Thomas Wolfe, page 436
“Yes, sir!” he said presently in a tone of hard assurance.
“Yes, sir! When I’m out there in that graveyahd pushin’ daisies, I don’t want no bokays! I want to get what’s comin’ to me here and now! Am I right?”
“You said it!” the Italian answered.
“Like I was sayin’ to a guy duh otheh day,” the young man now concluded with an air of triumph, “yuh neveh can tell. No, sir! Yuh neveh can tell what’s goin’ t’happen. You’re here one day an’ gone duh next—so wat t’hell!” he said. “Let’s make duh most of it.”
And they all agreed that he was right, and began to search the dead man’s face again with their dark, rapt, fascinated stare.
Elsewhere now, people were gathering into little groups, beginning to talk, philosophize, even to smile and laugh, in an earnest and animated way. One man was describing his experience to a little group that pressed around him eagerly, telling again and again, with unwearied repetition, the story of what he had seen, felt, thought, and done when he first saw the dead man.
“Sure! Sure!” he cried. “Dat’s what I’m tellin’ yuh. I seen him when he passed out. I was standin’ not ten feet away from ’im! Sure! I watched ’im when he stahted gaspin’ t’ get his bret’. I was standin’ dere. Dat’s what I’m sayin’. I tu’ns to duh cop an’ says, ‘Yuh’d betteh look afteh dat guy,’ I says. ‘Deh’s somet’ing wrong wit’ ’im,’ I says. Sure! Dat’s when it happened. Dat’s what I’m tellin’ yuh. I was standin’ dere,” he cried.
Meanwhile, two men and two women had come in and stopped. They all had the thick, clumsy figures, the dull-red smouldering complexions, the thick taffy-colored hair, bleared eyes, and broad, blunted, smeared features of the Slavic races—of Lithuanians or Czechs—and for a while they stared stupidly and brutally at the figure of the dead man, and then began to talk rapidly among themselves in coarse thick tones, and a strange tongue.
And now, some of the people began to drift away, the throng of people swarming homeward across the cement floor had dwindled noticeably, and the circle of people around the dead man had thinned out, leaving only those who would stay like flesh-flies feeding on a carrion, until the body was removed.
A young Negro prostitute came through the gate and walked across the floor, glancing about her quickly with every step she took and smiling a hideous empty smile with her thin encarmined lips. When she saw the circle of men, she walked over to it and after one vacant look toward the bench where the dead man sat, she began to glance swiftly about her from right to left, displaying white, shining, fragile-looking teeth.
The thin face of the young Negress, which was originally of a light coppery color, had been so smeared over with rouge and powder that it was now a horrible, dusky yellow-and-purplish hue, her black eyelashes were coated with some greasy substance which made them stick out around her large dark eyes in stiff greasy spines, and her black hair had been waved and was also coated with this grease.
She was dressed in a purple dress, wore extremely high-heels which were colored red, and had the wide hips and long, thin, ugly legs of the Negress. There was something at once horrible and seductive in her figure, in her thin stringy lower legs, her wide hips, her mongrel color, her meager empty little whore’s face, her thin encarmined lips, and her thin shining frontal teeth, as if the last atom of intelligence in her bird-twitter of brain had been fed into the ravenous maw of a diseased and insatiable sensuality, leaving her with nothing but this varnished shell of face, and the idiot and sensual horror of her smile, which went brightly and impudently back and forth around the ring of waiting men.
Meanwhile, the Italian with the vulpine face, whose former companions, the Jew and the sleek young Broadwayite, had now departed, sidled stealthily over toward the Negress until he stood behind her. Then he eased up on her gently, his glittering eye and livid face feeding on her all the time in a reptilian stare, until his body was pressed closely against her buttocks, and his breath was hot upon her neck. The Negress said nothing but looked swiftly around at him with her bright smile of idiot and sensual vacancy, and in a moment started off rapidly, stepping along on her high red heels and long, stringy legs, and looking back swiftly toward the Italian, flashing her painted lips and shining teeth at him in a series of seductive invitations to pursuit. The man craned his neck stealthily at the edges of his collar, looked furtively around with his glittering eyes and vulpine face, and then started off rapidly after the girl. He caught up with the girl in the corridor beyond the stiles, and they went on together.
Meanwhile, the stiles still turned with their blunt, dull wooden note, belated travelers came by with a lean shuffle of steps upon the cement floors, in the news-stand the dealer sold his wares, giving only an occasional and wearily indifferent glance at the dead man and the people, and in the cleared space around the bench the police were standing, waiting, with a stolid, weary, and impassive calm. A man had come in, walked across the space, and was now talking to one of the police. The policeman was a young man with a solid strong-necked face that was full of dark color. He talked quietly out of the side of his mouth to the man who questioned him, and who was taking notes in a small black book. The man had a flabby yellowish face, weary eyes, and a flabby roll of flesh below his chin.
Meanwhile, the people who remained, having greedily sucked the last drop of nourishment from conversation, now stood silent, staring insatiably at the dead man with a quality of vision that had a dark, feeding, glutinous, and almost physical property, and that seemed to be stuck upon the thing they watched.
By this time an astonishing thing had happened. Just as the dead man’s figure had appeared to shrink and contract visibly within its garments, as if before our eyes the body were withdrawing out of a life with which it had no further relationships, so now did all the other properties of space and light, the dimensions of width, length, and distance that surrounded him, undergo an incredible change.
And it seemed to me that this change in the dimensions of space was occurring visibly and momently under my eyes, and just as the man’s body seemed to dwindle and recede, so did the gray cement space around him. The space that separated him from the place where the police stood, and the gray space which separated us from the police, together with the distance of the tiled subway wall behind, all grew taller, wider, longer, enlarged themselves terrifically while I looked. It was as if we were all looking at the man across an immense and lonely distance. The dead man looked like a lonely little figure upon an enormous stage, and by his very littleness and loneliness in that immense gray space, he seemed to gain an awful dignity and grandeur.
And now, as it seemed to me, just as the living livid gray-faced dead men of the night were feeding on him with their dark insatiate stare, so did he return their glance with a deathless and impassive irony, with a terrible mockery and scorn, which was as living as their own dark look, and would endure forever.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, that distorted vision was gone, all shapes and things and distances swam back once more into their proper focus. I could see the dead man sitting there in the gray space and the people as they looked and were. And the police were driving forward again and thrusting at the people all about me.
But they could not bear to leave that little lonely image of proud death, that sat there stiffly with its grotesque, drunken dignity, its thin smile, as men are loyal to a lifeless shape, and guard and watch and will not leave it till the blind earth takes and covers it again. And they would not leave it now because proud death, dark death, sat grandly there upon man’s shabby image, and because they saw nothing common, mean, or shabby on earth, nor all the fury, size, and number of the million-footed city could alter for an instant the immortal dignities of death, proud death, even when it rested on the poorest cipher in the streets.
Therefore they could not leave it from a kind of love and loyalty they bore it now; and because proud death was sitting grandly there and had spoken to them, and had stripped them down into their nakedness; and because they had built great towers against proud death, and had hidden from him in gray tunnels, and had tried to still his voice with all the brutal stupefactions of the street, but proud death, dark death, proud brother death, was striding in their city now, and he was taller than their tallest towers, and triumphant even when he touched a shabby atom of base clay, and all their streets were silent when he spoke.
Therefore they looked at him with awe, with terror and humility, and with love, for death, proud death, had come into their common and familiar places, and his face had shone terribly in gray tainted air, and he had matched his tongue, his stride, his dignities against the weary and brutal custom of ten million men, and he had stripped them down at length, and stopped their strident and derisive tongues, and in the image of their poorest fellow had shown them all the way that they must go, the awe and terror that would clothe them—and because of this they stood before him lonely, silent, and afraid.
Then the last rituals of the law and church were followed, and the dead man was taken from their sight. The dead-wagon of the police had come. Two men in uniform came swiftly down the stairs and entered carrying a rolled stretcher. The stretcher was rolled out upon the cement floor, swiftly the dead man was lifted from the bench and laid down on the stretcher, and at the same moment, a priest stepped from the crowd, and knelt there on the floor beside the body.
He was a young man, plump, well-kept, and very white, save for his garments, pork-faced, worldly, and unpriestly, and on his full white jaws was the black shaved smudge of a heavy beard. He wore a fine black overcoat with a velvet collar, and had on a scarf of fine white silk, and a derby hat, which he removed carefully and put aside when he knelt down. His hair was very black, fine-spun as silk, and getting thin on top. He knelt swiftly beside the dead man on the stretcher, raised his white, hairy hand, and as he did so, the five policemen straightened suddenly, whipped off their visored hats with a military movement, and stood rigidly for a moment, with their hats upon their hearts as the priest spoke a few swift words above the body which no one could hear. In a moment a few of the people in the crowd also took off their hats awkwardly, and presently the priest got up, put on his derby hat carefully, adjusted his coat and scarf, and stepped back into the crowd again. It was all over in a minute, done with the same inhuman and almost weary formality that the ambulance doctor had shown. The two uniformed stretcher-men bent down, took the handles of the stretcher, and speaking in low voices to each other, lifted it. Then they started off at a careful step, but as they did so, the dead man’s gray-tallow hands flapped out across the edges of the stretcher and began to jog and jiggle in a grotesque manner with every step the stretcher-bearers took.
One of the men spoke sharply to another, saying, “Wait a minute! Put it down! Some one get his hands!”
The stretcher was laid down upon the floor again, a policeman knelt beside the body and quickly stripped the dead man’s tie from his collar, which had been opened by the doctor and now gaped wide, showing a brass collar-button in the neck band of the shirt and the round greenish discoloration of the brass collar-button in the dead yellowed tissues of the neck. The policeman took the dead man’s necktie, which was a soiled, striped, and stringy thing of red and white, and quickly tied it in a knot around the dead man’s wrists in order to keep his hands from jerking.
Then the stretcher-bearers lifted him again, and started off, the police striding before them toward the gate-way, thrusting the people back, and crying: “Get back, there! Get back! Make way! Make way! Make way!”
The dead man’s hands were silent now, tied together across his stomach, but his shabby old garments trembled, and his gray-yellow cheek-flanks quivered gently with every step the stretcher-bearers took. The gaping collar ends flapped stiffly as they walked, and his soiled white shirt was partially unbuttoned, revealing a dead, bony, tallowy-yellow patch of breast below, and his battered old brown hat was now pushed down so far over his face that it rested on his nose, and, together with the thin sunken smile of his mouth, intensified the grotesque and horrible appearance of drunkenness.
As for the rest of him—the decaying substance that had been his body—this seemed to have shrunk and dwindled away to almost nothing. One was no longer conscious of its existence. It seemed lost, subsided to nothing and indistinguishable in a pile of shabby old garments—an old gray overcoat, baggy old trousers, an old hat, a pair of scuffed and battered shoes. This in fact was all he now seemed to be: a hat, a thin, grotesquely drunken smile, two trembling cheek-flanks, two flapping collar-ends, two gray-grimy claws tied with a stringy necktie, and a shabby heap of worn, dingy, and nondescript garments that moved and oscillated gently with every step the stretcher-bearers took.
The stretcher men moved carefully yet swiftly through the gate and up the stairs of an obscure side opening which was marked “Exit.” As they started up the grimy iron steps, the body sloped back a little heavily, and the old brown hat fell off, revealing the dead man’s thin, disordered, and gray-grimy hair. One of the policemen picked up the hat, saying to one of the stretcher-bearers, “O.K., John, I’ve got it!” then followed him up-stairs.
It was now early morning, about half-past three o’clock, with a sky full of blazing and delicate stars, an immense and lilac darkness, a night still cool, and full of chill, but with all the lonely and jubilant exultancy of spring in it. Far-off, half-heard, immensely mournful, wild with joy and sorrow, there was a ship lowing in the gulf of night, a great boat blowing at the harbor’s mouth.
The street looked dark, tranquil, almost deserted—as quiet as it could ever be, and at that brief hour when all its furious noise and movement of the day seemed stilled for a moment’s breathing space, and yet preparing for another day, the taxis drilled past emptily, sparely, and at intervals, like projectiles, the feet of people made a lean and picketing noise upon the pavements, the lights burned green and red and yellow with a small, hard, lovely radiance that somehow filled the heart with strong joy and victory and belonged to the wild exultancy of the night, the ships, the springtime, and of April. A few blocks farther up the street where the great shine and glitter of the night had burned immensely like a huge censer steaming always with a dusty, pollinated, immensely brilliant light, that obscene wink had now gone dull, and shone brownly, still livid but subdued.
When the stretcher-men emerged from the subway exit, the green dead-wagon of the police was waiting at the curb, and a few taxi-drivers with dark dingy faces had gathered on the sidewalk near the door. As the stretcher-men moved across the pavement with their burden, one of the taxi-drivers stepped after them, lifted his cap obsequiously to the dead man, saying eagerly:
“Taxi, sir! Taxi!”
One of the policemen, who was carrying the dead man’s hat, stopped suddenly, turned around laughing, and lifted his club with jocular menace, saying to the taxi-man:
“You son-of-a-bitch! Go on!”
Then the policeman, still laughing, saying “Jesus!” tossed the dead man’s hat into the green wagon, into which the stretcher-men had already shoved the body. Then one of the stretcher-men closed the doors, went around to the driver’s seat where the other was already sitting, took out a cigarette and lit it between a hard cupped palm and a twisted mouth, climbed up beside the driver, saying, “O.K. John,” and the wagon drove off swiftly. The police looked after it as it drove off. Then they all talked together for a moment more, laughed a little, spoke quietly of plans, pleasures, and duties of the future, said good-night all around, and walked off, two up the street toward the dull brown-livid smoulder of the lights, and three down the street, where it was darker, quieter, more deserted, and where the lights would shift and burn green, yellow, red.
Meanwhile, the jesting taxi-man who had offered his services to the dead man on the stretcher turned briskly to his fellows with an air of something ended, saying sharply and jocosely:
“Well, wattya say, boy! Wattya say!”—at the same time sparring sharply and swiftly at one of the other drivers with his open hands. Then the taxi drivers walked away toward their lines of shining, silent machines, jesting, debating, denying, laughing in their strident and derisive voices.
And again, I looked and saw the deathless sky, the huge starred visage of the night, and heard the boats then on the river, a great ship baying at the harbor’s mouth. And instantly an enormous sanity and hope of strong exultant joy surged up in me again; and like a man who knows he is mad with thirst, yet sees real rivers at the desert’s edge, I knew I should not die and strangle like a mad dog in the tunnel’s dark, I knew I should see light once more and know new coasts and come into strange harbors, and see again, as I had once, new lands and morning.
The face of the night, the heart of the dark, the tongue of the flame—I had known all things that lived or stirred or worked below her destiny. I was the child of night, a son among her mighty family, and I knew all that moved within the hearts of men who loved the night. I had seen them in a thousand places, and nothing that they ever said or did was strange to me. As a child, when I had been a route boy on a morning paper, I had seen them on the streets of a little town—that strange and lonely company of men who prowl the night. Sometimes they were alone, and sometimes they went together in a group of two or three, forever in mid-watches of the night in little towns prowling up and down the empty pavements of bleak streets, passing before the ghastly waxen models in the windows of the clothing stores, passing below hard bulbous clusters of white light, prowling before the facades of a hundred darkened stores, pausing at length in some little lunch-room to drawl and gossip quietly, to thrust snout, lip, and sallow jowl into the stained depths of a coffee mug, or dully to wear the slow gray ash of time away without a word.
