Thomas Wolfe, page 432
“Oh, little man,” it said, “I am the city, the million-footed, million-visaged city—my life is made up of the lives of ten million men, who come and go, pass, die, are born, and die again, while I endure forever. Little man, little man,” it said, “you think me cruel and merciless because I have just killed one of you, just as only a moment since you thought that I was beautiful and good because the breath of April filled your lungs with its intoxication, the smell of the tides was coming to you from the harbor with an excellent promise of Spring—warm seas, the thought of mighty ships, of voyages, and the vision of the fabled and golden countries you have never known. Yes, little man—oh! dingy meager little atom that crawls and sweats along my strong pavements, is hauled blindly, darkly, grayly, and helplessly through my savage tunnels, who swarms up from my earth in places like vermin swarming from their ratholes in the ground, and who is poured in here and doled out there, driven and hurried along here like a dead leaf on the breast of my great tides—you little man, who live, sweat, suffer, die, only as an infinitesimal particle of my everlasting sweep, my tidal energies, to whom I give brief housings in my ten million little cells, but who can leave not even the mark of your puny foot upon my savage streets to tell that you have lived here—Oh! little man, little man, thou grimy, faceless little atom in my unnumbered swarms, who sweat, curse, hate, lie, cheat, plead, love, and toil forever until your flesh grows dry and hard and juiceless as the stone it walks upon, your eyes as dark and dead as burnt-out coals, your words as harsh, sterile, and strident as the clangors of my rusty iron, a moment since you thought me kind because the sun shone warmly on you and the air was sweet with April, and now you think me cruel because I have just killed one of your number—but what do you think I care for you? Do you think that I am kind because the sun shines warmly on you in the month of April and you see a tree in leaf again? Do you think that I am beautiful because your blood begins to pulse more hot and wild with April, because your lungs draw magic from the smells of spring, and your eyes read lies of beauty, magic, and adventure into the green of a tree, the light of the sun, the flesh and fragrance of your women? Little man, little man—in gray November you have found me dull and dismal, in the glazed and gelid heat of August you have cursed me bitterly and found my walls intolerable, in October you have returned to me with wild joy and sorrow, with exulting and regret, in the grim and savage month of February you have found me cruel, merciless, and barren, in the wild and ragged month of March your life itself was like a torn cloud, filled with mad promises of spring, and with despair and dreariness, with soaring hopes and with the broad harsh lights of desolation, with the red and torn sunsets, and the howling of demented winds; and in April, late April, you have found me fair and beautiful again. But, little man, these are the lights and weathers of your own heart, the folly of your soul, the falseness of your eye. Ten thousand lights and weathers have passed over me, shone upon me, stormed and beaten at my iron front—yet I have been the same forever. You sweat, you toil, you hope, you suffer, I kill you in an instant with a stroke, or let you grub and curse your way along to your own death, but I do not care a jot whether you live or die, survive or are beaten, swim in my great tides, or smother there. I am neither kind, cruel, loving, or revengeful—I am only indifferent to you all, for I know that others will come when you have vanished, more will be born when you are dead, millions arise when you have fallen—and that the City, the everlasting City, will surge forever like a great tide upon the earth.”
So did the city speak to me that first time that I saw it kill a man, and the way it killed a man was this:
I was coming along one of the dingy cross-streets in the upper east-side district—a street filled with the harsh and angular fronts of old brown-stone houses, which once no doubt had been the homes of prosperous people but were now black with the rust and grime of many years. These streets were swarming with their violent and disorderly life of dark-faced, dark-eyed, strange-tongued people, who surged back and forth, unaccountably, innumerably, namelessly, with a tidal, liquid, and swarming fluency that all dark bloods and races have, so that the lean precision, their isolation, and the severe design that the lives of northern peoples have—like something lonely, small, pitifully yet grandly itself beneath an infinite and cruel sky—are fractured instantly by this tidal darkness. The numberless and ageless manswarm of the earth is instantly revealed in all its fathomless horror and will haunt one later in dreams of madness, terror, and drowning, even if one sees only a half-dozen of these dark faces in a street. For this reason, Thomas De Quincey remarked that if he were forced to live in China for the remainder of his days, he would go mad.
Upon the corner of this swarming street, where it joined one of the great grimy streets that go up and down the city and that are darkened forever by the savage violence and noise of the elevated structure, so that not only the light which swarms through the rusty iron webbing, but all the life and movement underneath it seems harsh, broken, driven, beaten, groping, violent, bewildered, and confused—on such a corner the man was killed. He was a little middle-aged Italian who had a kind of flimsy cart or wagon which was stationed at the curb and in which he had a shabby and miscellaneous stock of cigarettes, cheap candies, bottled drinks, a big greasy-looking bottle of orange juice turned neck downward into a battered cylinder of white-enameled tin, and a small oil stove on which several pots of food—sausages and spaghetti—were always cooking.
The accident occurred just as I reached the corner opposite the man’s stand. The traffic was roaring north and south beneath the elevated structure. At this moment an enormous covered van—of the kind so large, powerful, and cumbersome that it seems to be as big as a locomotive and to engulf the smaller machines around it, to fill up the street so completely that one wonders at the skill and precision of the driver who can manipulate it—came roaring through beneath the elevated structure. It curved over and around, in an attempt to get ahead of a much smaller truck in front of it, and as it did so, swiped the little truck a glancing blow that wrecked it instantly and sent it crashing across the curb into the vendor’s wagon with such terrific force that the cart was smashed to splinters, and the truck turned over it completely and lay beyond it in a stove-in wreckage of shattered glass and twisted steel.
The driver of the truck, by the miracle of chance, was uninjured, but the little Italian vendor was mangled beyond recognition. As the truck smashed over him, the bright blood burst out of his head in an instant and exploding fountain so that it was incredible so small a man could have such fountains of bright blood in him. A great crowd of swarming, shouting, excited dark-faced people gathered around the dying man at once, police appeared instantly in astonishing numbers, and began to thrust and drive in brutally among the excited people, cursing and mauling them, menacing them with clubs, and shouting savagely:
“Break it up, deh! Break it up! On your way, now!” . . . “Where yuh goin’?” one snarled, grabbing a man by the slack of his coat, lifting him and hurling him back into the crowd as if he were a piece of excrement. “Break it up, deh! Break it up! G’wan, youse guys—yuh gotta move!”
Meanwhile, the police had carried the dying man across the curb, laid him down on the sidewalk, and made a circle around him from the thrusting mob. Then the ambulance arrived with its furious and dreadful clangor of bells, but by this time the man was dead. The body was taken away, the police drove and lashed the crowds before them, whipping and mauling them along, as if they were surly and stupid animals, until at length the whole space around the wreck was clear of people.
Then two policemen, clearing the street again for its unceasing traffic, half pushed, half-carried the twisted wreckage of the vendor’s cart to the curb, and began to pick up his strewn stock, boxes, broken cups and saucers, fragments of broken glass, cheap knives and forks, and finally his spaghetti pots, and to throw them into the heap of wreckage. The spaghetti, pieces of brain, and fragments of the skull were mixed together on the pavement in a horrible bloody welter. One of the policemen looked at it for a moment, pushed the thick toe of his boot tentatively into it, and then turned away with a grimace on his brutal red face as he said, “Jesus!”
At this moment, a little gray-faced Jew, with a big nose, screwy and greasy-looking hair that roached backward from his painful and reptilian brow, rushed from the door of a dismal little tailor’s shop across the sidewalk, breathing stertorously with excitement, and carrying a bucketful of water in his hand. The Jew ran swiftly out into the street, with a funny bandy-legged movement, dashed the water down upon the bloody welter, and then ran back into the shop as fast as he had come. Then a man came out of another shop with a bucketful of sawdust in his hand which he began to strew upon the bloody street until the stain was covered over. Finally, nothing was left except the wreckage of the truck and the vendor’s cart, two policemen who conferred quietly together with notebooks in their hands, some people staring with dull fascinated eyes upon the blood-stain on the pavement, and little groups of people upon the corners talking to one another in low, excited tones, saying:
“Sure! I seen it! I seen it! Dat’s what I’m tellin’ yuh! I was talkin’ to’m myself not two minutes before it happened! I saw duh whole t’ing happen! I was standin’ not ten feet away from ’im when it hit him!”—as they revived the bloody moment, going over it again and again with an insatiate and feeding hunger.
Such was the first death that I saw in the city. Later, the thing I would remember most vividly, after the horror of the blood and brains, and the hideous mutilation of the man’s flesh was almost forgotten, was the memory of the bloody and battered tins and pots in which the vendor had cooked his spaghetti, as they lay strewn upon the pavement, and as the policemen picked them up to fling them back into the pile of wreckage. For later it seemed these dingy and lifeless objects were able to evoke, with a huge pathos, the whole story of the man’s life, his kindly warmth and smiling friendliness—for I had seen him many times—and his pitiful small enterprise, to eke out shabbily, but with constant hope and as best he could, beneath an alien sky, in the heart of the huge indifferent city, some little reward for his bitter toil and patient steadfastness—some modest but shining goal of security, freedom, escape, and repose, for which all men on this earth have worked and suffered.
And the huge indifference with which the immense and terrible city had in an instant blotted out this little life, soaking the shining air and all the glory of the day with blood, the huge and casual irony of its stroke—for the great van, which had wrecked the truck and killed the man, had thundered ahead and vanished, perhaps without its driver even knowing what had happened—was evoked unforgettably, with all its pity, pathos, and immense indifference, by the memory of a few battered pots and pans. This, then, was the first time I saw death in the city.
The second time I saw death in the city, it had come by night, in winter, in a different way.
About mid-night of a night of still bitter cold in February, when the moon stood cold and blazing in the white-blue radiance of the frozen skies, a group of people were huddled together upon the sidewalk of one of those confusing and angular streets which join Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square. The people were standing before a new building which was being put up there, whose front stood raw and empty in the harsh brown-livid light. A few feet away, upon the curb, the watchman of the building had made a fire in a rusty ash-can, and this fire now whipped and blazed in the frozen air with a crackling flame to which some of the people of the group would go from time to time to warm their hands.
Upon the icy pavement before the building, a man was stretched upon his back and a hospital interne, with the tubes of a stethoscope fastened to his ears, was kneeling beside him, moving the instrument from place to place on the man’s powerful chest, which was exposed. An ambulance, its motor throbbing with a quiet and reduced power that was somehow ominous, was drawn up at the curb.
The man on the pavement was about forty years old and had the heavy shambling figure, the brutal and powerful visage, of the professional bum. On the scarred and battered surface of that face it seemed that every savage violence of weather, poverty, and physical degradation had left its mark of iron, during the years the vagabond had wandered back and forth across the nation, until now the man’s features had a kind of epic brutality in which the legend of immense and lonely skies and terrible distances, of pounding wheel and shining rail, of rust and steel and bloody brawl, and of the wild, savage, cruel, and lonely earth was plainly written.
The man lay on his back, as still and solid as a rock, eyes closed, his powerful, brutal features upthrust in the rigid and stolid attitude of death. He was still living, but one side of his head, at the temple, had been bashed in—a terrible and gaping wound which had been got when he had wandered, drunk and almost blind with the cheap alcohol or “smoke” which he had been drinking, into the building, and had fallen forward across a pile of iron beams, against one of which he had smashed his head. The great black stain of the wound had run down across one side of his face and on the ground, but it had almost ceased to bleed, and in the freezing air the blood was clotting rapidly.
The man’s rag of dirty shirt had been torn open, and his powerful breast also seemed to swell forward with the same rigid and stolid immobility. No movement of breath was visible: he lay there as if carved out of rock, but a dull, flushed, unwholesome-looking red was still burning on his broad and heavy face, and his hands were clenched beside him. His old hat had fallen off, and his bald head was exposed. This bald head, with its thin fringe of hair upon each side, gave a final touch of dignity and power to the man’s strong and brutal face that was somehow terrible. It was like the look of strength and stern decorum one sees on the faces of those powerful men who do the heavy work in the trapeze act at the circus, and who are usually bald-headed men.
None of the people who had gathered there about the man showed any emotion whatever. Instead, they just stood looking at him quietly with an intent yet indifferent curiosity, as if there were in the death of this vagabond something casual and predictable which seemed so natural to them that they felt neither surprise, pity, nor regret. One man turned to the man next to him, and said quietly, but with assurance, and a faint grin:
“Well, dat’s duh way it happens to dem in duh end. Dey all go like dat sooner or later. I’ve never known it to fail.”
Meanwhile, the young interne quietly and carefully, yet indifferently, moved his stethoscope from place to place, and listened. A policeman with a dark, heavy face, pitted, seamed, and brutal looking, stood over him, surveying the scene calmly as he gently swung his club, and ruminating slowly on a wad of gum. Several men, including the night watchman and a news-dealer on the corner, stood quietly, staring. Finally, a young man and a girl, both well dressed, and with something insolent, naked, and ugly in their speech and manner that distinguished them as being a cut above the others in education, wealth, and position—as young college people, young city people, young Village, painting, writing, art-theater people, young modern “post-war generation” people—were looking down at the man, observing him with the curiosity with which, and with less pity than, one would regard a dying animal and laughing, talking, jesting with each other with a contemptible and nasty callousness that was horrible, and which made me want to smash them in the face.
They had been drinking, but they were not drunk: something hard and ugly was burning nakedly in them—yet, it was not anything forced or deliberate; it was just hard-eyed, schooled in arrogance, dry and false, and fictional, and carried like a style. They had an astonishing literary reality as if they might have stepped out of the pages of a book, as if there really were a new and desolate race of youth upon the earth that men had never known before—a race hard, fruitless, and unwholesome, from which man’s ancient bowels of mercy, grief, and wild, exultant joy had been eviscerated as out of date and falsely sentimental to bright arid creatures who breathed from sullen preference an air of bitterness and hate, and hugged desolation to the bone with a hard fatality of arrogance and pride.
Their conversation had in it something secret, sweet, and precious. It was full of swift allusions, little twists and quirks and subtleties of things about which they themselves were in the know, and interspersed with all the trade-marks of the rough-simple speech that at that time was in such favor with this kind of people: the “swell,” the “grand,” the “fine,” the “simply marvelous.”
“Where can we go?” the girl was asking him. “Will Louie’s still be open? I thought that he closed up at ten o’clock.”
The girl was pretty and had a good figure, but both face and body had no curve or fullness; body and heart and soul, there was no ripeness in her, she was something meager of breast, hard, sterile, and prognathous.
“If he’s not,” the young man said, “we’ll go next door to Steve’s. He’s open all night long.” His face was dark and insolent, the eyes liquid, the mouth soft, weak, pampered, arrogant, and corrupt. When he laughed, his voice had a soft welling burble in it, loose, jeering, evilly assured.
He had the look of something prized, held precious by aesthetic women; I had also seen his kind among the art-theater crowd who sometimes went to Esther’s house.
“Oh, swell!” the girl was saying in her naked tone. “I’d love to go there! Let’s have another party! Who can we get to go? Do you think Bob and Mary would be in?”
