Thomas Wolfe, page 165
Outside the streets were wet with mist, the old cobbles shone with a dull wet gleam, through the mist the lamps burned dimly, and through the fog he heard the swift and unseen passing of the taxi-cabs, the shrill tooting of their little horns.
Yet everything was ghost-like and phantasmal—the streets of Paris had the unfamiliar reality of streets that one revisits after many years of absence, or walks again after the confinement of a long and serious illness.
He ate at a little restaurant in the Rue de la Seine, and troubled by the dismal lights, the high old houses, and the empty streets of the Latin Quarter sounding only with the brief passage of some furious little taxi drilling through those narrow lanes towards the bridge of the Seine and the great blaze and gaiety of night, he finally forsook that dark quarter, which seemed to be the image of the unquiet loneliness that beset him, and crossing the bridge, he spent the remainder of the evening reading in one of the cafés near Les Magasins du Louvre.
The next morning when he awoke, a pneumatique was waiting for him. It was from Elinor, and read:
“Darling, where are you? Are you still recovering from the great debauch, or have you given us the go-by, or what? The suspense is awful—won’t you say it ain’t so, and come to lunch with us today at half-past twelve? We’ll be waiting for you at the studio.—Elinor”—Below this, in a round and almost childish hand, was written: “We want to see you. We missed you yesterday.—Ann.”
He read this brief and casual little note over again and again, he laughed exultantly, and smote his fist into the air, and read again. All of the old impossible joy was revived in him. He looked about the room and found everything in it good and homely. He went to the window and looked out: a lemony sunlight was falling on the old pale walls and roofs and chimney-pots of Paris: everything sparkled with health and hope and work and morning—and all because two girls from Boston in New England had written him a note.
He held the flimsy paper of the pneumatique tenderly, as if it were a sacred parchment too old and precious for rough handling; he even lifted it to his nose and smelled it. It seemed to him that all the subtle, sensuous femininity of the two women was in it—the seductive and thrilling fragrance, impalpable and glorious as the fragrance of a flower, which their lives seemed to irradiate and to give to everything, to every one they touched, a sense of triumph, joy and tenderness. He read the one blunt line that Ann had written him as if it were poetry of haunting magic: the level, blunt and toneless inflexibility of her voice sounded in the line as if she had spoken, he read into her simple words a thousand buried meanings—the tenderness of a profound, simple and inarticulate spirit, whose feelings were too deep for language, who had no words for them.
When he got to the studio he found the two women waiting, but Starwick was not there. Ann was quietly, bluntly matter-of-fact as usual; Elinor almost hilariously gay, but beneath her gaiety he sensed at once a deep and worried perturbation, a worn anxiety that shone nakedly from her troubled eyes.
They told him that on their return from Rheims, Starwick had left the studio to meet Alec and had not been seen since. No word from him had they had that night or the day before, and now, on the second day since his disappearance, their anxiety was evident.
But during lunch—they ate at a small restaurant in the neighborhood, near the Montparnasse railway station—Elinor kept up a gay and rapid conversation, and persisted in speaking of Starwick’s disappearance as a great lark—the kind of thing to be expected from him.
“Perfectly insane, of course!” she cried, with a gay laugh. “But then, it’s typical of him: it’s just the kind of thing that kind would do. Oh, he’ll turn up, of course,” she said, with quiet confidence, “—he’ll turn up in a day or two, after some wild adventure that no one in the world but Francis Starwick could have had. . . . I mean!” she cried, “picking that Frenchman—Alec—up the way he did the other night. Utterly mad, of course!” she said gaily. “—But then, there you are! It wouldn’t be Frank if he didn’t!”
“I see nothing very funny about it,” said Ann bluntly. “It looks like a pretty rotten mess to me. We know nothing at all about that Frenchman—who he is, what he does; we don’t even know his name. For all you know he may be one of the worst thugs or criminals in Paris.”
“Oh, I know, my dear—but don’t be absurd!” Elinor protested. “The man’s all right—Frank’s always picking up these people—it always turns out all right in the end—oh, but of course!” she cried, as if dispelling a troubling thought from her mind—“Of course it will! It’s too ridiculous to allow yourself to be upset like this!”
But in spite of her vigorous assurance, her eyes were full of care, and of something painful and baffled, an almost naked anguish.
He left them after lunch, promising to meet them again for dinner. Starwick had not come back. When they had finished dinner, the two women went back to the studio to wait for Starwick’s possible return, and Eugene went to look for him in Montmartre, promising to let them know at once if he found Starwick or got news of him. When he got to Montmartre, he made a round first of all the resorts which Starwick had liked best and frequented most, as Eugene remembered them, of course; but no one had seen him since they had last been there all together. Finally, he went to the bistro in the Rue Montmartre, where they had first encountered Alec, and asked the soiled barman with the dark mistrustful eye, if he had seen either Alec or Starwick in the past three days. The man eyed him suspiciously for a moment before answering. Then he surlily replied that he had seen neither of them. In spite of the man’s denial, he stayed on, drinking one cognac after another at the bar, while it filled up, ebbed and flowed, with the mysterious rout and rabble of the night. He waited until four o’clock in the morning: neither Starwick nor Alec had appeared. He got into a taxi and was driven back across Paris to Montparnasse. When he got to the studio, the two women were still awake, waiting, and he gave them his disappointing news. Then he departed, promising to return at noon.
All through that day they waited: the apprehension of the two women was now painfully evident, and Ann spoke bluntly of calling in the police. Towards six o’clock that evening, while they were engaged in vigorous debate concerning their course of action, there were steps along the alley-way outside, and Starwick entered the studio, followed by the Frenchman, Alec.
Starwick was in excellent spirits, his eyes were clear, his ruddy face looked fresh, and had a healthy glow. In response to all their excited greetings and inquiries, he laughed gleefully, teasingly, and refused to answer. When they tried to find out from Alec where Starwick had been, he too smiled an engaging but malicious smile, shrugged his shoulders politely, and said: “I do not know, I s’ink he tells you if he v’ants—if not!” again he smiled, and shrugged politely. And this moody and secretive silence was never broken. Starwick never told them where he had been. Once or twice, during dinner, which was an hilarious one, he made casual and mysteriously hinting references to Brussels, but, in response to all of Elinor’s deft, ironic cross-examination, he only laughed his burbling laugh, and refused to answer.
And she, finally defeated, laughed suddenly, a laugh of rich astonishment, crying: “Perfectly insane, of course! But then, what did I tell you? It’s just the sort of thing that Frank would do!”
But, in spite of all her high light spirits, her gay swift laughter, her distinguished ease, there was in the woman’s eyes something the boy had never seen before: a horrible, baffled anguish of torment and frustration. And although her manner towards the Frenchman, Alec, was gracious, gay, and charming—although she now accepted him as “one of us,” and frequently said with warm enthusiasm that he was “a perfectly swell person—I like him so much!” there was often something in her eyes when she looked at him that it was not good to see.
Alec was their guest, and Starwick’s constant companion, everywhere they went thereafter. And everywhere, in every way, he proved himself to be a droll, kind, courteous, witty and urbanely cynical person: a man of charming and engaging qualities, and delightful company. They never asked his name, nor inquired about his birth, his family, or his occupation. They seemed to accept his curious fellowship with Starwick as a matter-of-course: they took him on their daily round of cafés, restaurants, night-clubs, and resorts, as if he were a life-long friend of the family. And he accepted all their favors gracefully, politely, with wit and grace and charm, with a natural and distinguished dignity and ease. He, too, never asked disturbing questions; he was a diplomat by nature, a superb tactician from his birth. Nevertheless, the puzzled, doubting and inquiring expression in his eyes grew deeper day by day; his tongue was eloquently silent, but the question in his puzzled eyes could not be hidden, and constantly sought speech.
As for Eugene, he now felt for the first time an ugly, disquieting doubt: suddenly he remembered many things—words and phrases and allusions, swift, casual darts and flashes of memory that went all the way back to the Cambridge years, that had long since been forgotten—but that now returned to fill his mind. And sometimes when he looked at Starwick, he had the weird and unpleasant sensation of looking at some one he had never seen before.
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LXXXV
At the last moment, when it seemed that the argosy of their battered friendship was bound to sink, it was Elinor who saved it again. Ann, in a state of sullen fury, had announced that she was sailing for home the next week; Eugene, that he was going South to “some quiet little place where”—so did his mind comfortably phrase it—“he could settle down and write.” As for Starwick, he remained coldly, wearily, sorrowfully impassive; he accepted this bitter dissolution of their plans with a weary resignation at once sad and yet profoundly indifferent; his own plans were more wrapped in a mantle of mysterious and tragic secretiveness than ever before. And seeing the desperate state which their affairs had come to, and that she could not look for help from these three gloomy secessionists, Elinor instantly took charge of things again, and became the woman who had driven an ambulance in the war.
“Listen, my darlings,” she said with a sweet, crisp frivolity, that was as fine, as friendly, as comforting, and as instantly authoritative as the words of a capable mother to her contrary children—“no one is going away; no one is going back home; no one is going anywhere except on the wonderful trip we’ve planned from the beginning. We’re going to start out next week, Ann and I will do the driving, you two boys can loaf and invite your souls to your hearts’ content, and when you see a place that looks like a good place to work in, we’ll stop and stay until you’re tired of working. Then we’ll go on again.”
“Where?” said Starwick in a dead and toneless voice. “Go on where?”
“Why, my dear child!” Elinor cried in a gay tone. “Anywhere! Wherever you like! That’s the beauty of it! We’re not going to be bound down by any program, any schedule: we shall stay where we like, and go anywhere our sweet selves desire.
“I thought, however,” she continued in a more matter-of-fact way, “that we would go first to Chartres and then on to Touraine, stopping off at Orléans or Blois or Tours—anywhere we like, and staying as long as we care to. After that, we could do the Pyrenees and all that part of France: we might stop a few days at Biarritz and then strike off into the Basque country. I know incredible little places we could stop at.”
“Could we see Spain?” asked Starwick, for the first time with a note of interest in his voice.
“But, of course!” she cried. “My dear child, we can see anything, everything, go anywhere your heart desires. That’s the beauty of the whole arrangement. If you feel like writing, if you want to run down to Spain to get a little writing done—why, presto! chango! Alacazam!” she said gaily, snapping her fingers, “—the thing is done! There’s nothing simpler!”
For a moment, no one spoke. They all sat entranced in a kind of unwilling but magical spell of wonder and delight. Elinor, with her power to make everything seem delightfully easy, and magically simple and exciting, had clothed that fantastic program with all the garments of naturalness and reason. Everything now seemed not only possible, but beautifully, persuasively practicable—even that ludicrous project of “running down to Spain to do a little writing,” that hopeless delusion of “stopping off and working, anywhere you like, until you are ready to go on again”—she gave to the whole impossible adventure not only the thrilling colors of sensuous delight and happiness, but also the conviction of a serious purpose, a reasonable design.
And in a moment, Starwick, rousing himself from his abstracted and fascinated reverie, turned to Eugene and, with the old gleeful burble of laughter in his throat, remarked simply in his strangely fibred voice:
“It sounds swell, doesn’t it?”
And Ann, whose sullen, baffled look had more and more been tempered by an expression of unwilling interest, now laughed her sudden angry laugh, and said:
“It would be swell if every one would only act like decent human beings for a change!”
In spite of her angry words, her face had a tender, radiant look of joy and happiness as she spoke, and it seemed that all her hope and belief had returned to her.
“But of course!” Elinor answered instantly, and with complete conviction. “And that’s just exactly how every one is going to act! Eugene will be all right,” she cried—“the moment that we get out of Paris! You’ll see! We’ve gone at a perfectly killing pace this last month or two! No one in the world could stand it! Eugene is tired, our nerves are all on edge, we’re worn out by staying up all night, and drinking, and flying about from one place to another—but a day or two of rest will fix all that. . . . And that, my children, is just exactly what we’re going to do—now—at once!” She spoke firmly, kindly, with authority. “We’re getting out of Paris today!”
“Where?” said Starwick. “Where are we going?”
“We’re all going out to St. Germain-en-Laye to rest up for a day or two before we leave. We’ll stay at your pension, Francis, and you can pack your things while we’re out there, because you won’t be going back again. After that we’ll come back to Paris to spend the night—we won’t stay here over a day at the outside: Ann and I will clear our things out of the Studio, and Eugene can get packed up at his hotel—that should mean, let’s see,” she tapped her lips lightly with thoughtful fingers—“we should be packed up and ready to start Monday morning, at the latest.”
“Hadn’t I better stay in town and do my packing now?” Eugene suggested.
“Darling,” said Elinor softly, with a tender and seductive humor, putting her fingers on his arm—“you’ll do nothing of the sort! You’re driving out with us this afternoon! We all love you so much that we’re going to take no chance on losing you at the last minute!”
And for a moment, the strange and almost noble dignity of Elinor’s face was troubled by a faint smile of pleasant, tender radiance, the image of the immensely feminine, gracious, and lovely spirit which almost grotesquely seemed to animate her large and heavy body.
Thus, under the benevolent and comforting dictatorship of this capable woman, hope had been restored to them, and in gay spirits, shouting and laughing and singing, feeling an impossible happiness when they thought of the wonderful adventure before them, they drove out to St. Germain-en-Laye that afternoon. The late sun was slanting rapidly towards evening when they arrived: they left their car before an old café near the railway station, and for an hour walked together through the vast aisles of the forest, the stately, sorrowful design of that great planted forest, so different from anything in America, so different from the rude, wild sweep and savage lyricism of our terrific earth, and so haunted by the spell of time. It was the forest which Henry the Fourth had known so well, and which, in its noble planted colonnades, suggested an architecture of nature that was like a cathedral, evoked a sense of time that was ancient, stately, classical, full of sorrow and a tragical joy, and haunted forever by the pacings of noble men and women now long dead.
When they came out of the forest at the closing hour—for in this country, in this ancient noble place, even the forests were controlled, and closed and opened by the measurements of mortal time—the old red sun of waning day had almost gone.
For a time, they stood on the great sheer butte of St. Germain, and looked across the space that intervened between themselves and Paris. Below them in the valley, the Seine wound snakewise through a series of silvery silent loops, and beyond, across the fields and forests and villages, already melting swiftly into night, and twinkling with a diamond dust of lights, they saw the huge and smoking substance that was Paris, a design of elfin towers and ancient buildings and vast inhuman distances, an architecture of enchantment, smoky, lovely as a dream, seeming to be upborne, to be sustained, to float there like the vision of an impossible and unapproachable loveliness, out of a huge opalescent mist. It was a land of far Cockaigne, forever threaded by the eternity of its silver, silent river; a city of enfabled walls, like Carcassonne, and never to be reached or known.
And while they looked it seemed to them that they heard the huge, seductive, drowsy murmur of that magic and eternal city—a murmur which seemed to resume into itself all of the grief, the joy, the sorrow, the ambitions, hopes, despairs, defeats and loves of humanity. And though all life was mixed and intermingled in that distant, drowsy sound, it was itself detached, remote, eternal and undying as the voice of time. And it hovered there forever in the timeless skies of that elfin city, and was eternally the same, no matter what men lived or died.
