of him is left for glory and the making of great songs? A few snatched moments only from the barren glut and suck of living.

Here, then, is man, this moth of time, this dupe of brevity and numbered hours, this travesty of waste and sterile breath. Yet if the gods could come here to a desolate, deserted earth where only the ruin of man’s cities remained, where only a few marks and carvings of his hand were legible upon his broken tablets, where only a wheel lay rusting in the desert sand, a cry would burst out of their hearts and they would say: “He lived, and he was here!”

Behold his works:

He needed speech to ask for bread—and he had Christ! He needed songs to sing in battle—and he had Homer! He needed words to curse his enemies—and he had Dante, he had Voltaire, he had Swift! He needed cloth to cover up his hairless, puny flesh against the seasons—and he wove the robes of Solomon, he made the garments of great kings, he made the samite for the young knights! He needed walls and a roof to shelter him—and he made Blois! He needed a temple to propitiate his God—and he made Chartres and Fountains Abbey! He was born to creep upon the earth—and he made great wheels, he sent great engines thundering down the rails, he launched great wings into the air, he put great ships upon the angry sea!

Plagues wasted him, and cruel wars destroyed his strongest sons, but fire, flood, and famine could not quench him. No, nor the inexorable grave— his sons leaped shouting from his dying loins. The shaggy bison with his thews of thunder died upon the plains; the fabled mammoths of the unrecorded ages are vast scaffoldings of dry, insensate loam; the panthers have learned caution and move carefully among tall grasses to the water-hole; and man lives on amid the senseless nihilism of the universe.

For there is one belief, one faith, that is man’s glory, his triumph, his immortality—and that is his belief in life. Man loves life, and, loving life, hates death, and because of this he is great, he is glorious, he is beautiful, and his beauty is everlasting. He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them. He lives in fear, in toil, in agony, and in unending tumult, but if the blood foamed bubbling from his wounded lungs at every breath he drew, he would still love life more dearly than an end of breathing. Dying, his eyes burn beautifully, and the old hunger shines more fiercely in them—he has endured all the hard and purposeless suffering, and still he wants to live.

Thus it is impossible to scorn this creature. For out of his strong belief in life, this puny man made love. At his best, he is love. Without him there can be no love, no hunger, no desire.

So this is man—the worst and best of him—this frail and petty thing who lives his day and dies like-all the other animals, and is forgotten. And yet, he is immortal, too, for both the good and evil that he does live after him. Why, then, should any living man ally himself with death, and, in his greed and blindness, batten on his brother’s blood?

28. The Fox

During all these desperate years in Brooklyn, when George lived and worked alone, he had only one real friend, and this was his editor, Foxhall Edwards. They spent many hours together, wonderful hours of endless talk, so free and full that it combed the universe and bound the two of them together in bonds of closest friendship. It was a friendship founded on many common tastes and interests, on mutual liking and admiration of each for what the other was, and on an attitude of respect which allowed unhampered expression of opinion even on those rare subjects which aroused differences of views and of belief. It was, therefore, the kind of friendship that can exist only between two men. It had in it no element of that possessiveness which always threatens a woman’s relations with a man, no element of that physical and emotional involvement which, while it serves nature’s end of bringing a man and woman together, also tends to thwart their own dearest wish to remain so by throwing over their companionship a constricting cloak of duty and obligation, of right’and vested interest.

The older man was not merely friend but father to the younger. Webber, the hot-blooded Southerner, with his large capacity for sentiment and affection, had lost his own father many years before and now had found a substitute in Edwards. And Edwards, the reserved New Englander, with his deep sense of family and inheritance, had always wanted a son but had had five daughters, and as time went on he made of George a kind of foster son. Thus each, without quite knowing that he did it, performed an act of spiritual adoption.

So it was to Foxhall Edwards that George now turned whenever his loneliness became unbearable. When his inner turmoil, confusion, and self-doubts overwhelmed him, as they often did, and his life went dead and stale and empty till it sometimes seemed that all the barren desolation of the Brooklyn streets had soaked into his very blood and marrow—then he would seek out Edwards. And he never went to him in vain. Edwards, busy though he always was, would drop whatever he was doing and would take George out to lunch or dinner, and in his quiet, casual, oblique, and understanding way would talk to him and draw him out until he found out what it was that troubled him. And always in the end, because of Edward’s faith in him, George would be healed and find himself miraculously restored to self-belief.

What manner of man was this great editor and father-confessor and true friend—he of the quiet, shy, sensitive, and courageous heart who often seemed to those who did not know him well an eccentric, cold, indifferent fellow—he who, grandly christened Foxhall, preferred to be the simple, unassuming Fox?

The Fox asleep was a breathing portrait of guileless innocence. He slept on his right side, legs doubled up a little, hands folded together underneath the ear, his hat beside him on the pillow. Seen so, the sleeping figure of the Fox was touching—for all his five and forty years, it was so plainly boylike. By no stretch of fancy the old hat beside him on the pillow might have been a childish toy brought to bed with him the night before—and this, in fact, it was!

It was as if, in sleep, no other part of Fox was left except the boy. Sleep seemed to have resumed into itself this kernel of his life, to have excluded all transitions, to have brought the man back to his acorn, keeping thus inviolate that which the man, indeed, had never lost, but which had passed through change and time and all the accretions of experience— and now had been restored, unwoven back into the single oneness of itself.

And yet it was a guileful Fox, withal. Oh, guileful Fox, how innocent in guilefulness and in innocence how full of guile! How straight in cunning, and how cunning-straight, in all directions how strange-devious, in all strange-deviousness how direct! Too straight for crookedness, and for envy too serene, too fair for blind intolerance, too just and seeing and too strong for hate, too honest for base dealing, too high for low suspiciousness, too innocent for all the scheming tricks of swarming villainy—yet never had been taken in a horse trade yet!

So, then, life’s boy is he, life’s trustful child; life’s guileful-guileless Fox is he, but not life’s angel, not life’s fool. Will get at all things like a fox—not full-tilt at the fences, not head-on, but through coverts peering, running at fringes of the wood, or by the wall; will swing round on the pack and get behind the hounds, cross them up and be away and gone when they are looking for him where he’s not—he will not mean to fox them, but he will.

Gets round the edges of all things the way a fox does. Never takes the main route or the worn handle. Sees the worn handle, what it is, says: “Oh,” but knows it’s not right handle though most used: gets right handle right away and uses it. No one knows how it is done, neither knows the Fox, but does it instantly. It seems so easy when Fox does it, easy as a shoe, because he has had it from his birth. It is a genius.

Our Fox is never hard or fancy, always plain. He makes all plays look easy, never brilliant; it seems that anyone can do it when Fox does it. He covers more ground than any other player in the game, yet does not seem to do so. His style is never mannered, seems no style at all; the thrilled populace never holds its breath in hard suspense when he takes aim, because no one ever saw the Fox take aim, and yet he never misses. Others spend their lives in learning to take aim: they wear just the proper uniform for taking aim, they advance in good order, they signal to the breathless world for silence—“We are taking aim!” they say, and then with faultless style and form, with flawless execution, they bring up their pieces, take aim—and miss! The great Fox never seems to take aim, and never misses. Why? He was just born that way—fortunate, a child of genius, innocent and simple—and a Fox!

“And ah!—a cunning Fox!” the Aimers and the Missers say. “A damned subtle, devilish, and most cunning Fox!” they cry, and grind their teeth. “Be not deceived by his appearance—’tis a cunning Fox! Put not your faith in Foxes, put not your faith in this one, he will look so shy, and seem so guileless and so bewildered—but he will never miss!”

“But how”—the Aimers and the Missers plead with one another in exasperation—“how does he do it? What has the fellow got? He’s nothing much to look at—nothing much to talk to. He makes no appearance! He never goes out in the world—you never see him at receptions, parties, splendid entertainments—he makes no effort to meet people—no, or to talk to them! He hardly talks at all!…What has he got? Where does it come from? Is it chance or luck? There is some mystery——”

“Well, now,” says one, “I’ll tell you what my theory is——”

Their heads come close, they whisper craftily together until——

“No!” another cries. “It is not that. I tell you what he does, it’s——”

And again they whisper close, argue and deny, get more confused than ever, and finally are reduced to furious impotence:

“Bah!” cries one. “How does the fellow do it, anyway? How does he get away with it? He seems to have no sense, no knowledge, no experience. He doesn’t get round the way we do, lay snares and traps. He doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, or what the whole thing’s all about—and yet——”

“He’s just a snob!” another snarls. “When you try to be a good fellow, he high-hats you! You try to kid him, he just looks at you! He never offers to shake hands with you, he never slaps you on the back the way real fellows do! You go out of your way to be nice to him— to show him you’re a real guy and that you think he is, too—and what does he do? He just looks at you with that funny little grin and turns away—and wears that damned hat in the office all day long—I think he sleeps with it! He never asks you to sit down—and gets up while you’re talking to him—leaves you cold—begins to wander up and down outside, staring at everyone he sees—his own associates—as if he were some half-wit idiot boy—and wanders back into his office twenty minutes later—stares at you as if he never saw your face before—and jams that damned hat farther down round his ears, and turns away—takes hold of his lapels—looks out the window with that crazy grin—then looks at you again, looks you up and down, stares at your face until you wonder if you’ve changed suddenly into a baboon—and turns back to the window without a word—then stares at you again—finally pretends to recognise you, and says:’Oh, it’s you!’…I tell you he’s a snob, and that’s his way of letting you know you don’t belong! Oh, I know about him—I know what he is! He’s an old New Englander—older than God, by God! Too good for anyone but God, by God!—and even God’s a little doubtful! An aristocrat—a rich man’s son—a Groton-Harvard boy—too fine for the likes of us, by God!—too good for the’low bounders’who make up this profession! He thinks we’re a bunch of business men and Babbitts—and that’s the reason that he looks at us the way he does—that’s the reason that he grins his grin, and turns away, and catches at his coat lapels, and doesn’t answer when you speak to him—”

“Oh, no,” another quickly interrupts. “You’re wrong there! The reason that he grins that grin and turns away is that he’s trying hard to hear—the reason that he doesn’t answer when you speak to him is that he’s deaf——”

“Ah, deaf!” says still another in derision. “Deaf, hell! Deaf as a Fox,  he is! That deafness is a stall—a trick—a gag! He hears you when he wants to hear you! If it’s anything he wants to hear,  he’ll hear you though you’re forty yards away and talking in a whisper! He’s a Fox, I tell you!”

“Yes, a Fox, a Fox!” they chorus in agreement. “That much is certain—the man’s a Fox!”

So the Aimers and the Missers whisper, argue, and deduce. They lay siege to intimates and friends of Fox, ply them with flattery and strong drink, trying thus to pluck out the heart of Fox’s mystery. They find out nothing, because there’s nothing to find out, nothing anyone can tell them. They are reduced at length to exasperated bafflement and finish where they started. They advance to their positions, take aim—and miss!

And so, in all their ways, they lay cunning snares throughout the coverts of the city. They lay siege to life. They think out tactics, crafty stratagems. They devise deep plans to bag the game. They complete masterly flanking operations in the night-time (while the great Fox sleeps), get in behind the enemy when he isn’t looking, are sure that victory is within their grasp, take aim magnificently—and fire—and shoot one another painfully in the seats of their expensive pants!

Meanwhile, the Fox is sleeping soundly through the night, as sweetly as a child.

Night passes, dawn comes, eight o’clock arrives. How to describe him now as he awakes?

A man of five and forty years, not really seeming younger, yet always seeming something of the boy. Rather, the boy is there within that frame of face, behind the eyes, within the tenement of flesh and bone—not imprisoned, just held there in a frame—a frame a little worn by the years, webbed with small wrinkles round the eyes—invincibly the same as it has always been. The hair, once fair and blond, no longer fair and blond now, feathered at the temples with a touch of grey, elsewhere darkened by time and weather to a kind of steel-grey—blondness really almost dark now, yet, somehow, still suggesting fair and blond. The head well set and small, boy’s head still, the hair sticking thick and close to it, growing to a V in the centre of the forehead, then back straight and shapely, full of natural grace. Eyes pale blue, full of a strange misty light, a kind of far weather of the sea in them, eyes of a New England sailor long months outbound for China on a clipper ship, with something drowned, sea-sunken in them.

The general frame and structure of the face is somewhat lean and long and narrow—face of the ancestors, a bred face, face of people who have looked the same for generations. A stern, lonely face, with the enduring fortitude of granite, face of the New England seacoast, really his grandfather’s face, New England statesman’s face, whose bust sits there on the mantel, looking at the bed. Yet something else has happened on Fox’s face to transfigure it from the primeval nakedness of granite: in its essential framework, granite still, but a kind of radiance and warmth of life has enriched and mellowed it. A light is burning in the Fox, shining outwards through the face, through every gesture, grace, and movement of the body,’something swift, mercurial, mutable, and tender, something buried and withheld, but passionate—something out of his mother’s face, perhaps,’or out of his father’s or his father’s mother’s—something that subdues the granite with warmth—something from poetry, intuition, genius, imagination, living, inner radiance, and beauty. This face, then, with the shapely head, the pale, far-misted vision of the eyes, held in round bony cages like a bird’s, the strong, straight nose, curved at the end, a little scornful and patrician, sensitive, sniffing, swift-nostriled as a hound’s—the whole face with its passionate and proud serenity might almost be the face of a great poet, or the visage of some strange and mighty bird.

But now the sleeping figure stirs, opens its eyes and listens, rouses, starts up like a flash.

“What?” says Fox.

The Fox awake now.

“FOXHALL MORTON EDWARDS.”

The great name chanted slowly through his brain—someone had surely spoken it—it filled his ears with sound—it rang down solemnly through the aisles of consciousness—it was no dream—the very walls were singing with its grave and proud sonorities as he awoke.

“What?” cried Fox again.

He looked about him. There was no one there. He shook his head as people do when they shake water from their ears. He inclined his good right ear and listened for the sound again. He tugged and rubbed his good right ear—yes, it was unmistakable—the good right ear was ringing with the sound.

Fox looked bewildered, puzzled, searched round the room again with sea-pale eyes, saw nothing, saw his hat beside him on the pillow, said, “Oh,” in a slightly puzzled tone, picked up the hat and jammed it on his head, half-covering the ears, swung out of bed and thrust his feet into his slippers, got up, pyjamaed and behatted, walked over to the door, opened it, looked out, and said:

“What? Is anybody there?—Oh!”

For there was nothing—just the hall, the quiet, narrow hall of morning, the closed door of his wife’s room, and the stairs.

He closed the door, turned back into his room, still looking puzzled, intently listening, his good right ear half-turned and searching for the sounds.

Where had they come from then? The name—he thought he heard it still, faintly now, mixed in with many other strange, confusing noises. But where? From, what direction did they come? Or had he heard them? A long, droning sound, like an electric fan—perhaps a motor in the street? A low, retreating thunder—an elevated train, perhaps? A fly buzzing? Or a mosquito with its whining bore? No, it could not be: it was morning, spring-time, and the month of May.

Light winds of morning fanned the curtains of his pleasant room. An old four-poster bed, a homely, gay old patch-quilt coverlet, an old chest of drawers, a little table by his bed, piled high with manuscripts, a glass of water and his eyeglasses, and a little ticking clock. Was that what he had heard? He held it to his ear and listened. On the mantel, facing him, the bust of his grandfather, Senator William Fox-hall Morton, far-seeing, sightless, stern, lean, shrewd with decision; a chair or two, and on the wall an engraving of Michelangelo’s great Lorenzo Medici. Fox looked at it and smiled.

“A man,” said he in a low voice. “The way a man should look!” The figure of the young Caesar was mighty-limbed, enthroned; helmeted for war; the fine hand half-supporting the chin of the grand head, broodingly aware of great events and destiny; thought knit to action, poetry to fact, caution to boldness, reflection to decision—the Thinker, Warrior, Statesman, Ruler all conjoined in one. “And what a man should be,” thought Fox.

A little puzzled still, Fox goes to his window and looks out, pyjamaed and behatted still, the fingers of one hand back upon his hips, a movement lithe and natural as a boy’s. The head goes back, swift nostrils sniff, dilate with scorn. Light winds of morning fan him, gauzy curtains are blown back.

And outside, morning, and below him, morning, sky-shining morning all above, below, around, across from him, cool-slanting morning, gold-cool morning, and the street. Black fronts of rusty brown across from him, the flat fronts of Turtle Bay.

Fox looks at morning and the street with sea-pale eyes, as if he never yet had seen them, then in a low and husky voice, a little hoarse, agreeable, half-touched with whisper, he says with slow recognition, quiet wonder, and—somehow, somewby—resignation:

“Oh…I see.”

Turns now and goes into his bathroom opposite, surveys himself in the mirror with the same puzzled, grave, and sea-pale wonder, looks at his features, notes the round cages that enclose his eyes, sees Boy-Fox staring gravely out at him, bethinks him suddenly of Boy-Fox’s ear, which stuck out at right angles forty years ago, getting Boy-Fox gibes at Groton—so jams hat farther down about the ear, so stick-out ear that’s stick-out ear no longer won’t stick out!

So standing, he surveys himself for several moments, and finding out at length that this indeed is he, says, as before, with the same slightly puzzled, slow, and patiently resigned acceptance:

“Oh. I see.”

Turns on the shower faucet now—the water spurts and hisses in jets of smoking steam. Fox starts to step beneath the shower, suddenly observes pyjamas on his person, mutters slowly—“Oh-h!”—and takes them off. Unpyjamaed now, and as God made him, save for hat, starts to get in under shower with hat on—and remembers hat, remembers it in high confusion, is forced against his will to acknowledge the unwisdom of the procedure—so snaps his fingers angrily, and, in a low, disgusted tone of acquiescence, says:

“Oh, well, then! All right!”

So removes his hat, which is now jammed on so tightly that he has to take both hands and fairly wrench and tug his way out of it, hangs the battered hulk reluctantly within easy reaching distance on a hook upon the door, surveys it for a moment with an undecided air, as if still not willing to relinquish it—and then, still with a puzzled air, steps in beneath those hissing jets of water hot enough to boil an egg!

Puzzled no longer, my mad masters, ye may take it, Fox comes out on the double-quick, and loudly utters: “Damn!”—and fumes and dances, snaps his fingers, loudly utters “Damn!” again—but gets his water tempered to his hide this time, and so, without more peradventure, takes his shower.

Shower done, hair brushed at once straight back around his well-shaped head, on goes the hat at once. So brushes teeth, shaves with a safety razor, walks out naked but behatted into his room, starts to go downstairs, remembers clothing—“Oh!”—looks round, bepuzzled, sees clothing spread out neatly on a chair by womenfolks the night before—fresh socks, fresh underwear, a clean shirt, a suit, a pair of shoes. Fox never knows where they come from, wouldn’t know where to look, is always slightly astonished when he finds them. Says “Oh!” again, goes back and puts clothes on, and finds to his amazement that they fit.

They fit him beautifully. Everything fits the Fox. He never knows what he has on, but he could wear a tow-sack, or a shroud, a sail, a length of canvas—they would fit the moment that he put them on, and be as well the elegance of faultless style. His clothes just seem to grow on him: whatever he wears takes on at once the grace, the dignity, and the unconscious ease of his own person. Never exercises much, but never has to; loves to take a walk, is bored by games and plays none; has same figure that he had at twenty-one—five feet ten, one hundred and fifty pounds, no belly and no fat, the figure of a boy.

Dressed now, except for necktie, picks up necktie, suddenly observes it, a very gay one with blue polka dots, and drops it with dilating nostrils, muttering a single word that seems to utter volumes:

“Women!”

Then searches vaguely on a tie rack in his closet, finds a modest grey cravat, and puts it on. So, attired now, picks up a manuscript, his pince-nez glasses, opens the door, and walks out in the narrow hall.

His wife’s door closed and full of sleep, the air touched subtly with a faint perfume. The Fox sniffs sharply, with a swift upward movement of his head, and, looking with scorn, mixed with compassion, pity, tenderness, and resignation, inclines his head in one slow downward movement of decision, and says:

“Women!”

So, down the narrow, winding staircase now, his head thrown sharply back, one hand upon his lapel, the other holding manuscript, and reaches second floor. Another narrow hall. Front, back and to the side, three more closed doors of sleep and morning, and five daughters——

“Women!”

Surveys the door of Martha, the oldest, twenty, a——

Woman!

And next the door of Eleanor, aged eighteen, and Amelia, just sixteen, but——

Women!

And finally, with a gentle scorn, touched faintly with a smile, the door of the two youngest, Ruth, fourteen, little Ann, just seven, yet——

Women!

So, sniffing sharply the woman-laden air, descends now to the first floor, enters living-room, and scornfully surveys the work of——

Women!

The carpets are rolled up, the morning sunlight slants on the bare boards. The chairs, the sofas, and upholstery have been ripped open, the stuffing taken out. The place smells of fresh paint. The walls, brown yesterday, are robin’s-egg blue this morning. Buckets of paint are scattered round the floor. Even the books that lined the walls have been taken from the tall, indented shelves. The interior decorators are at their desperate work again, and all because of——

Women!

Fox sniffs the fresh paint with sharp disgust, crosses the room, mounts winding steps, which also have been painted robin’s-egg blue, and goes out on the terrace. Gay chairs and swings and tables, gay-striped awnings, and in an ash-tray several cigarette-butts with tell-tale prints upon them——

Women!

The garden backs of Turtle Bay are lyrical with tender green, with birdsong and the hidden plash of water—the living secret of elves’magic embedded in the heart of the gigantic city—and beyond, like some sheer, terrific curtain of upward-curving smoke, the frontal cliff of the sky-waving towers.

Fox sniffs sharply the clean green fragrance of the morning, sea-pale eyes are filled with wonder, strangeness, recognition. Something passionate and far transforms his face—and something rubs against his leg, moans softly. Fox looks down into the melancholy, pleading eyes of the French poodle. He observes the ridiculous barbering of the creature—the fuzzy muff of kinky wool around the shoulders, neck, and head, the skinned nakedness of ribs and loins, wool-fuzzy tail again, tall, skinny legs—a half-dressed female creature with no wool at all just where the wool is needed most—no dog at all, but just a frenchified parody of dog—an absurd travesty of all the silly fashions, mannerisms, conquettishness, and irresponsibility of a——

Woman!

Fox turns in disgust, leaves terrace, descends steps to the living-room again, traverses barren boards, threads way round the disembowelled furnishings, and descends the stairs to the basement floor.

“What’s this?”

In entrance hall below, a lavish crimson carpet where yesterday there was a blue one, cream-white paint all over walls to-day, which yesterday were green, the wall all chiselled into, a great sheet of mirror ready to be installed where yesterday no mirror was.

Fox traverses narrow hallway, past the kitchen, through the cloakroom—this, too, redolent of fresh paint—and into little cubbyhole that had no use before.

“Good God, what’s this?”

Transfigured now to Fox’s “cosy den” (Fox wants no “cosy den”—will have none!), walls are painted, bookshelves built, a reading lamp and easy chairs in place, the Fox’s favourite books (Fox groans!) transplanted from their shelves upstairs and brought down here where Fox can never find them.

Fox bumps his head against the low doorway in going out, traverses narrow hall again, at last gets into dining-room. Seats himself at head of the long table (six women make a long table!), looks at the glass of orange juice upon his plate, does nothing to it, makes no motion towards it, just sits there waiting in a state of patient and resigned dejection, as who should say: “It’s no one but the Old Grey Mule.”

Portia enters—a plump mulatto, nearing fifty, tinged so imperceptibly with yellow that she is almost white. She enters, stops, stares at Fox sitting motionless there, and titters coyly. Fox turns slowly, catches his coat lapels, and looks at her in blank astonishment. She drops her eyelids shyly, tittering, and spreads plump fingers over her fat mouth. Fox surveys her steadily, as if trying to peer through her fingers at her face, then with a kind of no-hope expression in his eyes, he says slowly, in a sepulchral tone:

“Fruit salad.”

And Portia, anxiously:

“What fo’you doesn’t drink yo’orange juice, Mistah Edwands? Doesn’t you like it?”

“Fruit salad,” repeats Fox tonelessly.

“What fo’you always eat dat ole fruit salad, Mistah Edwahds? What fo’you wants dat ole canned stuff when we fixes you de nice fresh orange juice?”

“Fruit salad,” echoes Fox dolefully, utter resignation in his tone.

Portia departs protesting, but presently fruit salad is produced and put before him. Fox eats it, then looks round and up at Portia, and, still with no-hope resignation in his voice, says low and hoarsely:

“Is that—all?”

“Why, no suh, Mistah, Edwahds,” Portia replies. “You can have anything you likes if you jest lets us know. We nevah knows jest what you’s goin’to awdah. All las’month you awdahed fish fo’brek-fus’—is dat what you wants?”

“Breast of guinea-hen,” says Fox tonelessly.

“Why,  Mistah Edwahds!” Portia squeals. “Breas’of guinea-hen fo’ brek-fus’?”

“Yes,” says Fox, patient and enduring.

“But, Mistah Edwahds!” Portia protests. “You know you doesn’t want breas’of guinea-hen fo’ brek-fus’!”

“Yes,” says Fox in his hopeless tone, “I do.” And he regards her steadily with sea-misted eyes, with proud and scornful features, eloquent with patient and enduring bitterness as if to say: “Man is born of woman and is made to mourn.”

“But Mistah Edwahds,” Portia pleads with him, “fokes don’t eat breas’of guinea-hen fo’ brek-fus’! Dey eats ham an’aiggs, an’toast an’bacon—things like dat.”

Fox continues to regard her fixedly.

“Breast of guinea-hen,” he says wearily, implacably as before.

“B-b-b-but, Mistah Edwahds,” Portia stammers, thoroughly demoralised by this time, “we ain’t got no breas’of guinea-hen.”

“We had some night before last,” says Fox.

“Yes, suh, yes, suh!” Portia almost tearfully agrees. “But dat’s all gone! We et up all dere was!…Besides, you been eatin’breas’of guinea-hen ev’ry night fo’dinnah de las’two weeks, an’Miz Edwands—she say you had enough—she say de chillun gettin’tired of it—she tol’us to get somep’n else!…If you tol’us dat you wanted guinea-hen fo’brek-fus’, we’d a-had it. But you nevah tol’us, Mista Edwahds.” Portia is on the verge of open tears by now. “You nevah tells us what you wants—an’dat’s why we nevah knows. One time you wanted cream chicken fo’yo’brek-fus’ev’ry mawnin’fo’a month…Den you changed roun’to codfish balls, an’had dat fo’a long, long time…An’now it’s guinea-hen,” she almost sobs—“an’we ain’t got none, Mistah Edwahds. You nevah tol’us what you wanted. We got ham an’aiggs—we got bacon—we got—”,

“Oh, well,” says Fox wearily, “bring what you have, then—anything you like.”

He turns away full of patient scorn, enduring and unhoping bitterness—and “aiggs” are brought him. Fox eats them with relish; toast, too, three brown slices, buttered; and drinks two cups of strong hot coffee.

Just at half-past eight something entered the dining-room as swift and soundless as a ray of light. It was a child of fourteen years, a creature of surpassing loveliness, the fourth daughter of the Fox, named Ruth. It was the Fox in miniature: a little creature, graceful as a bird, framed finely as some small and perfect animal. The small, lean head was shaped and set exactly as the head of Fox, the dark blonde hair grew cleanly to it, the child’s face was of an ivory transparency, the features and the sensitivity of expression were identical with those of Fox, transformed to femininity, and the lines of the whole face were cut and moulded with the exquisite delicacy of a cameo.

The shyness of this little girl was agonising; it was akin to terror. She entered the room breathlessly, noiselessly, stricken, with her head lowered, her arms held to her side, her eyes fixed on the floor. The ordeal of passing by her father, and of speaking to him, was obviously a desperate one; she glided past as if she almost hoped to escape notice. Without raising her eyes, she said: “Good morning, daddy,” in a timid little voice, and was about to duck into her chair, when Fox looked up startled, got up quickly, put his arms round her, and kissed her. In answer to his kiss, she pecked her cheek towards him like a bird, still keeping her eyes desperately on the floor.

The face of Fox was illuminated by a radiant tenderness as, in a low, deaf, slightly hoarse tone, he said:

“Good morning, darling.”

Still without looking at him, stricken, desperate, she tried to get away from him, yet, even in the act, her affection for the Fox was eloquent. Her heart was beating like a trip-hammer, her eyes went back and forth like a frightened fledgling’s, she wanted to vanish through the walls, dart out of doors, turn into a shadow—anything,  anything, if only she could utterly escape notice, having no one look at her, pay any attention to her, above all,  speak to her. So she fluttered there in his embrace like a dove caught in a snare, tried to get away from him, was in a state of agony so acute and sensitive that it was painful to watch her or to do anything that would in any way increase the embarrassment and desperate shyness of this stricken little girl.

Fox’s embrace tightened round her as she tried to escape, and he grew full of solicitude and anxiety as he looked at her.

“Darling!” he whispered, in a low and troubled tone. He shook her gently. “What, darling?” he demanded. “Nowwhat?” he finally demanded, with a touch of the old scorn.

“But nothing, daddy!” she protested, her timid little voice rising in a note of desperate protest. “Nothing, daddy!” She squirmed a little to get free. Reluctantly Fox let her go. The child ducked right down into her chair, still with her eyes averted, and concluded with a little gasping laugh of protest: “You’re so funny, daddy!”

Fox resumed his seat and still continued to regard her sternly, gravely, with alarmed solicitude, and a little scorn. She shot a frightened look at him and ducked her head down towards her plate.

“Is anything wrong?” said Fox, in a low voice.

“But naturally—not!”—a protesting and exasperated little gasp of laughter. “Why should anything be wrong?Honestly, you’re so strange, daddy!”

“Well, then,” said Fox, with patient resignation.

“But nothing! I keep telling you, there’s nothing! That’s what I’ve told you from the feerst!”

All of the children of the Fox say “feerst” for “first”, “beerst” for “burst”, “theerst” for “thirst”. Why, no one knows. It seems to be a tribal accent, not only among all of Fox’s children, but among all of their young cousins on the Fox’s side. It is almost as if they were creatures of some isolated family, immured for generations on some lonely island, cut off from the world, and speaking some lost accent that their ancestors spoke three hundred years ago. Moreover, their tone is characterised by a kind of drawl—not the languorous drawl of the deep South, but a protesting drawl, a wearied-out, exasperated drawl, as if they have almost given up hope of making Fox—orsomeone—understand what ought to be obvious without any explanation whatsoever. Thus:

“But nothing, daddy! I’ve told you that from the f-e-e-r-s-t!”

“Well, then, what is it, darling?” Fox demanded. “Why do you look like that?”—with an emphatic downward movement of the head.

“But look like what?” the child protested. “Oh,  daddy, honestly”—she gasped, with a little strained laugh, and looked away—“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Portia brought smoking oatmeal and put it down before her, and the girl, saying timidly: “Good morning, Portia,” ducked her head and began to eat hastily.

Fox continued to look at the child sternly, gravely, with a troubled expression in his eyes. Looking up suddenly, she put down her spoon, and cried:

“But,  daddy—wha-a-t?”

“Are those scoundrels going to be here again to-day?” said Fox.

“Oh, daddy,  what scoundrels?…Honestly!” She twisted in her chair, gasped a little, tried to laugh, picked up her spoon, started to go on eating, then put her spoon down again.

“Those scoundrels,” said the Fox, “that—you women”—he inclined his head with scornful emphasis—“have brought in to destroy my home.”

“But who are you talking about?” she protested, looking round like a hunted animal for a means of escape. “I don’t know who you mean.”

“I mean,” said Fox, “those interior decorating fellows”—here his voice was filled with the dismissal of an unutterable contempt—“that you and your mother have imported to wreck the house.”

“But I had nothing to do with it!” the girl protested. “Oh, daddy, you’re so——-” she broke off, squirmed, and turned away with a little laugh.

“So—what?” said Fox, low, hoarse, and scornful.

“Oh, I don’t know—so—so stra-a-nge! You say such funny thi-i-ngs!”

“Have you women,” Fox went on, “decided when you’re going to let me have a little peace in my own house?”

“Let you have a little pe-a-ce?…What have I done? If you don’t want the decorators, why don’t you speak to mo-o-ther?”

“Because”—Fox inclined his head with a slow, ironic emphasis upon the word—“because—I—don’t—count! I’m only the—Old—Grey—Mule—among six women—and, of course,  anything is good enough for me!”

“But what have we done? We haven’t done anything to you! Why do you act so p-e-e-r-secuted?…Oh, daddy, honestly!” She squirmed desperately, tried to laugh, turned away, and ducked her head down towards her plate again.

Sitting back in his chair, one hand clasped upon the arm, his whole being withdrawn, remote, in an attitude eloquent of deep, unhoping patience, Fox continued to regard the child gravely for a moment. Then he thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled his watch out and looked at it, glanced at the child again, and shook his head in a movement packed with stern reproach and silent accusation.

She looked up, quick and startled, laid her spoon down, and gasped:

“Now what? What are you shaking your he-a-ad for? What is it now?”

“Is your mother up?”

“But naturally, I don’t kno-o-w!”

“Are your sisters up?”

“But,  da-a-dy, how can I tell?”

“Did you get to bed early?”

“Ye-e-e-s,” in a drawl of protest.

“What time did your sisters get to bed?”

“But, of course, I have no way of kno-o-wing! Why don’t you ask the-e-m?”

Fox looked at the watch again, then at the child, and shook his head once more.

“Women!” he said quietly, and put the watch back into his pocket.

The child by now has finished with her oatmeal—all she wants of it. Now she slides out of her chair and, with face averted, tries to glide past Fox, out of the room. Fox gets up quickly, puts his arms round her, says in a low, quick, worried tone:

“Oh,  darling, where are you going?”

“But to sch-o-o-ol, of course!”

“Darling, stay and eat your breakfast!”

“But I’ve e-e-a-ten!”

“Oh, you haven’t!” whispers Fox impatiently.

“But I’ve eaten all I wa-a-a-nt!”

“You haven’t eaten anything!” he whispers scornfully.

“But I don’t want any more,” she protests, looks desperately about, and struggles to free herself. “Oh, let me go-o-o, daddy! I’ll be late!”

“Then be late!” whispers the great watch-watcher and head-shaker scornfully. “Stay and eat your breakfast!”—punctuating these decisive words with slow nods of emphasis.

“But I ca-a-n’t! I’ve got to read a pa-a-per.”

“A—what?”

“A t-e-e-r-m paper—for Miss Allen’s class—it comes at nine o’clock.”

“Oh,” says Fox slowly, “I see.” In a low, almost inaudible tone, “On—Whitman?”

“Ye-e-e-s.”

“Oh…Did you read the book I gave you—the one with his war diary and notes?”

“Ye-e-e-s.”

“Astonishing!” whispers Fox. “Isn’t it astonishing? You can see just how he did it, can’t you? He—he got right upon everything,” Fox whispers, “just as if he were the thing itself—as if it were happening to him!”

“Ye-e-e-s.” She looks desperately around, then with averted eyes blurts out: “You were right about the other thing, too.”

“What other thing?”

“About night—how there’s so much night and darkness in himhis—his feeling for night.”

“Oh,” Fox whispers slowly, his sea-pale eyes misted with reflection. “Did you tell about that, too?”

“Ye-e-s. It’s tr-u-e. After you told me, I read him again, and it’s tr-u-e.”

Shy, desperate, timid, stricken as she is, she nevertheless knows it’s true when it’s true.

“That’s fine!” Fox whispers, and shakes his head sharply with immense satisfaction. “I’ll bet it’s good!”

The girl’s ivory features flush crimson. Like Fox, she loves praise, yet cannot stand to have it spoken. She squirms, is terrified, is hoping against hope——

“I don’t kno-o-w,” she gasps. “Miss Allen didn’t like the last paper I wrote—what I said about Mark Twain.”

“Then,” Fox whispers, low and scornfully, “let Miss Allen not like it. That was a fine paper,” he whispers. “What—what you said about the River was just right.”

“I kno-o-w! And that was the part she didn’t like. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about—said it was immature and not sound, and gave me a’C'.”

“Oh,” says Fox absently, thinking all the time with an immense satisfaction of the spirit: “What a girl this is! She has a fine mind. She—she understands things!”

“You see, darling,” Fox whispers gently, coming back to Miss Allen, “it’s not their fault. These people do the best they can—but—but they just can’t seem to understand,” he whispers. “You see, Miss Allen is an—an academic kind of person—I guess, kind of an old maid,  really,” he whispers, with an emphatic movement of the head—“and that kind of person, darling, just wouldn’t be able to understand what Whitman and Mark Twain and Keats are like…It’s—it’s a shame,” Fox mutters, and shakes his head, his eyes troubled with regret—“it’s a shame we’ve got to hear about these people first in—in schools—from—from people like Miss Allen. You see, darling,” Fox says gently, his face cocked sideways, his good ear pointing towards the girl, his language simple as a shoe, his face keen, shrewd, thoughtful, and absorbed, and radiant as a blade of light, as it always is when interest and reflection hold the wise serpent of his brain—“you see, darling, schools are all right,  really—but the Thing they do is different from the Thing that Keats and Whitman and Mark Twain do…People like that really have no place in schools. A—a school,” Fox whispers, “is an academic kind of place, you see—and the people that you find in schools are academic people—and these other kind of people—the poets,” whispers Fox, “are not academic people—they’re—they’re really against what the academic people do—they are people who—who discover things for themselves,” Fox whispers, “who burst through and make another world—and the academic people cannot understand them—so that’s why what the academic people say about them is—is not much good,” Fox whispers. For a moment he is silent, then shakes his head and mutters in a low tone of profound regret: “It’s a pity! Too bad you’ve got to hear about it first in schools—but—but just do the best you can with it—get what you can from it—and—and when those people”—whisper mixed with understanding, pity, and contempt—“have gone as far as they can go, just forget about the rest they tell you.”

“I kno-o-w! But, really, daddy, when Miss Allen starts drawing charts and diagrams upon the blackboard, showing how they did it—it’s—it’s aw-w-full I can’t be-e-ar it—it just makes everything so, —te-er-rible!…Oh, daddy, let me go!” She squirms to free herself again, her tender features tortured with self-consciousness. “Please, daddy! I’ve got to! I’ll be late!”

“How are you going?”

“But naturally, the way I always go.”

“By taxi?”

“But of course not, I take the str-e-e-t car.”

“Oh…What street car?”

“The Lexington A-a-a-venue.”

“Alone?” says Fox in a low, grave, troubled tone.

“But, of course, daddy!”

He looks at her sternly with a sorrow-troubled face, and shakes his head.

“But what’s wrong with taking the str-e-e-t car? Oh, daddy, you’re so-o—” she squirms, looks off indefinitely, her face touched by a smile of agonised embarrassment. “Please, daddy! Let me go-o-o! I tell you I’ll be late!”

She pushes a little to release herself, he kisses her, and lets her go reluctantly.

“Good-bye, darling”—low, hoarse, tender, troubled with grave solicitude. “You will take care, won’t you?”

“But, of course!” A little agonised laugh. “There’s nothing to take care.” Then, suddenly, in a timid little voice: “Good-bye, daddy”—and she is gone, swiftly, silently, like fading light.

Fox, hands upon his hips, with a look half-trouble and half-tenderness, follows her with sea-pale eyes until she has gone. Then he turns back to the table, sits down again, and picks up the paper.

News.

29. “The Hollow Men”

Fox picks up the paper and settles back to read it with keen relish. The paper is the Times. (He read the Tribunelate last night: waited up for it, would not miss it, has never missed it, could not sleep if he had not read it.) Morning now, Fox reads the Times.

How does he read the Times?

He reads it the way Americans have always read the paper. He also reads it as few Americans have ever read the paper—with nostrils sensitive, dilating with proud scorn, sniffing for the news behind the news.

He loves it—even loves the Times—loves Love unlovable—and don’t we all? Ink-fresh papers, millions of them—ink-fresh with morning, orange juice, waffles, eggs and bacon, and cups of strong hot coffee. How fine it is, here in America, at ink-fresh, coffee-fragrant morning, to read the paper!

How often have we read the paper in America! How often have we seen it blocked against our doors! Little route-boys fold and block it, so to throw it—and so we find it and unfold it, crackling and ink-laden, at our doors. Sometimes we find it tossed there lightly with flat plop; sometimes we find it thrown with solid, whizzing whackagainst the clapboards (clapboards here, most often, in America); sometimes, as now in Turtle Bay, servants find just freshly folded sheets laid neatly down in doorways, and take them to the table for their masters. No matter how it got there, we always find it.

How we do love the paper in America! How we do love the paper, all!

Why do we love the paper in America? Why do we love the paper, all?

Mad masters, I will tell ye why.

Because the paper is “the news” here in America, and we love the smell of news. We love the smell of news that’s “fit to print”. We also love the smell of news not fit to print. We love, besides, the smell of facts that news is made of. Therefore we love the paper because the news is so fit-printable—so unprintable—and so fact-printable.

Is the news, then, like America? No, it’s not—and Fox, unlike the rest of you, mad masters, turns the pages knowing it is just the news and not America that he reads there in his Times.

The news is not America, nor is America the news—the news is in America. It is a kind of light at morning, and at evening, and at midnight in America. It is a kind of growth and record and excrescence of our life. It is not good enough—it does not tell our story—yet it is the news!

Fox reads (proud nose sharp-sniffing with a scornful relish):

An unidentified man fell or jumped yesterday at noon from the twelfth storey of the Admiral Francis Drake Hotel, corner of Hay and Apple Streets, in Brooklyn. The man, who was about thirty-five years old, registered at the hotel about a week ago, according to the police, as C. Green. Police are of the opinion that this was an assumed name. Pending identification, the body is being held at the King’s County Morgue.

This, then, is news. Is it also the whole story, Admiral Drake? No! Yet we do not supply the whole story—we who have known all the lights and weathers of America—as Fox supplies it now:

Well, then, it’s news, and it happened in your own hotel, brave Admiral Drake. It didn’t happen in the Penn-Pitt at Pittsburgh, nor the Phil-Penn at Philadelphia, nor the York-Albany at Albany, nor the Hudson-Troy at Troy, nor the Libya-Ritz at Libya Hill, nor the Clay-Calhoun at Columbia, nor the Richmond-Lee at Richmond, nor the George Washington at Easton, Pennsylvania, Canton, Ohio, Terre Haute, Indiana, Danville, Virginia, Houston, Texas, and ninety-seven other places; nor at the Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, Wilmington, Delaware, Cairo, Illinois, Kansas City, Missouri, Los Angeles, California, and one hundred and thirty-six other towns; nor at the Andrew Jackson, the Roosevelt (Theodore or Franklin—take your choice), the Jefferson Davis, the Daniel Webster, the Stonewall Jackson, the U.S. Grant, the Commodore Vanderbilt, the Waldorf-Astor, the Adams House, the Parker House, the Palmer House, the Taft, the McKinley, the Emerson (Waldo or Bromo), the Harding, the Coolidge, the Hoover, the Albert G. Fall, the Harry Daugherty, the Rockefeller, the Harriman, the Carnegie or the Frick, the Christopher Columbus or the Leif Ericsson, the Ponce-de-Leon or the Magellan, in the remaining eight hundred and forty-three cities of America—but at the Francis Drake, brave Admiral—your own hotel—so, of course, you’ll want to know what happened.

“An unidentified man”—well, then, this man was an American. “About thirty-five years old” with “an assumed name”—well, then, call him C. Green as he called himself ironically in the hotel register. C. Green, the unidentified American, “fell or jumped,” then, “yesterday at noon…in Brooklyn”—worth nine lines of print in to-day’s Times—one of seven thousand who died yesterday upon this continent—one of three hundred and fifty who died yesterday in this very city (see dense, close columns of obituaries, page 15: begin with “Aaronson”, so through the alphabet to “Zorn”). C. Green came here “a week ago”——

And came from where? From the deep South, or the Mississippi Valley, or the Middle West? From Minneapolis, Bridgeport, Boston, or a little town in Old Catawba? From Scranton, Toledo, St. Louis, or the desert whiteness of Los Angeles? From the pine barrens of the Atlantic coastal plain, or from the Pacific shore?

And so—was what, brave Admiral Drake? Had seen, felt, heard, smelled, tasted—what? Had known—what?

Had known all our brutal violence of weather: the burned swelter of July across the nation, the smell of the slow, rank river, the mud, the bottom lands, the weed growth, and the hot, coarse, humid fragrance of the corn. The kind that says: “Jesus, but it’s hot!”—pulls off his coat, and mops his face, and goes in shirt-sleeves in St. Louis, goes to August’s for a Swiss on rye with mustard, and a mug of beer. The kind that says: “Damn! It’s hot!” in South Carolina, slouches in shirt-sleeves and straw hat down South Main Street, drops into Evans Drug Store for a dope, says to the soda jerker: “Is it hot enough fer you to-day, Jim?” The kind that reads in the paper of the heat, the deaths, and the prostration, reads it with a certain satisfaction, hangs on grimly day by day and loses sleep at night, can’t sleep for heat, is tired in the morning, says: “Jesus! It can’t last for ever!” as heat lengthens into August, and the nation gasps for breath, and the green that was young in May now mottles, fades and bleaches, withers, goes heat-brown. Will boast of coolness in the mountains, Admiral Drake. “Always cool at night! May get a little warm around the middle of the day, but you’ll sleep with blankets every night.”

Then summer fades and passes, and October comes. Will smell smoke then, and feel an unsuspected sharpness, a thrill of nervous, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure. C. Green doesn’t know the reason, Admiral Drake, but lights slant and shorten in the afternoon, there is a misty pollen of old gold in light at noon, a murky redness in the lights of dusk, a frosty stillness, and the barking of the dogs; the maples flame upon the hills, the gums are burning, bronze the oak leaves and, the aspens yellow; then come the rains, the sodden dead-brown of the fallen leaves, the smoke-stark branches—and November comes.

Waiting for winter in the little towns, and winter comes. It is really the same in big towns and the cities, too, with the bleak enclosure of the winter multiplied. In the commerce of the day, engaged and furious, then darkness, and the bleak monotony of “Where shall we go? What shall we do?” The winter grips us, closes round each house—the stark, harsh light encysts us—and C. Green walks the streets. Sometimes hard lights burn on him, Admiral Drake, bleak faces stream beneath the lights, amusement signs are winking. On Broadway, the constant plaze of sterile lights; in little towns, no less, the clustered raisins of hard light on Main Street. On Broadway, swarming millions up to midnight; in little towns, hard lights and frozen silence—no one, nothing, after ten o’clock. But in the hearts of C. Greens everywhere, bleak boredom, undefined despair, and “Christ! Where shall I go now? When will winter end?”

So longs for spring, and wishes it were Saturday, brave Admiral Drake.

Saturday night arrives with the thing that we are waiting for. Oh, it will come to-night; the thing that we have been expecting all our lives will come to-night, on Saturday!’On Saturday night across America we are waiting for it, and ninety million Greens go moth-wise to the lights to find it. Surely it will come to-night! So Green goes out to find it, and he finds—hard lights again, saloons along Third Avenue, or the Greek’s place in a little town—and then hard whisky, gin, and drunkenness, and brawls and fights and vomit.

Sunday morning, aching head.

Sunday afternoon, and in the cities the chop-suey signs wink on and flash their sterile promises of unborn joy.

Sunday night, and the hard stars, and the bleak enclosures of our wintry weather—the buildings of old rusty brick, in cold enclosed, the fronts of old stark brown, the unpainted houses, the deserted factories, wharves, piers, warehouses, and office buildings, the tormented shabbiness of Sixth Avenues; and in the smaller towns, bleak Main Streets, desolate with shabby store fronts and be-raisined clusters of lamp standards, and in the residential streets of wooden houses (dark by ten o’ clock), the moaning of stark branches, the stiff lights, limb-bepatterned, shaking at street corners. The light shines there with wintry bleakness on the clapboard front and porch of a shabby house where the policeman lives—blank and desolate upon the stuffy, boxlike little parlour where the policeman’s daughter amorously receives—and almost—not quite—gives. Hot, fevered, fearful, and insatiate, it is all too close to the cold street light—too creaking, panting, flimsy-close to others in the flimsy house—too close to the policeman’s solid and slow-creaking tread—yet somehow valiant, somehow strong, somehow triumphant over the stale varnish of the little parlour, the nearness of the street, the light, the creaking boughs, and papa’s tread—somehow triumphant with hot panting, with rose lips and tender tongue, white underleg and tight-locked thighs—by these intimacies of fear and fragrant hot desire will beat the ashen monotone of time and even the bleak and grey duration of the winter out.

Does this surprise you, Admiral Drake?

“But Christ!”—Green leaves the house, his life is bitter with desire, the stiff light creaks. “When will it end?” thinks Green. “When will spring come?”

It comes at last unhoped for, after hoping, comes when least expected, and when given up. In March there is a day that’s almost spring, and C. Green, strong with will to have it so, says: “Well, it’s here”—and it is gone like smoke. You can’t look spring too closely in the eye in March. Raw days return, and blown light, and gusty moanings of the wind. Then April comes, and small, soaking rain. The air is wet and raw and chilled, but with a smell of spring now, a smell of earth, of grass exploding in small patches, here and there a blade, a bud, a leaf. And spring comes, marvellous, for a day or two—“It’s here!” Green thinks. “It’s here at last!”—and he is wrong again. It goes, chill days and greyness and small, soaking rains return. Green loses hope. “There is no spring!” he says. “You never get spring any more; you jump from winter into summer—we’ll have summer now and the hot weather before you know it.”

Then spring comes—explodes out of the earth in a green radiance—comes up overnight! It’s April twenty-eighth—the tree there in the city backyard is smoke-yellow, feathered with the striplings of young leaf! It’s April twenty-ninth—the leaf, the yellow, and the smoke have thickened overnight. April thirtieth—you can watch it grow and thicken with your eye! Then May the first—the tree’s in leaf now, almost full and dense, young, feather-fresh! The whole spring has exploded from the earth!

All’s explosive with us really, Admiral Drake—spring, the brutal summer, frost, October, February in Dakota with fifty-one below, spring floods, two hundred drowning along Ohio bottoms, in Missouri, in New England, all through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee. Spring shot at us overnight, and everything with us is vast, explosive, floodlike. A few hundred dead in floods, a hundred in a wave of heat, twelve thousand in a year by murder, thirty thousand with the motor-car—it all means nothing here. Floods like this would drown out France; death like this would plunge England in black mourning; but in America a few thousand C. Greens more or less, drowned, murdered, killed by motor-cars, or dead by jumping out of windows on their heads—well, it just means nothing to us—the next flood, or next week’s crop of death and killings, wash it out. We do things on a large scale, Admiral Drake.

The tar-smell in the streets now, children shouting, and the smell of earth; the sky shell-blue and faultless, a sapphire sparkle everywhere; and in the air the brave stick-candy whippings of a flag. C. Green thinks of the baseball games, the raw-hide arm of Lefty Grove, the resilient crack of ashwood on the horsehide ball, the waiting pockets of the well-oiled mitts, the warm smell of the bleachers, the shouted gibes of shirt-sleeved men, the sprawl and monotone of inning after inning. (Baseball’s a dull game, really; that’s the reason that it is so good. We do not love the game so much as we love the sprawl and drowse and shirt-sleeved apathy of it.) On Saturday afternoon, C. Green goes out to the ball park and sits there in the crowd, awaiting the sudden sharpness and the yell of crisis. Then the game ends and the crowd flows out across the green turf of the playing-field. Sunday, Green spends the day out in the country in his flivver, with a girl.

Then summer comes again, heat-blazing summer, humid, murked with mist, sky-glazed with brutal weariness—and C. Green mops his face and sweats and says: “Jesus! Will it never end?”

This, then, is C. Green “thirty-five years old”—“unidentified”—and an American. In what way an American? In what way different from the men you knew, old Drake?

When the ships bore home again and Cape St. Vincent blazed in Spaniard’s eye—or when old Drake was returning with his men, beating coastwise from strange seas abreast, past the Scilly Isles towards the slant of evening fields, chalk cliffs, the harbour’s arms, the town’s sweet cluster and the spire—where was Green?

When, in red-oak thickets at the break of day, coon-skinned, the huntsmen of the wilderness lay for bear, heard arrows rattling in the laurel leaves, the bullets’whining plunk, and waited with cocked musket by the tree—where was Green?

Or when, with strong faces turning towards the setting sun, hawk-eyed and Indian-visaged men bore gun-stocks on the western trails and sternly heard the fierce war-whoops around the Painted Buttes—where, then, was Green?

Was never there with Drake’s men in the evening when the sails stood in from the Americas! Was never there beneath the Spaniard’s swarthy eye at Vincent’s Cape! Was never there in the red-oak thicket in the morning! Was never there to hear the war-cries round the Painted Buttes!

No, no. He was no voyager of unknown seas, no pioneer of western trails. He was life’s little man, life’s nameless cypher, life’s man-swarm atom, life’s American—and now he lies disjected and exploded on a street in Brooklyn!

He was a dweller in mean streets, was Green, a man-mote in the jungle of the city, a resident of grimy steel and stone, a mole who burrowed in rusty brick, a stunned spectator of enormous salmon-coloured towers, hued palely with the morning. He was a renter of shabby wooden houses in a little town, an owner of a raw new bungalow on the outskirts of the town. He was a waker in bleak streets at morning, an alarm-clock watcher, saying: “Jesus, I’ll be late.”—a fellow who took short cuts through the corner lot, behind the advertising signs; a fellow used to concrete horrors of hot day and blazing noon; a man accustomed to the tormented hodge-podge of our architectures, used to broken pavements, ash-cans, shabby store fronts, dull green paint, the elevated structure, grinding traffic, noise, and streets be-tortured with a thousand bleak and dismal signs. He was accustomed to the gas tanks going out of town, he was an atom of machinery in an endless flow, going, stopping, going to the winking of the lights; he tore down concrete roads on Sundays, past the hot-dog stands and filling-stations; he would return at darkness; hunger lured him to the winking splendour of chop-suey signs; and midnight found him in The Coffee Pot, to prowl above a mug of coffee, tear a coffee-cake in fragments, and wear away the slow grey ash of time and boredom with other men in grey hats and with skins of tallow-grey, at Joe the Greek’s.

C. Green could read (which Drake could not), but not too accurately; could write, too (which the Spaniard couldn’t), but not too well. C. Green had trouble over certain words, spelled them out above the coffee mug at midnight, with a furrowed brow, slow-shaping lips, and “Jesus!” when news stunned him—for he read the news. Preferred the news with pictures, too, girls with voluptuous legs crossed sensually, dresses above the knees, and plump dolls’faces full of vacant lechery. Green liked news “hot”—not as Fox knows it, not subtly sniffing with strange-scornful nostrils for the news behind the news—but straight from the shoulder—socko!—biff!—straight off the griddle, with lots of mustard, shapely legs, roadside wrecks and mutilated bodies, gangsters’molls and gunmen’s hideouts, tallow faces of the night that bluntly stare at flashlight lenses—this and talk of “heart-balm”, “love-thief”, “sex-hijacker”—all of this liked Green.

Yes, Green liked the news—and now, a bit of news himself (nine lines of print in Times), has been disjected and exploded on a Brooklyn pavement!

Well, such was our friend, C. Green, who read, but not too well; and wrote, but not too easily; who smelled, but not too strongly; felt, but not too deeply; saw, but not too clearly—yet had smelled the tar in May, smelled the slow, rank yellow of the rivers, and the clean, coarse corn; had seen the slants of evening on the hill-flanks in the Smokies, and the bronze swell of the earth, the broad, deep red of Pennsylvania barns, proud-proportioned and as dominant across the fields as bulls; had felt the frost and silence in October; had heard the whistles of the train wail back in darkness, and the horns of New Year’s Eve, and—“Jesus! There’s another year gone by! What now?”

No Drake was he, no Spaniard, no coon-skin cap, no strong face burning west. Yet, in some remote and protoplasmic portion, he was a little of each of these. A little Scotch, perhaps, was Green, a little Irish, English, Spanish even, and some German—a little of each part, all compacted and exploded into nameless atom of America!

No. Green—poor little Green—was not a man like Drake. He was just a cinder out of life—for the most part, a thinker of base thoughts, a creature of unsharpened, coarse perceptions. He was meagre in the hips, he did not have much juice or salt in him. Drake gnawed the beef from juicy bones in taverns, drank tankards of brown ale, swore salty curses through his whiskers, wiped his mouth with the back of his hard hand, threw the beef bone to his dog, and pounded with his tankard for more ale. Green ate in cafeterias, prowled at midnight over coffee and a doughnut or a sugar-coated bun, went to the chop-suey joint on Saturday nights and swallowed chow mein, noodle soup, and rice. Green’s mouth was mean and thin and common, it ran to looseness and a snarl; his skin was grey and harsh and dry; his eyes were dull and full of fear. Drake was self-contained: the world his oyster, seas his pastures, mighty distances his wings. His eyes were sea-pale (like the eyes of Fox); his ship was England. Green had no ship, he had a motor-car, and tore down concrete roads on Sunday, and halted with the lights against him with the million other cinders hurtling through hot space. Green walked on level concrete sidewalks and on pavements grey, through hot and grimy streets past rusty tenements. Drake set his sails against the west, he strode the buoyant, sea-washed decks, he took the Spaniard and his gold, and at the end he stood in to the sweet enfoldments of the spire, the clustered town, the emerald fields that slope to Plymouth harbour—then Green came!

We who never saw brave Drake can have no difficulty conjuring up an image of the kind of man he was. With equal ease we can imagine the bearded Spaniard, and almost hear his swarthy oaths. But neither Drake nor Spaniard could ever have imagined Green. Who could have foreseen him, this cypher of America, exploded now upon a street in Brooklyn?

Behold him, Admiral Drake! Observe the scene now! Listen to the people! Here is something strange as the Armadas, the gold-laden cargoes of the bearded Spaniards, the vision of unfound Americas!

What do you see here, Admiral Drake?

Well, first, a building—your own hotel—such a building as the folk of Plymouth never saw. A great block of masonry, pale-hued, grimy-white, fourteen storeys tall, stamped in an unvarying pattern with many windows. Sheeted glass below, the store front piled with medicines and toilet articles, perfumes, cosmetics, health contrivances. Within, a soda fountain, Admiral Drake. The men in white with monkey caps, soda jerkers sullen with perpetual overdriven irritation. Beneath the counter, pools of sloppy water, filth, and unwashed dishes. Across the counter, Jewesses with fat, rouged lips consuming ice-cream sodas and pimento sandwiches.

Outside upon the concrete sidewalk lies the form of our exploded friend, C. Green. A crowd has gathered round—taxi-drivers, passersby, hangerson about the subway station, people working in the neighbourhood, and the police. No one has dared to touch exploded Green as yet—they stand there in a rapt and fascinated circle, looking at him.

Not much to look at either, Admiral Drake; not even those who trod your gory decks would call the sight a pretty one. Our friend has landed on his head—“taken a nose dive”, as we say—and smashed his brains out at the iron base of the second lamp-post from the corner. (It is the same lamp-post as heretofore described, to be found throughout America—a “standard”, standardised, supporting five hard grapes of frosted glass.)

So here Green lies, on the concrete sidewalk all disjected. No head is left, the head is gone now, head’s exploded; only brains are left. The brains are pink, and almost bloodless, Admiral Drake. (There’s not much blood here—we shall tell you why.) But brains exploded are somewhat like pale sausage meat, fresh-ground. Brains are stuck hard to the lamp-post, too; there is a certain driven emphasis about them, as if they had been shot hydraulically out of a force-hose against the post.

The head, as we have said, is gone completely; a few fragments of the skull are scattered round—but of the face, the features, forehead—nothing! They have all been blown out, as by some inner explosion. Nothing is left but the back of the skull, which curiously remains, completely hollowed out and vacant, and curved over, like the rounded handle of a walking-stick.

The body, five feet eight or nine of it, of middling weight, is lying—we were going to say “face downwards”; had we not better say “stomach downwards”?—on the sidewalk. It is well-dressed, too, in cheap, neatly pressed, machine-made clothes: tan shoes and socks with a clocked pattern, suit of a light texture, brownish-red in hue, a neat canary-coloured shirt with attached collar—obviously C. Green had a nice feeling for proprieties! As for the body itself, save for a certain indefinable and curiously “disjected” quality, one could scarcely tell that every bone in it is broken. The hands are still spread out, half-folded and half-clenched, with a still-warm and startling eloquence of recent life. (It happened just four minutes ago!)

Well, where’s the blood, then, Drake? You’re used to blood; you’d like to know. Well, you’ve heard of casting bread upon the waters, Drake, and having it return—but never yet, I’ll vow, of casting blood upon the streets—and having it run away—and then come back to you! But here it comes now, down the street—down Apple Street, round the corner into Hay, across the street now towards C. Green, the lamp-post, and the crowd!—a young Italian youth, blunt-featured, low-browed, and bewildered, his black eyes blank with horror, tongue mumbling thickly, arm held firmly by a policeman, suit and shirt all drenched with blood, and face be-spattered with it! A stir of sudden interest in the crowd, sharp nudges, low-toned voices whispering:

“Here he is! Th’guy that’got it’!…Sure, that’s him—you know him, that Italian kid that works inside in the news-stand—he was standin’ deh beside the post! Sure,  that’s the guy!—talkin’to another guy—he got it all! That’s the reason you didn’t see more blood—this guy got it!—Sure! The guy just missed him by six inches!—Sure! I’m tellin’you I saw it, ain’t I? I looked up an’saw him in the air! He’d a hit this guy, but when he saw that he was goin’to hit the lamp-post, he put out his hands an’tried to keep away! That’s the reason that he didn’t hit this guy!…But this guy heard him when he hit, an’turned round—and zowie!—he got all of it right in his face!”

And another, whispering and nudging, nodding towards the horror-blank, thick-mumbling Italian boy: “Jesus! Look at th’guy, will yuh!…He don’t know what he’s doing!…He don’t know yet what happened to him!…Sure! He got it all. I tell yuh! He was standin’deh beside the post, wit a package undehneath one ahm—an’when it happened—when he got it—he just stahted runnin’…He don’t know yet what’s happened!…That’s what I’m tellin’yuh—th’guy just stahted runnin’when he got it.”

And one policeman (to another): “…Sure, I yelled to Pat to stop him. He caught up with him at Borough Hall…He just kept on runnin’—he don’t know yet what happened to him.”

And the Italian youth, thick-mumbling: “…Jeez! W’at happened?…Jeez!…I was standin’talkin’to a guy—I heard it hit…Jeez!…W’at happened, anyway?…I got it all oveh me!…Jeez!…I just stahted runnin’…Jeez! I’m sick!”

Voices: “Here, take’im into the drug-store!…Wash’im off!…That guy needs a shot of liquor!…Sure! Take him into the drug-stoeh deh!…They’ll fix him up!”

The plump, young, rather effeminate, but very intelligent young Jew who runs the news-stand in the corridor, talking to everyone round him, excitedly and indignantly: “…Did I see it? Listen! I saw everything! I was coming across the street, looked up, and saw him in the air!…See it?…Listen! If someone had taken a big ripe water-melon and dropped it on the street from the twelfth floor you’d have some idea what it was like!…See it! I’ll tell the world I saw it! I don’t want to see anything like that again!” Then excitedly, with a kind of hysterical indignation: “Shows no consideration for other people, that’s all I’ve got to say! If a man is going to do a thing like that, why does he pick a place like this—one of the busiest corners in Brooklyn?…How did he know he wouldn’t hit someone? Why, if that boy had been standing six inches nearer to the post, he’d have killed him, as sure as you live!…And here he does it right in front of all these people who have to look at it! It shows he had no consideration for other people! A man who’d do a thing like that…”

(Alas, poor Jew! As if C. Green, now past considering, had considered nice “considerations”.)

A taxi-driver, impatiently: “That’s what I’m tellin’yuh!…I watched him for five minutes before he jumped. He crawled out on the window-sill an’stood there for five minutes, makin’up his mind!…Sure, I saw him! Lots of people saw him!” Impatiently, irritably:-“Why didn’t we do somethin’to stop him? F’r Chri’sake, what was there to do? A guy who’d do a thing like that is nuts to start with! You don’t think he’d listen to anything we had to say, do you?…Sure, we did yell at him!…Jesus!…We was almost afraid to yell at him—we made motions to him to get back—tried to hold his attention while the cops sneaked round the corner into the hotel…Sure, the cops got there just a second after he jumped—I don’t know if he jumped when he heard’em comin’, or what happened, but Christ!—he stood there gettin’ready for five minutes while we watched!”

And a stocky little Czech-Bohemian, who works in the delicatessen-fruit store on the corner, one block down: “Did I hear it! Say, you could have heard it for six blocks! Sure! Everybody heard it! The minute that I heard it, I knew what had happened, too! I come runnin’!”

People press and shuffle in the crowd. A man comes round the corner, presses forward to get a better look, runs into a-little fat, baldheaded man in front of him who is staring at the Thing with a pale, sweating, suffering, fascinated face, by accident knocks off the little’fat man’s straw hat. The new straw hat hits the pavement dryly, the little fat, bald-headed man scrambles for it, clutches it, and turns round on the man who has knocked it off, both of them stammering frantic apologies:

“Oh, excuse me!…’Scuse me!…’Scuse me!…Sorry!”

“Quite all right…All right!…All right.”

Observe now, Admiral, with what hypnotic concentration the people are examining the grimy-white facade of your hotel. Watch their faces and expressions. Their eyes go travelling upwards slowly—up—up—up. The building seems to widen curiously, to be distorted, to flare out wedgelike till it threatens to annihilate the sky, overwhelm the will, and crush the spirit. (These optics, too, American, Admiral Drake.) The eyes continue on past storey after storey up the wall until they finally arrive and come to rest with focal concentration on that single open window twelve floors up. It is no jot different from all the other windows, but now the vision of the crowd is fastened on it with a fatal and united interest. And after staring at it fixedly, the eyes come travelling slowly down again—down—down—down—the faces strained a little, mouths all slightly puckered as if something set the teeth on edge—and slowly, with fascinated measurement—down—down—down—until the eyes reach sidewalk, lamp-post, and—the Thing again.

The pavement finally halts all, stops all, answers all. It is the American pavement, Admiral Drake, our universal city sidewalk, a wide, hard stripe of grey-white cement, blocked accurately with dividing lines. It is the hardest, coldest, cruellest, most impersonal pavement in the world: all of the indifference, the atomic desolation, the exploded nothingness of one hundred million nameless “Greens” is in it.

In Europe, Drake, we find worn stone, all hollowed out and rubbed to rounded edges. For centuries the unknown lives of men now buried touched and wore this stone, and when we see it something stirs within our hearts, and something strange and dark and passionate moves our souls, and—“They were here!” we say.

Not so, the streets, the sidewalks, the paved places of America. Has man been here? No. Only unnumbered nameless Greens have swarmed and passed here, and none has left a mark.

Did ever the eye go seaward here with searching for the crowded sail, with longing for the strange and unknown coasts of Spain? Did ever beauty here come home to the heart and eyes? Did ever, in the thrusting crowd, eye look to eye, and face to face, and heart to heart, and know the moment of their meeting—stop and pause, and be oblivious in this place, and make one spot of worn pavement sacred stone? You won’t believe it, Admiral Drake, but it is so—these things have happened on the pavements of America. But, as you see yourself, they have not left their mark.

You, old Drake, when last your fellow townsmen saw you at the sailing of the ships, walked with the crowd along the quay, past the spire and cluster of the town, down to the cool lap of the water; and from your deck, as you put out, you watched the long, white, fading arm of your own coast. And in the town that you had left were streets still haunted by your voice. There was your worn tread upon the pavement, there the tavern table dented where you banged your tankard down. And in the evening, when the ships were gone, men waited for your return.

But no return is here among us in America. Here are no streets still haunted by departed men. Here is no street at all, as you knew streets. Here are just our cement Mobways, unannealed by time! No place in Mobway bids you pause, old Drake. No spot in Mob-way bids you hold your mind a moment in reflection, saying: “He was here!” No square of concrete slab says: “Stay, for I was built by men.” Mobway never knew the hand of man, as your streets did. Mobway was laid down by great machines, for one sole purpose—to unimpede and hurry up the passing of the feet.

Where did Mobway come from? What produced it?

It came from the same place where all our mobways come from—from Standard Concentrated Production Units of America, No. 1. This is where all our streets, sidewalks, and lamp-posts (like the one on which Green’s brains are spattered) come from, where all our white-grimy bricks (like those of which your hotel is constructed) come from, where the red facades of our standard-unit tobacco stores (like the one across the street) come from, where our motor-cars come from, where our drug-stores and our drug-store windows and displays come from, where our soda fountains (complete, with soda jerkers attached) come from, where our cosmetics, toilet articles, and the fat, rouged lips of our Jewesses come from, where our soda water, slops and syrups, steamed spaghetti, ice-cream, and pimento sandwiches come from, where our clothes, our hats (neat, standard stamps of grey), our faces (also stamps of grey, not always neat), our language, conversation, sentiments, feelings, and opinions come from. All these things are made for us by Standard Concentrated Production Units of America, No. 1.

So here we are, then, Admiral Drake. You see the street, the sidewalk, the front of your hotel, the constant stream of motor-cars, the drug-store and the soda fountain, the tobacco store, the traffic lights, the cops in uniform, the people streaming in and out of the subway, the rusty, pale-hued jungle of the buildings, old and new, high and low. There is no better place to see it, Drake. For this is Brooklyn—which means ten thousand streets and blocks like this one. Brooklyn, Admiral Drake, is the Standard Concentrated Chaos No. 1 of the Whole Universe. That is to say, it has no size, no shape, no heart, no joy, no hope, no aspiration, no centre, no eyes, no soul, no purpose, no direction, and no anything—just Standard Concentrated Units everywhere—exploding in all directions for an unknown number of square miles like a completely triumphant Standard Concentrated Blot upon the Face of the Earth. And here, right in the middle—no, that is wrong, for Standard Concentrated Blots don’t have a middle—but, if not in the middle, at least right slap-bang out in the open, upon a minute portion of his magnificent Standard Concentrated Blot, where all the Standard Concentrated Blotters can stare at him, and with the brains completely out of him——

—Lies Green!

And this is bad—most bad—oh,  very bad—and should not be allowed! For, as our young Jewish friend has just indignantly proclaimed, it “shows no consideration for other people”—which means, for other Standard Concentrated Blotters. Green has no right to go falling in this fashion in a public place. He has no right to take unto himself any portion of this Standard Concentrated Blot, however small. He has no business being where he is at all. A Standard Concentrated Blotter is not supposed to be places, but to go places.

You see, dear Admiral, this is not a street to amble in, to ride along, to drift through. It is a channel—in the words of the Standard Concentrated Blotter-Press, an “artery”. This means that it is not a place where one drives, but a place where one is driven—not really a street at all, but a kind of tube for a projectile, a kind of groove for millions and millions of projectiles, all driven past incessantly, all beetling onwards, bearing briefly white slugged blurs of driven flesh.

As for the sidewalk, this Standard Concentrated Mobway is not a place to walk on, really. (Standard Concentrated Blotters have forgotten how to walk.) It is a place to swarm on, to weave on, to thrust and dodge on, to scurry past on, to crowd by on. It is not a place to stand on, either. One of the earliest precepts in a Concentrated Blotter’s life is: “Move on there! Where th’hell d’you think you are, anyway—in a cow pasture?” And, most certainly, it is not a place to lie on, to sprawl out on.

But look at Green! Just look at him! No wonder the Jewish youth is angry with him!

Green has wilfully and deliberately violated every Standard Concentrated Principle of Blotterdom. He has not only gone and dashed his brains out, but he has done it in a public place—upon a piece of Standard Concentrated Mobway. He has messed up the sidewalk, messed up another Standard Concentrated Blotter, stopped traffic, taken people from their business, upset the nerves of his fellow Blotters—and now lies there, all sprawled out, in a place where he has no right to be. And, to make his crime unpardonable, C. Green has——

—Come to Life!

Consider that, old Drake! We can understand some measure of your strangeness, because we heard you swearing in the tavern and saw your sails stand to the west. Can you now do the same for us? Consider strangeness, Drake—and look at Green! For you have heard it said by your own countryman, and in your living generation: “The times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die.” But now, old Drake, what hath Time wrought? There is surely here some strangeness in us that you could never have foretold. For the brains are “out” now—and the man has——

—Come to Life!

What’s that, Admiral? You do not understand it? Small wonder, though it’s really very simple:

For just ten minutes since, C. Green was a Concentrated Blotter like the rest of us. Ten minutes since, he, too, might hurry in and out of the subway, thrust and scurry on the pavement, go hurtling past with whited blur in one of our beetles of machinery, a nameless atom, cypher, cinder, swarming with the rest of us, just another “guy” like a hundred million other “guys”. But now, observe him! No longer is he just “another guy”—already he has become a “special guy”—has become “The Guy”. C. Green at last has turned into a—Man!

Four hundred years ago, brave Admiral Drake, if we had seen you lying on your deck, your bronze gone pale and cold, imbrued in your own blood, and hewn to the middle by the Spaniards’steel, we could have understood that, for there was blood in you. But Green—this Concentrated Blotter of ten minutes since—made in our own image, shaped in our own dust, compacted of the same grey stuff of which our own lives are compacted, and filled, we thought, with the same Standard Concentration of embalming fluid that fills our veins—oh, Drake, we did not know the fellow had such blood in him! We could not have thought it was so red, so rich, and so abundant!

Poor, shabby, and corrupted cypher! Poor, nameless, and exploded atom! Poor little guy! He fills us Concentrated Blotters of the Universe with fear, with shame, with awe, with pity, and with terror—for we see ourselves in him. If he was a man with blood in him, then so are we! If he, in the midst of his always-driven life, could at last be driven to this final and defiant gesture of refusal to remain a Concentrated Blotter, then we, too, might be driven to a point of equal desperation! And there are other methods of defiance, other ways of ultimate refusal, other means of exercising one’s last-remaining right of manhood—and some of them are no less terrifying to contemplate than this! So our fascinated eyes go up and up, past floor after floor of Standard Concentrated brick, and fasten on the open window where he stood—and suddenly we crane our necks along the ridges of our collars, look away with constricted faces, and taste the acrid bitterness of steel upon our lips!

It is too hard, and not to be endured—to know that little Green, speaking our own tongue and stuffed with our own stuffing, had yet concealed in him some secret, dark, and frightful thing more terrible than anything that we have ever known—that he bore within him some black and hideous horror, some depth of madness or of courage, and could stand there—upon the sheer and nauseating verge of that grey window-ledge for five full minutes—and know the thing he was about to do—and tell himself he must now!—that he had to!—that the compulsion of every horror-fascinated eye down in the gulf below had now made escape impossible—and then, horror-sick past all regeneration, see, too, before he jumped, his fall, the downward-hurtling plunge, and his own exploded body—feel the bones crack and fly apart, and the brutal obliteration of the instant when his brains would shoot out against the lamp-post—and even while his soul drew back from that sheer verge of imagined terror, shame, and unutterable self-loathing, crying: “I cannot do it!”—then jumped!

And we, brave Drake? We try to see it, but we cannot see. We try to fathom it, but we cannot plunge. We try to comprehend the hell of hells, the hundred lives of horror, madness, anguish, and despair that were exhausted in five minutes by that shabby creature crouched there on the window-ledge. But we cannot understand, or look at it any longer. It is too hard, too hard, and not to be endured. We turn away with nausea, hollowness, blind fear, and unbelief within us.

One man stares, cranes his neck, wets his lips, and whispers: “Jesus! To do a thing like that takes guts!”

Another, harshly: “Nah! It don’t take guts! A guy who’d do a thing like that is crazy! He don’t know what he’s doin’to begin with!”

And others, doubtfully, half-whispering, with eyes focused on the ledge: “But Jesus!”

A taxi-driver, turning away and moving towards his cab, with an attempt at casual indifference that does not ring entirely true: “Oh, well! Just another guy, I guess!”

Then one man, turning to his companion with a little puckered smile: “Well, what about it, Al? You still feel like eating?”

And his companion, quietly: “Eating, hell! I feel like two or three stiff shots of rye! Come on, let’s go round to Steve’s!”

They go. The Concentrated Blotters of the World cannot abide it. They must somehow blot it out.

So a policeman comes round the corner now with an old tarpaulin, with which he covers the No-Head. The crowd remains. Then the green wagon from the morgue. The Thing, tarpaulin and all, is pushed into it. It drives away. A policeman with thick-soled boots scuffs and pushes skull-pieces and brain-fragments into the gutter. Someone comes with sawdust, strews it. Someone from the drugstore with formaldehyde. Later, someone with a hose and water. From the subway come an adolescent boy and girl with the hard, tough faces of the city; they walk past it, deliberately and arrogantly step among it, look at the lamp-post, then at each other, and laugh!

All’s over now, all’s gone, the crowd’s departed. Something else remains. It cannot be forgotten. There’s a sick, humid smell upon the air, what was light and clear and crystal has gone out of day, and something thick and glutinous—half taste, half smell, and all impalpable—remains upon your tongue.

There would have been a time and place for such a thing, brave Admiral Drake, if he, our fellow Green, had only fallen as a hollow man and landed dryly, or if he had opened to disperse a grey embalming fluid in the gutter. It would have been all right if he had just been blown away like an old paper, or if he had been swept aside like remnants of familiar litter, and then subsumed into the Standard Concentrated stuff from which he came. But C. Green would not have it so. He exploded to drench our common substance of viscous grey with the bright indecency of blood, to resume himself from number, to become before our eyes a Man, and to identify a single spot of all our general Nothingness with the unique passion, the awful terror, and the dignity of Death.

So, Admiral Drake—“an unidentified man fell’or jumped yesterday at noon” from a window of your own hotel. That was the news. Now you’ve had the story.

We are “the hollow men, the hollow men”? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.

30. The Anodyne

Fox read it instantly, the proud nose sniffing upwards sharply—“man fell or jumped…Admiral Francis Drake Hotel…Brooklyn.” The sea-pale eyes took it in at once, and went on to more important things.

Fox was cold, then? Hard? Selfish? Lacking in understanding? Unsympathetic? Unimaginative? By no means.

Could not have known Green, then? Was too much the patrician to know Green? Was too high, too rare, too subtle, too fine-fibred to know Green? None of these.

Fox knew everything, or almost everything. (If there’s a lack here, we will smell it out.) Fox had been born with everything, and had learned much, yet his learning had not made him mad, or ever blunted the keen blade of knowing. He saw all things as they were: had never (in his mind and heart) called man a “white man” yet, because Fox saw man was not “white man”—man was pink man tinged with sallow, man was sallow tinged with grey, man was pink-brown, red-bronze, or white-red-sallow, but not white.

So Fox (in mind and heart) would call it as it was. This was the boy’s straight eye. Yet his clarities were obscured for other men. His straightness was thought cunning by crude-cunning rogues, his warmth seemed ice to all the hearty-false, and to the false-sincere Fox was a twister. Not one of these things was true of him.

Fox knew Green all right—knew him better than we, the Concentrated Blotters of Green’s ilk. For, being of the ilk, we grow confused, struggle with Green (so with ourselves), argue, debate, deny, are tarred with the same brush, and so lose judgment.

Not so, Fox. Not of Green’s ilk, yet was he still of the whole family of earth. Fox knew at once that Green had blood in him. Fox placed him instantly: saw sky above him, Admiral Drake Hotel behind him, lamp-post, pavement, people, Brooklyn corner, cops, rouged Jewesses, the motor-cars, the subway entrance, and exploded brains—and, had he been there, would have said in a low, somewhat puzzled, and abstracted tone:

“Oh…I see.”

Would have seen, too, my mad masters; never doubt it. Would have seen clearly and seen whole, without our agony, without confusion, without struggling with the surface of each brick, each square inch of concrete pavement, each scale of rust upon the fire-escapes, the raw-green paint of the lamp-post, the sterile red-front brightness of the cigar store, the shapes of windows, ledges, cornices, and doorways, the way the shops were set into old houses along the street, all the heart-sick ugliness exploded into the nothingness of Brooklyn. Fox would have seen it instantly, without having to struggle to see all, know all, hold all clearly, singly, permanently, in the burning crystal of the brain.

And if Fox had lived in Brooklyn, he would have got much else as well—got it clear and straight—while we were trying to make our maddened ears spread out like funnels to absorb it—every whispered word in Flatbush, every rhythmic-creaking spring in the back bedrooms of whore’s Sand Street (by old yellow shades concealed), every barker’s cry in Coney, all the jargons of each tenement from Red Hook to Brownsville. Yes, while we wrestled with our five senses there in Jungletown, our tormented brain caught in the brutal chaos of “Gewirr! Gewirr!”—Fox would have got it all, without madness, agony, or the fevered eye, and would have murmured:

“Oh…I see.”

Wherever he was, Fox was one to get the little things—the little, most important things that tell you everything. He never picked a little thing because it was a little thing, to show he was a devilish cunning, subtle, rare, and most aesthetic fellow: he picked a little thing because it was the right thing—and he never missed.

Fox was a great fox, and a genius. He was no little Pixy of the Aesthetes. He did not write nine-page reviews on “How Chaplin Uses Hands in Latest Picture”—how it really was not slap-stick, but the tragedy of Lear in modern clothes; or on how Enters enters; or on how Crane’s poetry can only be defined, reviewed, and generally exposited in terms of mathematical formulae—ahem! ahem, now!—as:

$\frac{\sqrt{a}n+pxt}{237}=\frac{n-F_3(B^{18}+11)}{2}$

(Bring on the Revolution, Comrades; it is Time!)

Fox did not go round making discoveries nine years after Boob McNutt had made them. He didn’t find out that Groucho was funny seven years too late, and then inform the public why he was. He did not write: “The openingVolte of the Ballet is the historic method amplified in history, the production of historic fullness without the literary cliché of the historic spate.” He had no part in any of the fine horse-manure with which we have allowed ourselves to be bored, maddened, whiff-sniffed, hound-and-hornered, nationed, new-republicked, dialled, spectatored, mercuried, storied, anvilled, new-massed, new-yorkered, vogued, vanity-faired, timed, broomed, transitioned, and generally shat upon by the elegant, refined, and snobified Concentrated Blotters of the Arts. He had nothing to do with any of the doltish gibberings, obscene quackeries, phoney passions, and six-months-long religions of fools, joiners, and fashion-apes a trifle brighter and quicker on the uptake than the fools, joiners, and fashion-apes they prey upon. He was none of your little frankypanky, seldesey-weldesey, cowley-wowley, tatesy-watesy, hicksy-picksy, wilsony-pilsony, jolasy-wolasy, steiny-weiny, goldy-woldly, sneer-puss fellows. Neither, in more conventional guise, was he one of your groupy-croupy, cliquey-triquey, meachy-teachy devotobloato wire-pullers and back-scratchers of the world.

No, Fox was none of these. He looked at the whole thing, whatever it was, and got it straight, said slowly: “Oh…I see,” then like a fox would begin to pick up things round the edges. An eye here, a nose there, a cleft of lip, a length of chin elsewhere—and suddenly, with the frame of a waiter’s face, he would see the grave, thought-lonely visage of Erasmus. Fox would turn away reflectively and drink his drink, glance casually from time to time as the man approached him, catch his coat lapels and turn, stare fixedly at the waiter’s face again, turn back to the table, turn again and stare, bend over, staring right up into the waiter’s face:

The waiter, troubled now, and smiling doubtfully: “Sir?…Is there anything wrong, sir?”

Fox, slowly, almost in a whisper: “Did you ever hear of—Erasmus?”

And the waiter, still smiling, but more doubtfully than ever: “No sir.”

And Fox, turning away and whispering hoarsely with astounded conviction: “Simply astonishing!”

Or, again, it will be a hat-check girl at the place where he has lunch—a little tough-voiced, pert, hard-boiled girl. Fox will suddenly stop one day and look at her keenly with his sea-pale eyes, and will give her a dollar as he goes out.

“But Fox,” friends will protest, “in God’s name, why did you give that girl a dollar?”

“But isn’t she the nicest person?” Fox will say, in a low and earnest whisper.

And they will stare at him in blank amazement. That girl! That little tough, gold-digging, hard-boiled—oh, well, what’s the use? They give it up! Rather than shatter the illusions and wound the innocence of this trusting child, they’ll hold their tongues and leave him to his dream.

And she, the little hard-boiled hat-check girl, in a hoarse, confiding tone to the other hat-check girl, excitedly: “Say! Do you know that guy that comes in here every day for lunch—the queer one that always orders guinea-hen—an’that didn’t usta wanna let us have his hat at all?”

The other, nodding: “Sure,  I know! He usta try to wear it w’ile he’s eatin’! You awmost had to throw’im down an’take it from’im befoeh he’d letcha have it.”

She, rapidly, nodding: “Yeah! That’s him!” Then, lowering her voice to an excited whisper: “Well, y’know, he’s been givin’me a dollah tip every day for the last mont’!”

The other, staring, stunned: “G’wan!”

She: “Honest t’Gawd!”

The other: “Has he made any passes atcha yet?—any wisecracks?—any funny tawk?”

She, with a puzzled look in her eye: “That’s the funny paht of it—I can’t make’im out! He’tawks funny awright—but—he don’t mean what I thought he did. The first time he said somethin’I thought he was goin’t’be fresh. He comes up t’get his hat one day, an’stands lookin’at me with that funny look until I got the willies. So I says:’So what!’'Married?’he says—just like that. Just stands lookin’at me an’says:’Married?’”

The other: “Gee! That was fresh!” Eagerly: “Well, go on—w’atcha say to’im? W’atcha tell’im?”

She: “Well, I says to myse’f:’Oh, ho! I knew this was comin’! This dollah-a-day stuff can’t keep up for ever! Well,’I thinks,’you can’t hang onto a good thing all yoeh life!’—so I decides to let’im have it befoeh he has the chanct to staht gettin’funny. So I lies to’im:’Surer I says, an’looks’im right in the eye—’I'm good an’married! Ain’t you?' I thought that ought to hold’im.”

The other: “An’w’at did he say t’ that?”

She: “He just stood lookin’at me with that funny look. Then he shook his head at me—as if I’d done somep’n—as if it was my fault—as if he was disgusted wit’me.’Yes,’he says, an’gets his hat, an’leaves his dollah, an’walks out. Tie that one down! Well, I gets to thinkin’it oveh, an’I figure that next day he’s goin’t’spring itstaht givin’me the old oil about how his wife don’t undehstand’im, or how he’s not livin’wit’her an’how lonesome he is—an’how about it?—can’t we get togetheh some night for dinneh?”

And number two, rapt: “So w’at happens?”

And she: “When he comes to get his hat next day he just stands there lookin’at me for a long time in that funny way of his that used to get me noivous—as if I’d done somep’n—so I says again:’So what?’An’he says in that funny voice—it’s so low sometimes you can’t handly hear it—he says:’Any children?’—just like that! Gee, it was funny! It wasn’t what I expected’im t’say at all! I didn’t know what t’say, so fine’ly I says:’No.’So, wit’that, he just stands there lookin’at me, an’he shakes his head at me like he was disgusted wit’me for not havin’any. So then I gets sore, I forget I’m pot married—the way he shakes his head at me as if it was my fault for not havin’any children gets me good an’sore—an’I says to’im:’So what? What if I haven’t? Have you?”

Number two, now fascinated: “So w’at happens? W’at does he tell yah?”

She: “He stands lookin’at me an’says:’Fiver—just like that. An’then he shakes his head again—’All women,’he says, as if he was disgusted wit’me—Like yourself,’he says. An’then he takes his hat, an’leaves his dollah, an’walks out!”

Number two, in an aggrieved tone: “Say-y! Who does he think he is, anyway? How does he get that way? That guy’s pretty fresh,  I’d say!”

She: “Well, I get to thinkin’about it an’I get sore. The noive of’im, tawkin’about women like that! So the next day when he comes to get his hat I says:’Listen,’I says,’what’s eatin’on you, anyway? What are yah—a woman-hatah or somep’n? Whatcha got against women, anyway? What’d they eveh do to you?'’Nothing,’he says,’nothing—except act like women!’Gee! The way he said that! An’ stood there shakin’his head at me in that disgusted way like I’d done somep’n! He takes his hat then, leaves his dollah, an’goes out…So afteh that I decide t’kid’im along a little, seein’he’s not tryin’t’get funny wit’me. So every day afteh that I make some wisecrack about women, tryin’to get a rise out of’im, but I neveh do! Say! You can’t get a rise outa that guy! I’ve tried an’I know! He don’t even know when you’re tryin’t’get a rise out of’im!…So then he stahts t’ast me questions about my husband—an’gee!—was I embarrassed? He ast me all kinds of questions about’im—what did he do, an’how old was he, an’where did he come from, an’was his mother livin’, an’what did he think about women? Gee! It usta keep me busy from one day to anotheh wonderin’what he was goin’to ast me next, an’what t’say to’im…Then he stahted astin’me about my mother, an’my sisters an’brothers, an’what did they do, an’how old were they—an’I could tell’im those because I knew the answers.”

Number two: “An’you told’im?”

She: “Sure. W’y not?”

Number two: “Gee, Mary, y’shouldn’t do that! You don’t know th’guy! How do you know who he is?”

She, abstracted, in a softer tone: “Oh, I don’t know. That guy’s all right!” With a little shrug: “You know! You can always tell.”

Number two: “Yeah, but all the same, y’neveh can tell! You don’t know anything about th’guy! I kid’em along, but I neveh tell’em anything.”

She: “Oh, sure. I know. I do the same. Only, it’s diff’rent wit’this guy. Gee, it’s funny! I musta told’im awmost everything—all about mama, an’Pat, an’Tim, an’Helen—I guess he knows the history of the whole damn fam’ly now! I neveh tawked so much to a stranger befoeh in my whole life. But it’s funny, he neveh seems to say anything himse’f. He just stands there an’looks at you, an’turns his head to one side as if he’s listenin’—an’you spill the beans. When he’s gone you realise you’ve done all the tawkin’.’Listen,’I says to’im the otheh day,’you know everything else now, I’ve told you the truth about everything else, so I’ll come clean on this, too—that wasn’t true about me bein’married.’Gee! He was about to drive me nuts astin’a new question every day about my husband!’I lied to you about that,’I says.’I neveh was married. I haven’t got a husband.’”

Number two, hungrily: “So w’at does he say to that?”

She: “Just looks at me an’says:’So—what?'” Laughing: “Gee, it was funny to hear’im say that! I guess I taught it to’im. He says it all the time now. But it’s funny the way he says it—like he don’t know exactly what it means.’So—what? he says. So I says:’What d’you mean, so what? I’m tellin’you that I’m not married, like I said I was.’'I knew that all the time,’he says. How did you know?’I says.’How could you tell?’Because,’he says, an’shakes his head at me in that disgusted way—’because you’re a woman!”

Number two: “Can you imagine that? The noive of’im! I hope you told’im somep’n!”

She: “Oh, sure! I always come right back at’im! But still, you neveh can be sure he means it! I think he’s kiddin’half the time. He may be kiddin’when he shakes his head at you in that disgusted way. Anyway, that guy’s all right! I don’t know, but somehow you can tell.” A pause, then with a sigh: “But gee! If only he’d go an’get himse’f a——-”

Number two: “Hat!”

She: “Can yah beat it?”

Number two: “Ain’t it a scream?”

They regard each other silently, shaking their heads.

Fox gets at all things round the edges in this way—sees the whole thing, whole, clear, instant, unperplexed, then all the little things as well. Will see a man in the crowd, notice the way his ear sticks out, his length of chin, his short upper lip, the way his face is formed, something about the cheek-bones—a man well dressed and well behaved, conventional in appearance, no one but the Fox would look a second time at him—and suddenly the Fox will find himself looking into the naked eyes of a wild animal. Fox will see the cruel and savage tiger prowling in that man, let loose in the great jungle of the city, sheathed in harmless and deceptive grey—a wild beast, bloody, rending, fierce, and murderous—and stalking free and unsuspected on the sheep of life! And Fox will turn away appalled and fascinated, look at the people all round him with astonishment—“Can’t they see? Don’t they know?”—then will return again and walk past the tiger with hands clutching coat lapels, will bend, crane his head, and stare fixedly into tiger’s eye until tiger’s eye, discovered and unguarded now, blazes back at Fox—and all the people, puzzled and perturbed, are staring at Fox, too. Like children, they don’t know what to make of it: “What does that guy see?” And Fox, astounded: “Can’t they see?”

Sees all life foxwise, really: has acute animal perceptions—does not let concrete, brick, stone, skyscrapers, motor-cars, or clothes obscure the thing itself. Finds the tiger looking out at life, and then sees all the people who are lions, bulls, mastiffs, terriers, bulldogs, greyhounds, wolves, owls, eagles, hawks, rabbits, reptiles, monkeys, apes, and—foxes. Fox knows the world is full of them. He sees them every day. He might have found one in C. Green, too—cat, rabbit, terrier, or snipe—could he have seen him.

He reads the news in this way, sniffing sharply, with keen relish, at the crisp, ink-pungent pages. He also reads the paper with a kind of eager hopelessness. Fox has no hope, really; he is beyond despair. (If there’s a lack, we’ll smell it out. Is this not one? Is this not a lack-American? Can Fox be wholly of us if he has no hope?) Fox really has no hope that men will change, that life will ever get much better. He knows the forms will change: perhaps new changes will bring better forms. The shifting forms of change absorb him—this is why he loves the news. Fox would give his life to keep or increase virtue—to save the savable, to grow the growable, to cure the curable, to keep the good. But for the thing unsavable, for life ungrowable, for the ill incurable, he has no care. Things lost in nature hold no interest for him.

Thus will grow grey at the temples, haggard-eyed, and thin if one of his children has an ailment. One daughter has been in a motor wreck, escapes unhurt apparently, days later has a slight convulsion. It comes a second time, returns weeks later, goes away, and comes again—not much, not long, just a little thing, but Fox grows grey with worry. He takes the girl from college, gets doctors, specialists, the best people in the world, tries everything, can find nothing wrong, yet the attacks continue; at length comes through it, finds out the trouble, pulls the girl out, and sees her married. His eyes are clear again. Yet if the girl had had a cureless ailment, Fox would not have worried much.

He goes home, sleeps soundly, seems indifferent, shows no worry, the night the daughter has a child. Next morning, when informed he is a grandfather, looks blank, puzzled, finally says: “Oh”—then, turning away with a disdainful sniffing of the nose, says scornfully:

“Another woman, I suppose?”

Informed it is a man-child, says: “Oh,” dubiously, then whispers contemptuously:

“I had supposed such a phenomenon was impossible in this family.”

And for some weeks thereafter persists in referring to his grandson as “She”, to the indignation, resentment, excited protest of the—Women!

(A cunning Fox—knows slyly how to tease.)

So, then, unhoping hopefulness, and resigned acceptance; patient fatality, and unflagging effort and unflinching will. Has no hope, really, for the end, the whole amount of things; has hope incessant for the individual things themselves. Knows we lose out all along the line, but won’t give in. Knows how and when we win, too, and never gives up trying for a victory. Considers it disgraceful to stop trying—will try everything—will lay subtle, ramified, and deep-delved plans to save people from avertible defeat; a man of talent drowning in his own despair, some strong and vital force exploding without purpose, some precious, misused thing gone wickedly to ruin. These things can be helped, they must be helped and saved, to see them lost, to see them thrown away, is not to be endured—Fox will move mountains to prevent them. But gone? Lost? Destroyed? Irretrievably thrown away? The grave face will be touched with sadness, the sea-pale eyes filled with regret, the low voice hoarse and indignant:

“It was a shame! A shame! Everything would have come out all right…he had it in his grasp…and he just let it go! He just gave in!”

Yes, for failure such as this, a deep, indignant sadness, a profound regret. But for other things foreordained and inevitable, not savable by any means, then a little sadness—“Too bad”—but in the end a tranquil fatality of calm acceptance: the thing had to be, it couldn’t be helped.

Is therefore like Ecclesiastes: has the tragic sense of life, knows that the day of birth is man’s misfortune—but, knowing this, will then “lay hold”. Has never, like the Fool, folded his hands together and consumed his flesh, but, seeing work to be done, has taken hold with all his might and done it. Knows that the end of all is vanity, but says: “Don’t whine, and don’t repine, but get work done.”

Is, therefore, not afraid to die; does not court death, but knows death is a friend. Does not hate life, is rather passionately involved with life, yet does not hug it like a lover—it would not be torn bitterly from reluctant fingers. There is no desperate hug of mortality in Fox—rather, the sense of mystery and strangeness in the hearts of men, the thrilling interest of the human adventure, the unending fascination of the whole tangled, grieved, vexed, and unfathomed pattern. As he reads the Times now, he sniffs sharply, shakes his head, smiles, scans the crowded columns of the earth, and whispers to himself:

“What a world! And what a life! Will we ever get to the bottom of it all?…And what a time we live in! I don’t dare go to sleep at night without the paper. I cannot wait until the next one has come out—things change so fast, the whole world’s in such a state of flux, the course of history may change from one edition to another. The whole thing’s so fascinating, I wish I could live a hundred years to see what’s going to happen! If it weren’t for that—and for the children——”

A slow perplexity deepens in his eyes. What will become of them? Five tender lambs to be turned loose out of the fold into the howling tumults of this dangerous and changeful earth. Five fledglings to be sent forth, bewildered and defenceless, to meet the storms of fury, peril, adversity, and savage violence that beat across the whole vexed surface of the earth—unsheltered, ignorant, unprepared, and——

“Women.” Scorn, touched now deeply with compassion; trouble, with a tender care.

Is there a way out, then? Yes, if only he can live to see each of them married to—to—to a good husband (the sense of trouble deepens in the sea-pale eyes—the world in printed columns there before him seethes with torment—no easy business)…But to find good husbands, foxes all of them—to see his fleecelings safely folded, shielded from the storms—each—each with fleecelings of her own—yeslthat’s the thing! Fox clears his throat and rattles the pages with decision. That’s the thing for——

—Women!

—To be folded, sheltered, guarded, kept from all the danger, violence, and savagery, the grimed pollution of this earth’s coarse thumb, each to ply her needle, learn to keep her house, do a woman’s work, be wifely, and—and—“lead the sort of life a woman ought to lead,” Fox whispers to himself—“the kind of life she was intended for.”

Which is to say, produce more fleecelings for the fold, Fox? Who will, in turn, find “good” husbands, and a fold, learn sewing, housewifery, and “lead the sort of life a woman ought to lead,” produce still other fleecelings, and so on,  ad infinitum, to world’s end for ever, or until——

—The day of wrath, the huge storm howling through the earth again—again the Terror and Jemappes I—again November and Moscow!—the whole flood broke through, the mighty river re-arisen, the dark tide flowing in the hearts of men, and a great wind howling through the earth, good Fox, that tears off roof-tops like a sheet of paper, bends the strongest oak-trees to the ground, knocks down the walls, and levels the warmest, strongest, and most solid folds that ever sheltered fleecelings in security—leaving fleecelings where?

O Fox, is there no answer?

Leaving fleecelings there to knit a pattern of fine needlework on the hurricane? Leaving fleecelings there to ply housewifery on the flood? Leaving fleecelings to temper the bleak storms of misery to the perfumed tenderness of fleeceling hides? To find “good” husbands in the maelstrom’s whirl? To produce more fleecelings in order to be secure, protected, in doing a woman’s work, in leading “the kind of life she was intended for”——

Oh, where, Fox, where?

—To draw compassion from the cobble-stones? Security from iron skies? Solicitude from the subduer’s bloody hand? Arthurian gallantries from the brutal surge of the on-marching mass? Still no answer, subtle Fox?

What, then? Will not hoarse voices fogged with blood and triumph soften to humility when they behold the fleeceling loveliness? And while the blind mob fills the desolated streets, will not a single cloak be thrown down for dainty fleeceling feet to tread upon? Will the shattered masonries of all those (as we thought) impregnable securities, with which the Foxes of the world have sheltered fleecelings, no longer give the warmth and safety which once were so assured and certain? And must those fountains so unfailing in the flow of milk and honey, on which fleecelings feed, be withered at their source? Must they be fountains, rather, dyed with blood—blood of the lamb, then? Fleeceling blood?

O Fox, we cannot think of it!

Fox reads on, intent, with the keen hunger of a fascinated interest, the shade of a deep trouble in his eye. The sober, close-set columns of the Times give up their tortured facts, revealing a world in chaos, man bewildered, life in chains. These substantial rages, so redolent of morning and sobriety—of breakfast in America, the pungency of ham and eggs, the homes of prosperous people—yield a bitter harvest of madness, hatred, dissolution, misery, cruelty, oppression, injustice, despair, and the bankruptcy of human faith. What have we here, mad masters?—for surely if ye be masters of such hell-on-earth as sober Times portrays, then ye be mad!

Well, here’s a little item:

It is announced, my masters, that on Saturday next, in the Land of the Enchanted Forest, land of legends and the magic of the elves, land of the Venusberg and the haunting beauties of the Gothic towns, land of the truth-lover and the truth-seeker, land of the plain, good, common, vulgar, and all-daring Sense of Man, land where the great monk nailed his blunt defiance to the doors at Wittenberg, and broke the combined powers, splendours, pomps, and menaces of churchly Europe with the sledge-hammer genius of his coarse and brutal speech—land from that time onwards of man’s common noble dignity, and of the strong truth of sense and courage, shaking its thick fist into the face of folly—yes! land of Martin Luther, land of Goethe, land of Faust, land of Mozart and Beethoven—land where immortal music was created, glorious poetry written, and philosophy cultivated—land of magic, mystery, matchless loveliness, and unending treasure-hordes of noble art—land where the Man of Weimar, for the last time in the modern world, dared to make the whole domain of art, culture, and learning the province of his gigantic genius—land, too, of noble, consecrated youth, where young men sang and wrote, loved truth, went through apprenticeships devoted to the aspiration of a high and passionate ideal—well, mad masters, it is announced that this same enchanted land will consecrate the devotion of another band of youth this Saturday—when the young men of the nation will burn books before the Town Halls, in all the public squares of Germany!

Well, then, Fox?

And elsewhere on this old tormented globe, goes it much better? Fire, famine, flood, and pestilence—these trials we have always had. And hatred—most firelike, faminelike, floodlike, and most pestilential of all evils—yes, we have always had that, too. And yet, Great God! When has our old unhappy earth been stricken with such universal visitation? When has she ached in every joint as she aches now? When has she had such a universal itch, been so spavined, gouty, poxy, so broken out in sores all over?

The Chinese hate the Japanese, the Japanese the Russians, the Russians also hate the Japanese, and the hordes of India the English. The Germans hate the French, the French hate the Germans, and then look wildly round to find other nations to help them hate the Germans; but find they hate almost everyone as much as they hate Germans; they can’t find enough to hate outside of France, and so divide themselves into thirty-seven different cliques and hate each other bitterly from Calais to Menton—the Leftists hate Rightists, the Centrists hate Leftists, the Royalists hate Socialists, the Socialists hate Communists, the Communists hate Capitalists, and all unite in hatred of one another. In Russia, the Stalinites hate Trotskyites, the Trotskyites hate Stalinites, and both hate Republicans and Democrats. Everywhere the Communists (so they say) hate their cousin Fascists, and the Fascists hate the Jews.

In this year of Our Gentle Lord 1934, “expert” observers say, Japan is preparing to go to war again with China within two years, Russia will join in with China, Japan will ally herself with Germany, Germany will make a deal with Italy, and then make war on France and England, America will try to stick her head into the sand, and so keep out of it, but will find it cannot be done and will be drawn in. And in the end, after everybody has fought everybody else up and down the globe, the whole Capitalistic world will join up finally against Russia in an effort to crush Communism—which eventually must win—will lose—is bound to triumph—will be wiped out—will supplant Capitalism, which is on its last legs—which is only suffering a temporary relapse—which grows more dropsical, greedy, avaricious, bloated, and monopolistic all the time—which is mending its ways and growing better all the time—which must be preserved at all costs if the “American System” is to endure—which must be destroyed at all costs if America is to endure—which is just beginning—which is ending—which is gone already—which will never go——

And so it goes—round, round, round the tortured circumference of this aching globe—round, round, and back again, and up and down, with stitch and counterstitch until this whole earth and all the people in it are caught up in one gigantic web of hatred,’greed, tyranny, injustice, war, theft, murder, lying, treachery, hunger, suffering, and devilish error!

And we, old Fox? How goes it in our own fair land—our great America?

Fox winces quickly, cranes his neck into his collar, and mutters hoarsely a passionate regret:

“Too bad! Too bad! We should have had it! We were just beginning—we should have had it fifty years ago, as Rome had it, and as England had it! But all this turmoil came too soon—we didn’t have it long enough! Too bad!Too bad!”

Yes, Fox, it is too bad. Too bad, indeed, that in our pride, our self-respect, and our taut horror the Medusa-visage of the whole tormented earth may be an anodyne for us, lest we have to look too closely at the honour of our own America.

31. The Promise of America

For four years George Webber lived and wrote in Brooklyn, and during all this time his life was about as solitary as any that a modern man can know. Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance, is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. Not only has this been true of the greatest poets, as evidenced by the huge unhappiness of their published grief, but now it seemed to George to apply with equal force to all the nameless cyphers who swarmed about him in the streets. As he saw them in their strident encounters with each other, and overheard their never-varying exchanges of abuse, contempt, distrust, and hatred, it became increasingly clear to him that one of the contributing causes of their complaint was loneliness.

To live alone as George was living, a man should have the confidence of God, the tranquil faith of a monastic saint, the stern impregnability of Gibraltar. Lacking these, he finds that there are times when anything, everything, all and nothing, the most trivial incidents, the most casual words, can in an instant strip him of his armour, palsy his hand, constrict his heart with frozen horror, and fill his bowels with the grey substance of shuddering impotence and desolation. Sometimes it would be a sly remark dropped by some all-knowing literary soothsayer in the columns of one of the more leftish reviews, such as:

“Whatever has become of our autobiographical and volcanic friend, George Webber? Remember him? Remember the splash he made with that so-called’novel’of his a few years back? Some of our esteemed colleagues thought they detected signs of promise there. We ourselves should have welcomed another book from him, just to prove that the first was not an accident. But tempus fugit, and where is Webber? Calling Mr. Webber! No answer? Well, a pity, perhaps; but then, who can count the number of one-book authors? They shoot their bolt, and after that they go into the silence and no more is heard from them. Some of us who were more than a little doubtful about that book of Webber’s, but whose voices were drowned out by the Oh’s and Ah’s of those who rused headlong to proclaim a new star rising in the literary firmament, could now come forward, if we weren’t too kindly disposed towards our more emotional brethren of the critical fraternity, and modestly say:’We told you so!’”

Sometimes it would be nothing but a shadow passing on the sun, sometimes nothing but the gelid light of March falling on the limitless, naked, sprawling ugliness and squalid decencies of Brooklyn streets. Whatever it was, at such a time all joy and singing would go instantly out of day, Webber’s heart would drop out of him like a leaden plummet, hope, confidence, and conviction would seem lost for ever to him, and all the high and shining truth that he had ever found and lived and known would now turn false to mock him. Then he would feel like one who walked among the dead, and it would be as if the only things that were not false on earth were the creatures of the death-in-life who moved for ever in the changeless lights and weathers of red, waning, weary March and Sunday afternoon.

These hideous doubts, despairs, and dark confusions of the soul would come and go, and George knew them as every lonely man must know them. For he was united to no image save that image which he himself created. He was bolstered by no knowledge save that which he gathered for himself out of his own life. He saw life with no other vision save the vision of his own eyes and brain and senses. He was sustained and cheered and aided by no party, was given comfort by no creed, and had no faith in him except his own.

That faith, though it was made up of many articles, was at bottom a faith in himself, a faith that if he could only succeed in capturing a fragment of the truth about the life he knew, and make it known and felt by others, it would be a more glorious accomplishment than anything else he could imagine. And through it all, animating this faith and sustaining it with a promise of rewards to come, was a belief—be it now confessed—that if he could only do this, the world would thank him for it, and would crown him with the laurel of its fame.

The desire for fame is tooted in the hearts of men. It is one of the most powerful of all human desires, and perhaps for that very reason, and because it is so deep and secret, it is the desire that men are most unwilling to admit, particularly those who feel most sharply its keen and piercing spur.

The politician, for example, would never have us think that it is love of office, the desire for the notorious elevation of public place, that drives him on. No, the thing that governs him is his pure devotion to the common weal, his selfless and high-minded statesmanship, his love of his fellow-man, and his burning idealism to turn out the rascal who usurps the office and betrays the public trust which he himself, as he assures us, would so gloriously and devotedly maintain.

So, too, the soldier. It is never love of glory that inspires him to his profession. It is never love of battle, love of war, love of all the resounding titles and the proud emoluments of the heroic conqueror. Oh, no. It is devotion to duty that makes him a soldier. There is no personal motive in it. He is inspired simply by the selfless ardour of his patriotic abnegation. He regrets that he has but one life to give for his country.

So it goes through every walk of life. The lawyer assures us that he is the defender of the weak, the guardian of the oppressed, the champion of the rights of defrauded widows and beleaguered orphans, the upholder of justice, the unrelenting enemy, at no matter what cost to himself, of all forms of chicanery, fraud, theft, violence, and crime. Even the business man will not admit a selfish motive in his money-getting. On the contrary, he is the developer of the nation’s resources. He is the benevolent employer of thousands of working men who would be lost and on the dole without the organising genius of his great intelligence. He is the defender of the American ideal of rugged individualism, the shining exemplar to youth of what a poor country boy may achieve in this nation through a devotion to the national virtues of thrift, industry, obedience to duty, and business integrity. He is, he assures us, the backbone of the country, the man who makes the wheels go round, the leading citizen, Public Friend No. 1.

All these people lie, of course. They know they lie, and everyone who hears them also knows they lie. The lie, however, has become a part of the convention of American life. People listen to it patiently, and if they smile at it, the smile is weary, touched with resignation and the indifferent dismissals of fatigue.

Curiously enough, the lie has also invaded the world of creation—the one place where it has no right at all to exist. There was a time when the poet, the painter, the musician, the artist of whatever sort, was not ashamed to confess that the desire for fame was one of the driving forces of his life and labour. But what a transformation from that time to this! Nowadays one will travel far and come back fruitless if he hopes to find an artist who will admit that he is devoted to anything except the service of some ideal—political, social, economic, religious, or aesthetic—which is outside himself, and to which his own humble fame-forsaking person is reverently and selflessly consigned.

Striplings of twenty assure us that the desire for fame is naively childish, the fruit of an outworn cult of “romantic individualism”. From all the falseness and self-deception of this cult these young gentlemen tell us they are free—without troubling to explain, however, by what process of miraculous purgation they achieved their freedom. It took Goethe, the strongest soul of modern times, some three and eighty years to free his mighty spirit of this last infirmity. Milton, old and blind, forsaken, and past fifty, is said to have won free of it by the end of Cromwell’s revolution, in whose employment he destroyed his sight. And yet, can we be sure that even he was ever wholly clear, for what is the tremendous edifice of Paradise Lost except a man’s final and triumphant suit against eternity?

Poor, blind Milton!

 Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
 (That last infirmity of Noble mind)
 To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
 But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
 And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
 Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
 And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,
 Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears;
 Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
 Nor in the glistering foil
 Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,
 But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
 And perfet witnes of all judging Jove;
 As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
 Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.

Deluded man! Poor vassal of corrupted time! How fair a thing for us to know that we are not such men as he and Goethe were! We live in more stirring times, and our very striplings are secure in their collective selflessness. We have freed ourselves of all degrading vanities, choked off the ravening desire for individual immortality, and now, having risen out of the ashes of our father’s earth into the untainted ethers of collective consecration, we are clear at last of all that vexed, corrupted earth—clear of the sweat and blood and sorrow, clear of the grief and joy, clear of the hope and fear and human agony of which our father’s flesh and that of every other man alive before us was ever wrought.

And yet, having achieved this glorious emancipation; having laid all petty dreams aside; having learned to think of life, not in terms of ourselves, but in terms of the whole mass; having learned to think of life, not as it is to-day, but as it is going to be five hundred years from now, when all the revolutions have been made, and all the blood has been shed, and all the hundreds of millions of vain and selfish little lives, each concerned with its own individual and romantic breath, have been ruthlessly wiped out in order to usher in the collective glory that such will be—having become marvellously and, as it were, overnight such paragons of collective selflessness and such scorners of the vanity of personal fame, is it not strange that though we have new phrases, yet their meaning is still the same? Is it not strange that, feeling only an amused and pitying contempt for those who are still naive enough to long for glory, we should yet lacerate our souls, poison our minds and hearts, and crucify our spirits with bitter and rancorous hatred against those who are fortunate enough to achieve fame?

Or do we err? Are we mistaken in assuming that these words we read so often are really words of hatred, malice, envy, ridicule, and jeering mockery? Are we mistaken in assuming that the whole vocabulary of abuse which is exhausted every week in the journals of our red and pink-complexioned comrades—the sneers against a man’s talent, the bitter denials that his work has any substance, sincerity, truth, or reality whatever—is really what it seems to be? No doubt we are mistaken. It would be more charitable to believe that these pure spirits of the present day are what they say they are—collective, selfless, consecrated—and that the words they use do not mean what they seem to mean, and do not betray the romantic and deluded passions that seem to animate them, but are really words used coldly, without passion, for the purposes of collective propaganda—in operations completely surgical, whereby the language of the present day, with all its overtones of superstition, prejudice, and false knowledge, is employed clinically, scientifically, simply to further the Idea of the Future State!

No more, no more! Of what avail to crush these vermin beneath our heavy boot? The locusts have no king, and lice will multiply for ever. The poet must be born, and live, and sweat, and suffer, and change, and grow, yet somehow maintain the changeless selfhood of his soul’s integrity among all the crawling fashions of this world of lice. The poet lives, and dies, and is immortal; but the eternal trifler of all complexions never dies. The eternal trifler comes and goes, sucks blood of living men, is filled and emptied with the surfeit of each changing fashion. He gorges and disgorges, and is never fed. There is no nurture in him, and he draws no nurture from the food he feeds on. There is no heart, no soul, no blood, no living faith in him: the eternal trifler simply swallows and remains.

And we? Made of our father’s earth, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh—born like our father here to live and strive, here to win through or be defeated—here, like all the other men who went before us, not too nice or dainty for the uses of this earth—here to live, to suffer, and to die-O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night.

Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.

There where the hackles of the Rocky Mountains blaze in the blank and naked radiance of the moon, go make your resting stool upon the highest peak. Can you not see us now? The continental wall juts sheer and flat, its huge black shadow on the plain, and the plain sweeps out against the East, two thousand miles away. The great snake that you see there is the Mississippi River.

Behold the gem-strung towns and cities of the good, green East, flung like star-dust through the field of night. That spreading constellation to the north is called Chicago, and that giant wink that blazes in the moon is the pendant lake that it is built upon. Beyond, close-set and dense as a clenched fist, are all the jewelled cities of the eastern seaboard. There’ s Boston, ringed with the bracelet of its shining little towns, and all the lights that sparkle on the rocky indentations of New England. Here, southward and a little to the west, and yet still coasted to the sea, is our intensest ray, the splintered firmament of the towered island of Manhattan. Round about her, sown thick as grain, is the glitter of a hundred towns and cities. The long chain of lights there is the necklace of Long Island and the Jersey shore. Southward and inland, by a foot or two, behold the duller glare of Philadelphia. Southward farther still, the twin constellations—Baltimore and Washington. Westward, but still within the borders of the good, green East, that night-time glow and smoulder of hell-fire is Pittsburgh. Here, St. Louis, hot and humid in the cornfield belly of the land, and bedded on the mid-length coil and fringes of the snake. There at the snake’s mouth, southward six hundred miles or so, you see the jewelled crescent of old New Orleans. Here, west and south again, you see the gemmy glitter of the cities on the Texas border.

Turn now, seeker, on your resting stool atop the Rocky Mountains, and look another thousand miles or so across moon-blazing fiend-worlds of the Painted Desert and beyond Sierras’ridge. That magic congeries of lights there to the west, ringed like a studded belt round the magic setting of its lovely harbour, is the fabled town of San Francisco. Below it, Los Angeles and all the cities of the California shore. A thousand miles to north and west, the sparkling towns of Oregon and Washington.

Observe the whole of it, survey it as you might survey a field. Make it your garden, seeker, or your backyard patch. Be at ease in it. It’s your oyster—yours to open if you will. Don’t be frightened, it’s not so big now, when your footstool is the Rocky Mountains. Reach out and dip a hatful of cold water from Lake Michigan. Drink it—we’ve tried it—you’ll not find it bad. Take your shoes off and work your toes down in the river oozes of the Mississippi bottom—it’s very refreshing on a hot night in the summer-time. Help yourself to a bunch of Concord grapes up there in northern New York State—they’re getting good now. Or raid that water-melon patch down there in Georgia. Or, if you like, you can try the Rockyfords here at your elbow, in Colorado. Just make yourself at home, refresh yourself, get the feel of things, adjust your sights, and get the scale. It’s your pasture now, and it’s not so big—only three thousand miles from east to west, only two thousand miles from north to south—but all between, where ten thousand points of light prick out the cities, towns, and villages, there, seeker, you will find us burning in the night.

Here, as you pass through the brutal sprawl, the twenty miles of rails and rickets, of the South Chicago slums—here, in an unpainted shack, is a Negro boy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night. Behind him is a memory of the cotton-fields, the flat and mournful pineland barrens of the lost and buried South, and at the fringes of the pine another nigger shack, with mammy and eleven little niggers. Farther still behind, the slave-driver’s whip, the slave ship, and, far off, the jungle dirge of Africa. And before him, what? A roped-in ring, a blaze of lights, across from him a white champion; the bell, the opening, and all round the vast sea-roaring of the crowd. Then the lightning feint and stroke, the black panther’s paw—the hot, rotating presses, and the rivers of sheeted print! 0 seeker, where is the slave ship now?

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound’s; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike.

Or there again, in the East-Side Ghetto of Manhattan, two blocks away from the East River, a block away from the gas-house district and its thuggery, there in the swarming tenement, shut in its sweltering cell, breathing the sun-baked air through opened window at the fire-escape, celled there away into a little semblance of privacy and solitude from all the brawling and vociferous life and argument of his family and the seething hive round him, the Jew boy sits and pores upon his book. In shirt-sleeves, bent above his table to meet the hard glare of a naked bulb, he sits with gaunt, starved face converging to his huge beaked nose, the weak eyes squinting painfully through his thick-lens glasses, his greasy hair roached back in oily scrolls above the slanting cage of his painful and constricted brow. And for what? For what this agony of concentration? For what this hell of effort? For what this intense withdrawal from the poverty and squalor of dirty brick and rusty fire-escapes, from the raucous cries and violence and never-ending noise? For what? Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship and pure research, certain knowledge, and the world distinction of an Einstein name.

So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this seeker, is the promise of America.