Thomas Wolfe, page 164
Paris, in fact, had this morning become a brilliant, lovely, flashing toy. It was a toy which had been miraculously created for the enjoyment of brilliant, knowing and sophisticated Americans like Elinor and himself. It was a toy which could be instantly understood, preserved and enjoyed, a toy that they could play with to their hearts’ content, a toy which need confuse and puzzle none of them for a moment, particularly since Elinor was there to explain the toy and make it go.
It was incredible. Gone was all the blind confusion, the sick despair, the empty desolation of his first month in Paris. Gone was the old blind and baffled struggle against the staggering mass and number of a world too infinitely complex to be comprehended, too strange and alien to be understood. Gone were all the old sensations of the drowning horror, the feeling of atomic desolation as he blindly prowled the streets among alien and uncountable hordes of strange dark faces, the sensation of being an eyeless, grope-thing that crawled and scuttled blindly on the sea-depths of some terrible oceanic world of whose dimensions, structure, quality and purpose it could know nothing. Gone were all those feelings of strife, profitless, strange and impotent futility—those struggles that wracked the living sinews of man’s life and soul with quivering exhaustion and with sick despair, the hideous feeling of being emptied out in planetary vacancy, of losing all the high hope of the spirit’s purpose, the heart’s integrity—of being exploded, emptied out and dissipated into hideous, hopeless nothingness where all the spirit of man’s courage turned dead and rotten as a last year’s apple, and all his sounding plans of work and greatness seemed feebler than the scratchings of a dog upon a wall—a horror that can seize a man in the great jungle of an unknown city and a swarming street and that is far more terrible than the unknown mystery of any Amazonian jungle of the earth could be.
It was all gone now—the devouring hunger, and the drowning horror, and the blind confusion of the old, swarm-haunted mind of man—the fruitless struggle of the Faustian life—and in its place he had the glittering toy, the toy of legend and enchantment and of quick possession.
The French, they were a charming race—so gay, so light, and so incorrigible—so childlike and so like a race of charming toys.
Elinor made their relation to all these good people swarming in the streets around them wonderfully easy, clear, and agreeable. There was nothing strange about them, their ways were unpredictable, since they were French, but they were perfectly understandable. Her attitude, expressed in a rapid, gay and half-abstracted chatter—a kind of running commentary on the life around her as she drove—made the whole thing plain. They were a quaint lot, a droll lot, an incomparable lot—they were charming, amazing, irresponsible, a race of toys and children—they were “French.”
“All right, my dear,” she would murmur to herself as a fat taxi driver snaked recklessly in ahead of her and came to a triumphant stop—“have it your own way, my darling—have it your own way—I shan’t argue with you—God!” she would cry, throwing her head back with a sudden rich burst of laughter—“look at the old boy with the whiskers over there at the table—did you see him twirl his gay mustachios and roll his roguish eyes at that girl as she went by? Simply incredible!” she cried with another laugh, and bit her lips, and shook her head in fine astonishment. “Thank you!” she murmured politely, as the gendarme shrilled upon his whistle and beckoned with his small white club. “Monsieur l’Agent, vous êtes bien gentil”—as she smoothly shifted gears and shot past him.
In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious shops and great cafés, an animated and beautiful design of a million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all filled with joy, all with something so vivid, bright, particular and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved itself into a thousand charming and brilliant pictures, each wonderful and unforgettable, and all fitting instantly into the single structure, the simple and magnificent clarity of the whole design.
They swept through the huge central web of Paris, and were passing through the great shabby complication of the Eastern Quarters, the ragged, ugly sprawl of the suburbs.
And now, swift as dreams, it seemed, they were out in open country, speeding along roads shaded by tall rows of poplars, under a sky of humid gray, whitened with a milky and soul-troubling light.
Elinor was very gay, mercurial, full of sudden spontaneous laughter, snatches of song, deep gravity, swift inexplicable delight. Ann maintained a sullen silence. As for Starwick, he seemed on the verge of collapse all the time. At Château-Thierry he announced that he could go no farther; they stopped, got him into a little café, and fortified him with some brandy. He sank into a stupor of exhaustion, from which they could not rouse him. To all their persuasions and entreaties he just shook his head and mumbled wearily:
“I can’t!—Leave me here!—I can’t go on!”
Three hours passed in this way before they succeeded in reviving him, getting him out of the café—or estaminet—and into the car again. Ann’s face was flushed with resentful anger. She burst out furiously:
“You had no right to make him come along on this trip! You knew he couldn’t make it; he’s dead on his feet. I think we ought to take him back to Paris now.”
“Sorry, my dear,” said Elinor crisply, with a fine bright smile, “but there’ll be no turning back! We’re going on!”
“Frank can’t go on!” Ann cried angrily. “You know he can’t! I think it’s a rotten shame for you to insist on this when you see what shape he’s in.”
“Nevertheless, we’re going on,” said Elinor with grim cheerfulness. “And Mr. Starwick is going with us. He’ll see it through now to the bitter end. And if he dies upon the way, we’ll give him a soldier’s burial here upon the field of honor. . . . Allons, mes enfants! Avancez!” And humming gaily and lightly the tune of Malbrouck, she shifted gears and sent the car smoothly, swiftly forward again.
It was a horrible journey. One of those experiences which, by the grim and hopeless protraction of their suffering, leave their nightmare image indelibly upon the memories of every one who has experienced them. The gray light of the short winter’s day was already waning rapidly when they drove out of Château-Thierry. As they approached Rheims, dark had almost come, the lights of the town had begun to twinkle, sparsely, with provincial dismalness, in the distance. No one knew the purpose of their visit; no one knew what the trip was for, what they were coming to see—no one had enquired.
It was almost dark when they entered the town. Elinor drove immediately to the cathedral, halted the car, and got out.
“Voilà, mes amis!” she said ironically. “We are here!”
And she made a magnificent flourishing gesture towards the great ruined mass, which, in the last faint gray light of day, was dimly visible as a gigantic soaring monument of shattering arches and demolished buttresses, a lacework of terrific stone looped ruggedly with splinters of faint light, the demolished façades of old saints and kings and shell-torn towers—the twilit ruins of a twilight world.
“Magnificent!” cried Elinor enthusiastically. “Superb!—Frank! Frank! You must get out and feast your eyes upon this noble monument! I have heard you speak so often of its beauty. . . . But, my dear, you must!” she said, answering with fine persuasion his feeble and dispirited groan. “You’d never forgive yourself, or me either, if you knew you’d come the whole way to Rheims without a single look at its cathedral.”
And, despite his wearily mumbled protests, she took him by the arm and pulled him from the car. Then, for a moment, as he stared drunkenly, with blind, unseeing eyes, at the great gray twilit shape, she propped him up and held him between herself and Eugene.
Then they all got back into the car, and she drove them to the best café, the best hotel in town. Starwick almost collapsed getting out of the car. His knees buckled under him, and he would have fallen if Ann had not caught him, put her arm around him, and held him up. His condition was pitiable. He could no longer hold his head up; it lolled and wobbled drunkenly on his neck like a flower too heavy for its heavy stalk. His eyes were glazed and leaden, and as they started into the café, he had to be held up. He lifted his feet and dragged them after him like leaden weights. The café was a large and splendid one. They found a table to one side. Starwick staggered towards the cushioned seat against the wall and immediately collapsed. From that time on, he was never wholly conscious. Ann sat down beside him, put her arm around him and supported him. He sank against her shoulder like a child. The girl’s face was flushed with anger, she stared at Elinor with resentful eyes, but by no word or gesture did Elinor show that she noticed anything amiss either in Ann’s or Starwick’s behavior.
Rather, she chatted gaily to Eugene, she kept up a witty and high-spirited discourse with every one around her, she had never been more mercurial, quick, gay and charming than she was that evening. And announcing gaily that she was the hostess that was “giving the party,” she ordered lavishly—a delicious meal, with champagne from the celebrated cellars of the establishment. And every one, spurred to hunger by the cold air and their long journey, ate heartily——every one save Ann, who ate little and sat in angry silence, with one arm around Starwick’s shoulders, and Starwick, who could not be roused from his deep stupor to eat anything.
It was after nine o’clock before they got up to go. Elinor paid the bill, and still chatting as gaily and as lightly as if the whole wretched expedition had brought nothing but unqualified joy to all her guests, started for the door. Starwick had to be half-carried, half-dragged out by Ann and Eugene, under the prayerful guidance of several deeply troubled waiters. They put him in the car and got in themselves. Elinor looking around lightly, and crying out cheerfully: “Are we ready, children?” started the motor for the long drive back to Paris.
That was a hideous and unforgettable journey. Before they were done with it, they thought that it would never end. Under the protraction of its ghastly horror, time lengthened out interminably, unbelievably, into centuries. It seemed to them at last that they would never arrive, that they were rolling through a spaceless vacancy without progression, that they were hung there in the horrible ethers of some planetary emptiness where their wheels spun futilely and forever in moveless movement, unsilent silence, changeless change.
From the very beginning they did not know where they were going. By the time they got out of Rheims they were completely lost. It was a cold night, late in February; a thick fog-like mist that grew steadily more impenetrable as the night wore on, had come down and blanketed the earth in white invisibility. And through this mist there were diffused two elements: the weird radiance of a submerged moon which gave to the sea of fog through which they groped, the appearance of an endless sea of milk, and the bitter clutch of a stealthy, raw, and cruelly penetrating cold which crept into man’s flesh and numbed him to the bone of misery.
All through that ghastly and interminable night, they groped their way across France in the milky ocean of antarctic fog. It seemed to them that they had travelled hundreds of miles, that Paris had long since been passed, lost, forgotten in the fog, that they were approaching the outer suburbs of Lyons or Bordeaux, that presently they would see the comforting lights of the English Channel or that they had turned northwards, had crossed Belgium, and soon would strike the Rhine.
From time to time the road wound through the ghostly street of some old village; the white walls of village houses rose sheer and blank beside the road, sheeted in phantasmal mist like ghosts, and with no sound within. Then they would be groping their way out through the open countryside again—but where or in what country, no one knew, none dared to say—and suddenly, low and level, beside them to the left, they would see the moon. It would suddenly emerge in some blind hole that opened in that wall of fog, and it was such a moon as no man living ever saw before. It was an old, mad, ruined crater of a moon, an ancient, worn, and demented thing that smouldered red like an expiring coal, and that was like the old ruined moon of a fantastic dream. It hung there on their left, just at the edge of a low ridge of hills, and it was so low, so level, and so ghostly-near, it seemed to them that they could touch it.
Towards midnight they groped their way into a whited ghostly phantom of a town which Elinor at length, with the sudden recognition of a person who revisits some old scene of childhood, discovered to be Soissons. She had known the town well during the War: the ambulance unit, in which she had been for eighteen months a driver, had been stationed here. Starwick was half conscious, huddled into Ann’s shoulder on the dark rear seat. He groaned pitiably and said that he could go no farther, that they must stop. They found a hotel café that was still open and half-carried, half-dragged him in. They got brandy for him, they tried to revive him; he looked like a dead man and said that he could go no farther, that they must leave him there. And for the first time Elinor’s grave tone showed concern and sharp anxiety, for the first time her hard eye softened into care. She remained firm; gently, obdurately, she refused him. He collapsed again into unconsciousness; she turned her worried eyes upon the others and said quietly:
“We can’t leave him here. We’ve got to get him back to Paris somehow.”
After two ghastly hours in which they tried to revive him, persuade him to gird up his fainting limbs for final effort, they got him back into the car. Ann covered him with blankets and held him to her for the remainder of the night, as a mother might hold a child. In the faint ghost-gleam of light her face shone dark and sombre, her eyes were dark, moveless, looking straight ahead.
Armed with instructions from an anxious waiter, they set out again on the presumptive road to Paris. The interminable night wore on; the white blanket of the fog grew thicker, they passed through more ghost-villages, sheer and sudden as a dream, sheeted in the strange numb silence of that ghostly nightmare of a fog. The old red crater of the moon vanished in a ruined helve at length behind a rise of earth. They could no longer see anything, the road before was utterly blotted out, the car-lights burned against an impenetrable white wall, they groped their way in utter blindness, they crawled at a snail’s pace.
Finally, they felt their way along, inch by inch and foot by foot. Eugene stood on the running-board of the car, peering blindly into that blank wall of fog, trying only to define the edges of the road. The bitter penetration of raw cold struck through the fog and pierced them like a nail. From time to time Elinor stopped the car, while he stepped down and stamped numb feet upon the road, swung frozen arms and lustily blew warmth back into numb fingers. Then that infinite groping patience of snail’s progress would begin again.
Somewhere, somehow, through that blind sea of fog, there was a sense of morning in the air. The ghosts of towns and villages grew more frequent—the towns were larger now, occasionally Elinor bumped over phantom curbs before the warning shouts of her look-out could prevent her. Twice they banged into trees along unknown pavements. There was a car-track now, the bump of cobbles, the sense of greater complications in the world about them.
Suddenly, they heard the most thrilling and evocative of all earth’s sounds at morning—the lonely clopping of shod hooves upon the cobbles. In the dim and ghostly sheeting of that light, they saw the horse, the market cart balanced between its two high creaking wheels, laden with sweet clean green-and-gold of carrot bunches, each neatly trimmed as a bouquet.
They could discern the faint ghost-glimmer of the driver’s face, the big slow-footed animal, dappled gray, and clopping steadily towards the central markets.
They were entering Paris, and the fog was lifting. In its huge shroud of mist dispersing, the old buildings of the city, emerged ghostly, haggard, pallidly nascent in the dim gray light. A man was walking rapidly along a terraced pavement, with bent head, hands thrust in pockets—the figure of the worker since the world began. They saw at morning, in gray waking light, a waiter, his apron ends tucked up, lifting racked chairs from the tables of a café, and on light mapled fronts of bars and shops, the signs Bière—Pâtisserie—Tabac. Suddenly, the huge winged masses of the Louvre swept upon them, and it was gray light now, and Eugene heard Elinor’s low, fervent “Thank God!”
And now the bridge, the Seine again, the frontal blank of the old buildings on the quays, faced haggardly towards light, the narrow lane of the Rue Bonaparte, and in the silent empty street at length, his own hotel.
They said good-bye quickly, hurriedly, abstractedly, as he got out; and drove away. The women were thinking of nothing, no one now, but Starwick, life’s fortunate darling, the rare, the precious, the all-favored one. In the gray light, unconscious, completely swaddled in the heavy rugs, Starwick still lay pillowed on Ann’s shoulder.
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LXXXIV
All day Eugene slept the dreamless, soundless sleep of a man who has been drugged. When he awoke, night had come again. And this concatenation of night to night, of dreamless and exhausted sleep upon the strange terrific nightmare of the night before, the swift kaleidoscope of moving action which had filled his life for the past two days, now gave to that recent period a haunting and disturbing distance, and to the events that had gone before the sad finality of irrevocable time. Suddenly he felt as if his life with Ann, Elinor, and Starwick was finished, done; for some strangely troubling reason he could not define, he felt that he would never see them again.
He got up, dressed, and went downstairs. He saw old Gely and his wife, his daughters, Marie the maid, and the little concierge: it seemed to him that they looked at him strangely, curiously, with some sorrowful sad knowledge in their eyes, and a nameless numb excitement gripped him, dulled his heart. He felt the nameless apprehension that he always felt—that perhaps all men feel—when they have been away a day or two. It was a premonition of bad news, of some unknown misfortune: he wanted to ask them if some one had come for him—without knowing who could come—if they had a message for him—not knowing who might send him one—an almost feverish energy to demand that they tell him at once what unknown calamity had befallen him in his absence. But he said nothing, but still haunted by what he thought was the strange and troubling look in their eyes—a look he had often thought he observed in people, which seemed to tell of a secret knowledge, an inhuman chemistry, a communion in men’s lives to which his own life was a stranger—he hurried out into the street.
