Thomas Wolfe, page 266
His mind was reeling from all the clamorous confusion of the Fair and this last exhibition, coming as a climax of an unceasing program of monsters and animal sensations, touched him with a sense of horror. For a moment it seemed to him that there was something evil and innate in men that blackened and tainted even their most primitive pleasures.
Late afternoon had come; the days were now shortening rapidly, and the air was already that of Autumn—it was crisp and chill, meagerly warmed by a thin red sunshine. Over all the Fair there rose the dense and solid fabric of a hundred thousand voices. Heinrich, whose interest in the shows of the Fair had been for the time appeased, now began to think of beer. Taking Monk by the arm, he joined in the vast oscillation of the crowd that jammed the main avenue of the carnival in an almost solid wedge.
The Germans moved along slowly and patiently, with that tremendous massivity that seems to be an essence of their lives, accepting the movement of the crowd with enormous contentment as they lost themselves and became a part of the great beast around them. Their heavy bodies jostled and bumped against one another awkwardly and roughly, but there was no anger among them. They roared out greetings or witticisms to one another and to everyone; they moved along in groups of six or eight, men and women all together with arms linked.
Heinrich Bahr had become eager and gay; he laughed and chuckled to himself constantly; presently, slipping his hand through Monk’s arm with a friendly and persuasive movement, he said:
“Come! Let us go and see the Roasted Ox.”
And immediately at these words the enormous hunger woke in Monk again, a hunger for flesh such as he had never known—he wanted not only to see the Roasted Ox, he wanted to devour great pieces of it. He had already noticed one characteristic of this Fair that distinguished it from any other he had ever seen. This was the great number of booths, large and small, given over to the sale of hot and cold meats. Great sausages hung in ropes and festoons from the walls of some of these places, while in others there was a constant exhalation from steaming and roasting viands of all kinds and sizes. The fragrance and the odor were maddening. And it seemed to him that above this dense mass of people that swayed along so slowly, there hovered forever in the thin, cold air an odor of slaughtered flesh.
But now they found themselves before a vast, long shed, gaily colored in front, and bearing above its doors a huge drawing of an ox. This was the Oxen Roastery (Ochsen-Braterei), but so dense was the crowd within that a man stood before the doors with his arms out, keeping back the people who wanted to enter, and telling them they must wait another fifteen minutes. Heinrich and Monk joined the crowd and waited docilely with all the others: to Monk there was communicated some of the enormous patience of this crowd, which waited and which did not try to thrust past barriers. Presently the doors were opened and they all went in.
Monk found himself in a vast, long shed, at the end of which, through the dense cloud of tobacco smoke which thickened the atmosphere almost to the consistency of a London fog, he could see the carcasses of two great animals revolving slowly on iron spits over troughs of red-hot coals.
The place, after the chill bite of the October air, was warm—warm with a single unmistakable warmth: the warmth of thousands of bodies crowded together in an enclosed place. And mingled with this warmth, there was an overpowering odor of food. At hundreds of tables people were sitting together devouring tons of flesh—ox flesh, great platters of sliced cold sausages, huge slabs of veal and pork—together with the great stone mugs that foamed with over a liter of the cold and strong October beer. There was a heavy and incessant rumble of voices full of food, an enormous and excessive clatter of heavy pottery and knives, that rose and fell in brittle waves. Down the central aisles and around the sides moved and jostled constantly another crowd looking restlessly over the densely packed area for a vacant place. And the brawny peasant women who acted as waitresses plunged recklessly through this crowd, bearing platters of food or a half-dozen steins of beer in one hand, and brusquely thrusting human impediments out of their way with the other.
Heinrich and Monk moved with the crowd slowly down the central aisle. The feeders, it seemed to Monk, were for the most part great, heavy people who already had in their faces something of the bloated contentment of swine. Their eyes were dull and bleared with food and beer, and many of them stared at the people around them in a kind of stupefaction, as if they had been drugged. And indeed the air itself, which was so thick and strong it could be cut with a knife, was sufficient to drug one’s senses, and he was therefore glad when, having arrived at the end of the aisle and stared for a moment at the great carcass of the ox that was turning brown as it revolved slowly before them, Heinrich suggested that they go elsewhere.
The sharp air lifted him at once from his lethargy, and he began to look about him quickly and eagerly again. The crowd was growing denser as evening approached, and he knew now that the evening was to be dedicated solidly to food and beer.
Distributed among the innumerable smaller buildings of the Fair, like lions couched among a rabble of smaller beasts, there rose about them the great beer halls erected by the famous breweries. And as thick as the crowd had been before the booths and shows, it seemed small compared to the crowd that filled these vast buildings—enormous sheds that each held several thousand people. Before them now, and at a distance, Monk could see the great red façade of the Löwenbrau brewery, with its proud crest of two royal lions, rampant. But when they came near the vast roaring of sound the hall enclosed, they saw that it would be impossible to find a seat there. Thousands of people were roaring over their beer at the tables, and hundreds more milled up and down incessantly, looking for an opening.
They tried several other of the great beer halls of the breweries with no better success, but at length they found one which had a few tables set about on a small graveled space before the hall and screened from the swarming crowd outside by a hedge. A few people were sitting at some of the tables, but most of them were vacant. Darkness was now approaching, the air was sharp and frosty, and there was almost a frantic eagerness to enter the fetid human warmth and the howling tempest of noise and drunkenness that the great hall contained. But both of them were now tired, fatigued by the excitement, by the crowd, by the huge kaleidoscope of noise, of color and sensation they had experienced.
“Let us sit down here,” Monk said, indicating one of the vacant tables before the hall.
And Heinrich, after peering restlessly through one of the windows at the smoky chaos within, through which dark figures pushed and jostled like spirits lost in fog, in the vapors of Valhalla, consented and took a seat, but with a disappointment he was unable to conceal. “It is beautiful in there,” he said. “You cannot afford to miss it.”
Then a peasant woman bore down upon them, swinging in each of her strong hands six foaming steins of the powerful October beer. She smiled at them with ready friendliness and said, “The light or the dark?”
They answered, “Dark.”
Almost before they had spoken she had set two foaming mugs before them on the table and was on her way again.
“But beer?” Monk said. “Why beer? Why have they come here to drink beer? Why have all these great sheds been built here by the famous breweries when all Munich is renowned for beer and there are hundreds of beer restaurants in the city?”
“Yes,” Heinrich answered, “but—” he smiled and emphasized the word—“this is October beer. It is almost twice as strong as ordinary beer.”
Then they seized their great stone mugs, clinked them together with a smiling “Prosit,” and in the frosty, sharp exhilaration of that air they drank long and deep the strong, cold liquor that sent tingling through their veins its potent energy. All about them people were eating and drinking. Near by at another table, some peasant people in gay clothes had ordered beer, and now, unwrapping several paper bundles that they were carrying with them, they set out on the table a prodigious quantity of food and began to eat and drink stolidly. The man, a brawny fellow with thick mustaches and white woolen stockings that covered his powerful calves but left his feet and knees bare, pulled from his pocket a large knife and cut the heads from several salt fish, which shone a beautiful golden color in the evening light. The woman produced several rolls, a bunch of radishes, and a big piece of liver sausage from another paper and added them to the general board. Two children, a boy and a girl, the girl with braided hanks of long, blond hair falling before her over the shoulders, both watchful and blue-eyed with the intent and focused hunger of animals, stared silently at the food as their parents cut it and apportioned it. In a moment, with this same silent and voracious attentiveness, all of them were eating and drinking.
Everyone was eating; everyone was drinking. A ravenous hunger—an insane hunger that knew no appeasement, that wished to glut itself on all the roasted ox flesh, all the sausages, all the salt fish in the world, seized Monk and held him in its teeth. In all the world there was nothing but Food—glorious Food. And Beer—October Beer. The world was one enormous Belly—there was no higher heaven than the Paradise of Cram and Gorge. All of the agony of the mind was here forgotten. What did these people know about books? What did they know about pictures? What did they know about the million tumults of the soul, the conflict and the agony of the spirit, the hopes, fears, hatreds, failures, and ambitions, the whole fevered complex of modern life? These people lived for nothing but to eat and drink—and Monk felt at that instant that they were right.
The doors of the great hall kept opening and shutting constantly as the incessant stream of beer drinkers pressed patiently in. And from within Monk heard the shattering blare of a huge brass band and the roar of five thousand beer-drunk voices, rocking together in the rhythms of “Trink, Trink, Brüderlein, Trink!”
Savage hunger was devouring Monk and Heinrich. They called out loudly to the bustling waitress as she passed them and were told that if they wanted hot food they must go within. But in a moment she sent another woman to their table who was carrying an enormous basket loaded with various cold foods. Monk took two sandwiches made most deliciously of onions and small salted fish, and an enormous slice of liver cheese with a crust about its edges. Heinrich also selected two or three sandwiches, and, having ordered another liter of dark beer apiece, they began to devour their food. Darkness had come on. All of the buildings and amusement devices of the Fair were now blazing with lights; from the vast irradiant murk of night there rose and fell in wavelike nodes the huge fused roar and mumble of the crowd.
When they had devoured their sandwiches and finished their beer, Heinrich suggested that they now make a determined effort to find seats within the hall, and Monk, who had heretofore felt a strong repulsion towards the thick air and roaring chaos of the hall, now found to his surprise that he was ready and eager to join the vast crowd of beer-fumed feeders. Obediently now he joined the line of patient Germans who were shuffling slowly through the doors, and in a moment more he found himself enveloped by a cyclone of drunken sound, tramping patiently with a crowd that moved slowly around the great room looking for seats. Presently, peering through the veils and planes of shifting smoke that coiled and rose in the great hall like smoke above a battlefield, Heinrich spied two seats at a table near the center of the room, where, on the square wooden platform, fog-enveloped, forty men dressed in peasant costume were producing a deafening noise upon brass instruments. They plunged directly for the seats, jostling and half-falling over unprotesting bodies that were numb with beer.
And at last, dead center of that roaring tumult, they seated themselves triumphantly, panting victoriously, and immediately ordered two liters of dark beer and two plates of schweinwurstl and sauerkraut. The band was blaring forth the strains of “Ein Prosit! Ein Prosit!” and all over the room people had risen from their tables and were standing with arms linked and mugs upraised while they roared out the great drinking song and swung and rocked rhythmically back and forth.
The effect of these human rings all over that vast and murky hall had in it something that was almost supernatural and ritualistic: something that belonged to the essence of a race was enclosed in those rings, something dark and strange as Asia, something older than the old barbaric forests, something that had swayed around an altar, and had made a human sacrifice, and had devoured burnt flesh.
The hall was roaring with their powerful voices, it shook to their powerful bodies, and as they swung back and forth it seemed to Monk that nothing on earth could resist them—that they must smash whatever they came against. He understood now why other nations feared them so; suddenly he was himself seized with a terrible and deadly fear of them that froze his heart. He felt as if he had dreamed and awakened in a strange, barbaric forest to find a ring of savage, barbaric faces bent down above him: blond-braided, blond-mustached, they leaned upon their mighty spear staves, rested on their shields of toughened hide, as they looked down. And he was surrounded by them, there was no escape. He thought of all that was familiar to him and it seemed far away, not only in another world but in another time, sea-sunken in eternity ages hence from the old, dark forest of barbaric time. And now he thought almost with warm friendliness of the strange, dark faces of the Frenchmen, their cynicism and dishonesty, their rapid and excited voices, their small scale, their little customs; even all their light and trivial adulteries now seemed friendly and familiar, playful, charming, full of grace. And of the dogged English, with their pipes, their pubs, their bitter beer, their fog, their drizzle, their women with neighing voices and long teeth—all these things now seemed immensely warm, friendly, and familiar to him, and he wished that he were with them.
But suddenly a hand was slipped through his arm, and through that roar and fog of sound he realized that someone was speaking to him. He looked down, and there beside him saw the jolly, flushed, and smiling face of a pretty girl. She tugged at his arm good-naturedly and mischievously, spoke to him, nodded her head for him to look. He turned. Beside him was a young man, her companion; he, too, smiling, happy, held his arm for Monk to take. He looked across and saw Heinrich, his sallow, lonely, pitted face smiling and happy as he had never seen it before. He nodded to Monk. In an instant they were all linked together, swinging, swaying, singing in rhythm to the roar of those tremendous voices, swinging and swaying, singing all together as the band played “Ein Prosit!” Ended at length the music, but now all barriers broken through, all flushed and happy, smiling at one another, they added their own cheers to the crowd’s great roar of approval when the song was ended. Then, laughing, smiling, talking, they all sat down again.
And now there was no strangeness any more. There were no barriers any more. They drank and talked and ate together. Monk drained liter after liter of the cold and heady beer. Its fumes mounted in his brain. He was jubilant and happy. He talked fearlessly in a broken jargon of his little German. Heinrich helped him out from time to time, and yet it did not matter. He felt that he had known all these people forever. The young girl with her jolly, pretty face eagerly tried to find out who he was and what he did. He teased her. He would not tell her. He told her a dozen things—that he was a business man, a Norwegian, an Australian, a carpenter, a sailor, anything that popped into his head, and Heinrich, smiling, aided and abetted him in all his foolishness. But the girl clapped her hands and gleefully cried out “No,” that she knew what he was—he was an artist, a painter, a creative man. She and all the others turned to Heinrich, asking him if this was not true. And, smilingly, he half inclined his head and said that Monk was not a painter but that he was a writer—he called him a poet. And then all of them nodded their heads in satisfied affirmation, the girl gleefully clapped her hands together again and cried that she had known it. And now they drank and linked their arms and swayed and swung together in a ring again. And presently, now that it was growing late and people had begun to leave the hall, they too got up, the six of them, the girl, another girl, their two young men, and Heinrich and Monk, moved out among the singing, happy crowds again, and, arm in arm, linked all together, moved singing through the crowds.
And then Monk and Heinrich left them, finally, four young people from the mass of life and from the heart of Germany, whom Monk would never see again—four people, and the happy, flushed, and smiling face of a young girl. They left them, never having asked each other’s names; they left and lost them, with warmth, with friendship, with affection in the hearts of all of them.
Monk and Heinrich went their way, and they went theirs. The great roar and clamor of the Fair suffused and faded far behind them, until it had become a vast and drowsy distant murmur. And presently, walking arm in arm together, they reached again the railway station and the ancient heart of Munich. They crossed the Karlsplatz and presently they had come to their dwelling in the Theresienstrasse.
And yet they found they were not tired, they were not ready to go in. The fumes of the powerful and heady beer, and, more than that, the fumes of fellowship and of affection, of friendship and of human warmth, had mounted to their brains and hearts. They knew it was a rare and precious thing, a moment’s spell of wonder and of joy, that it must end, and they were loath to see it go.
