Thomas Wolfe, page 457
The next day I went away, and never saw any of them again, but I could not forget them. Although I had never passed beyond the armor of their hard bright eyes, or breached the wall of their crisp, friendly, and impersonal speech, or found out anything about them, I always thought of them with warmth, with a deep and tender affection, as if I had always known them—as if, somehow, I could have lived with them or made their lives my own if only I had said a word, or turned the handle of a door—a word I never knew, a door I never found.
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DARK IN THE FOREST, STRANGE AS TIME
[Scribner’s Magazine, November 1934]
Some years ago, among the people standing on one of the platforms of the Munich railway station, beside the Swiss express, which was almost ready to depart, there were a woman and a man—a woman so lovely that the memory of her would forever haunt the mind of him who saw her, and a man on whose dark face the legend of a strange and fatal meeting was already visible.
The woman, who was about thirty-five years old, was at the flawless summit of a mature and radiant beauty. She was a glorious creature, packed to the last red ripeness of her lip with life and health, a miracle of loveliness in whom all the elements of beauty had combined with such exquisite proportion and so rhythmical a balance that even as one looked at her he could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes, so magically did it change and yet remain itself.
Thus, although not over tall, she seemed at times to command a superb and queenly height, then to be almost demurely small and cozy as she pressed close to her companion. Again, her lovely figure seemed never to have lost the lithe slenderness of girlhood, yet it was full, lavish, undulant with all the voluptuous maturity of womanhood, and every movement she made was full of seductive grace.
The woman was fashionably, smartly, and expensively dressed; her little toque-like hat fitted snugly down over a crown of coppery reddish hair and shaded her eyes, which had a smoke-blue and depthless quality that could darken almost into black, and change with every swiftest change of feeling that passed across her face. She was talking to the man in low and tender tones, smiling a vague and voluptuous smile as she looked at him. She spoke eagerly, earnestly, gleefully to him, and from time to time burst into a little laugh that came welling low, rich, sensual, and tender from her throat.
As they walked up and down the platform talking, the woman thrust her small gloved hand through the arm of his heavy overcoat and snuggled close to him, sometimes nestling her lovely head, which was as proud and graceful as a flower, against his arm. Again they would pause, and look steadfastly at each other for a moment. Now she spoke to him with playful reproof, chided him, shook him tenderly by the arms, pulled the heavy furred lapels of his expensive overcoat together, and wagged a small gloved finger at him warningly.
And all the time the man looked at her, saying little, but devouring her with large dark eyes that were burning steadily with the fires of death, and that seemed to feed on her physically, with an insatiate and voracious tenderness of love. He was a Jew, his figure immensely tall, cadaverous, and so wasted by disease that it was lost, engulfed, forgotten, in the heavy and expensive garments that he wore.
His thin white face, which was wasted almost to a fleshless integument of bone and skin, converged to an immense hooked nose, so that his face was not so much a face as a great beak of death, lit by two blazing and voracious eyes and colored on the flanks with two burning flags of red. Yet, with all its ugliness of disease and emaciation, it was a curiously memorable and moving face, a visage somehow nobly tragic with the badge of death.
But now the time had come for parting. The guards were shouting warnings to the passengers; all up and down the platform there were swift and serried movements, hurried eddyings among the groups of friends. One saw people embracing, kissing, clasping hands, crying, laughing, shouting, going back for one more hard swift kiss, and then mounting hastily into their compartments. And one heard in a strange tongue the vows, oaths, promises, the jests and swift allusions, that were secret and precious to each group and that sent them off at once in roars of laughter, the words of farewell that are the same the world over:
“Otto! Otto! . . . Have you got what I gave you? . . . Feel! Is it still there?” He felt; it was still there; fits of laughter.
“Will you see Else?”
“How’s that? Can’t hear”—shouting, cupping hand to ear, and turning head sideways with a puzzled look.
“I—say—will—you—see—Else?” fairly roared out between cupped palms above the tumult of the crowd.
“Yes. I think so. We expect to meet them at St. Moritz.”
“Tell her she’s got to write.”
“Hey? I can’t hear you.” Same pantomime as before.
“I—say—tell—her—she’s—got—to write” another roar.
“Oh, yes! yes!” nodding quickly, smiling, “I’ll tell her.”
“—or I’ll be mad at her!”
“What? Can’t hear you for all this noise”—same business as before.
“I—say—I’ll—be—mad—if—she—doesn’t—write” roared again at the top of his lungs.
Here a man who had been whispering slyly to a woman, who was trembling with smothered laughter, now turned with a grinning face to shout something at the departing friend, but was checked by the woman, who seized him by the arm and with a face reddened by laughter, gasped hysterically:
“No! No!”
But the man, still grinning, cupped his hands around his mouth and roared:
“Tell Uncle Walter he has got to wear his ——”
“How’s that? Can’t hear!”—cupping ear and turning head to one side as before.
“I—say,” the man began to roar deliberately.
“No! No! No! Sh-h!” the woman gasped frantically, tugging at his arm.
“—to—tell—Uncle Walter—he—must—wear—his—woolen ——”
“No! No! No!—Heinrich! . . . Sh-h!” the woman shrieked.
“The—heavy—ones—Aunt—Bertha—embroidered—with—his—initials!” the man went on relentlessly.
Here the whole crowd roared, and the woman screamed with laughter, shrieking protests, and saying:
“Sh-h! Sh-h!” loudly.
“Ja—I’ll tell him!” the grinning passenger yelled back at him as soon as they had grown somewhat quieter. “Maybe—he—hasn’t—got—’em—any—more,” he shouted as a happy afterthought. “Maybe—one—of—the—Frauleins—down—there—” he gasped and choked with laughter.
“Otto!” the woman shrieked. “Sh-h!”
“Maybe—one—of—the—Frauleins—got—them—away—from—” He began to gasp with laughter.
“O-o-o-t-to! . . . Shame on you—Sh-h!” the woman screamed.
“Souvenir—from—old—München,” roared back his fellow wit, and the whole group was convulsed again. When they had recovered somewhat, one of the men began in a wheezing and faltering tone, as he wiped his streaming eyes:
“Tell—Else—” Here his voice broke off in a feeble squeak, and he had to pause to wipe his eyes again.
“What?” the grinning passenger yelled back at him.
“Tell—Else,” he began more strongly, “that Aunt—Bertha—Oh, my God!” he groaned weakly again, faltered, wiped at his streaming eyes, and was reduced to palsied silence.
“What?—What?” shouted the grinning passenger sharply, clapping his hand to his attentive ear. “Tell Else what?”
“Tell—Else—Aunt—Bertha—is—sending—her—recipe—for—layer—cake,” the man fairly screamed now, as if he would get it out at any cost before his impending total collapse. The effect of that apparently meaningless reference to Aunt Bertha’s layer cake was astonishing: nothing that had gone before could approach the spasmodic effect it had upon this little group of friends. They were instantly reduced to a shuddering paralysis of laughter, they staggered drunkenly about, clasped one another feebly for support, tears streamed in torrents from their swollen eyes, and from their wide-open mouths there came occasionally feeble wisps of sound, strangled gasps, faint screams from the women, a panting, palsied fit of mirth from which they finally emerged into a kind of hiccoughing recovery.
What it was—the total implication of that apparently banal reference which had thrown them all into such a convulsive fit of merriment—no stranger could ever know, but its effect upon the other people was infectious; they looked toward the group of friends, and grinned, laughed, shook their heads at one another. And so it went all up and down the line. Here were people grave, gay, sad, serious, young, old, calm, casual, and excited; here were people bent on business and people bent on pleasure; here were people sharing by every act, word, and gesture the excitement, joy, and hope which the voyage awakened in them, and people who looked wearily and indifferently about them, settled themselves in their seats, and took no further interest in the events of the departure—but everywhere it was the same.
People were speaking the universal language of departure that varies not the whole world over—that language which is often banal, trivial, and even useless, but on this account curiously moving, since it serves to hide a deeper emotion in the hearts of men, to fill the vacancy that is in their hearts at the thought of parting, to act as a shield, a concealing mask to their true feeling.
And because of this there was for the youth, the stranger and the alien who saw and heard these things, a thrilling and poignant quality in the ceremony of the train’s departure. As he saw and heard these familiar words and actions—words and actions that beneath the barrier of an alien tongue were identical to those he had seen and known all his life, among his own people—he felt suddenly, as he had never felt before, the overwhelming loneliness of familiarity, the sense of the human identity that so strangely unites all the people in the world, and that is rooted in the structure of man’s life, far below the tongue he speaks, the race of which he is a member.
But now that the time had come for parting, the woman and the dying man said nothing. Clasped arm to arm they looked at each other with a stare of burning and voracious tenderness. They embraced, her arms clasped him, her living and voluptuous body drew toward him, her red lips clung to his mouth as if she could never let him go. Finally, she fairly tore herself away from him, gave him a desperate little push with her hands, and said, “Go, go! It’s time!”
Then the scarecrow turned and swiftly climbed into the train, the guard came by and brutally slammed the door behind him, the train began to move slowly out of the station. And all the time the man was leaning from a window in the corridor looking at her, and the woman was walking along beside the train, trying to keep him in sight as long as she could. Now the train gathered motion, the woman’s pace slowed, she stopped, her eyes wet, her lips murmuring words no one could hear, and as he vanished from her sight, she cried, “Auf Wiedersehen!” and put her hand up to her lips and kissed it to him.
For a moment longer the young man, who was to be this specter’s brief companion of the journey, stood looking out the corridor window down the platform toward the great arched station sheds, seeming to look after the group of people departing up the platform, but really seeing nothing but the tall lovely figure of the woman as she walked slowly away, head bent, with a long, deliberate stride of incomparable grace, voluptuous undulance. Once she paused to look back again, then turned and walked slowly as before.
Suddenly she stopped. Someone out of the throng of people on the platform had approached her. It was a young man. The woman paused in a startled manner, lifted one gloved hand in protest, started to go on, and in the next moment they were locked in a savage embrace, devouring each other with passionate kisses.
When the traveler returned to his seat, the dying man, who had already come into the compartment from the corridor and had fallen back into the cushions of his seat, breathing hoarsely, was growing calmer, less exhausted. For a moment the young man looked intently at the beak-like face, the closed weary eyes, wondering if this dying man had seen that meeting on the station platform, and what knowledge such as this could now mean to him. But the mask of death was enigmatic, unrevealing; the youth found there nothing that he could read. A faint and luminous smile was playing at the edges of the man’s thin mouth, and his burning eyes were now open, but far and sunken, and seemed to be looking from an unspeakable depth at something that was far away. In a moment, in a profound and tender tone, he said:
“That was my wife. Now in the winter I must go alone, for that is best. But in the spring, when I am better, she will come to me.”
All through the wintry afternoon the great train rushed across Bavaria. Swiftly and powerfully it gathered motion, it left the last scattered outposts of the city behind it, and swift as dreams, the train was rushing out across the level plain surrounding Munich.
The day was gray, the sky impenetrable and somewhat heavy, and yet filled with a strong, clean, Alpine vigor, with that odorless and yet exultant energy of cold mountain air. Within an hour the train had entered Alpine country; now there were hills, valleys, the immediate sense of soaring ranges, and the dark enchantment of the forests of Germany, those forests which are something more than trees—which are a spell, a magic, and a sorcery, filling the hearts of men, and particularly those of strangers who have some racial kinship with that land, with a dark music, a haunting memory, never wholly to be captured.
It is an overwhelming feeling of immediate and impending discovery, such as men have who come for the first time to their father’s country. It is like coming to that unknown land for which our spirits long so passionately in youth, which is the dark side of our soul, the strange brother and the complement of the land we have known in our childhood. And it is revealed to us instantly the moment that we see it with a powerful emotion of perfect recognition and disbelief, with that dream-like reality of strangeness and familiarity which dreams and all enchantments have.
What is it? What is this wild fierce joy and sorrow swelling in our hearts? What is this memory that we cannot phrase, this incessant recognition for which we have no words? We cannot say. We have no way to give it utterance, no ordered evidence to give it proof, and scornful pride can mock us for a superstitious folly. Yet we will know the dark land at the very moment we come to it, and though we have no tongue, no proof, no utterance for what we feel, we have what we have, we know what we know, we are what we are.
And what are we? We are the lonely naked men, the lost Americans. Immense and lonely skies bend over us, and ten thousand men are marching in our blood. Where does it come from, the constant hunger and the rending lust, and the music, dark and solemn, elfin, magic, sounding through the wood? How is it that this boy, who is American, has known this strange land from the moment that he saw it?
How is it that from his first night in a German town he has understood the tongue he never heard before, has spoken instantly, saying all he wished to say, in a strange language which he could not speak, speaking a weird argot which was neither his nor theirs, of which he was not even conscious, so much did it seem to be the spirit of a language, not the words, he spoke, and instantly, in this fashion, understood by everyone with whom he talked?
No. He could not prove it, yet he knew that it was there, buried deep in the old swarm-haunted brain and blood of man, the utter knowledge of this land and of his father’s people. He had felt it all, the tragic and insoluble admixture of the race. He knew the terrible fusion of the brute and of the spirit. He knew the nameless fear of the old barbaric forest, the circle of brutal and barbaric figures gathered round him in their somber and unearthly ring, the sense of drowning in the blind forest horrors of barbaric time. He carried all within himself, the slow gluttony and lust of the unsated swine, as well as all the haunting, strange, and powerful music of the soul.
He knew the hatred and revulsion from the never-sated beast—the beast with the swine-face and the quenchless thirst, the never-ending hunger, the thick, slow, rending hand that fumbled with a brutal, smouldering, and unsated lust. And he hated that great beast with the hate of hell and murder because he felt and knew it in himself and was himself the prey of its rending, quenchless, and obscene desires. Rivers of wine to drink, whole roast oxen turning on the spit, and through the forest murk, the roaring wall of huge beast-bodies and barbaric sound around him, the lavish flesh of the great blonde women, in brutal orgy of the all-devouring, never-sated maw of the great belly, without end or surfeit—all was mixed into his blood, his life, his spirit.
It had been given to him somehow from the dark time-horror of the ancient forest together with all that was soaring, glorious, haunting, strange, and beautiful: the husky horn-notes sounding faint and elfin through the forests, the infinite strange weavings, dense mutations of the old swarm-haunted and Germanic soul of man. How cruel, baffling, strange, and sorrowful was the enigma of the race: the power and strength of the incorruptible and soaring spirit rising from the huge corrupted beast with such a radiant purity, and the powerful enchantments of grand music, noble poetry, so sorrowfully and unalterably woven and inwrought with all the blind brute hunger of the belly and the beast.
It was all his, and all contained in his one life. And it could, he knew, never be distilled out of him, no more than one can secrete from his flesh his father’s blood, the ancient and immutable weavings of dark time. And for this reason, as he now looked out the window of the train at the haunting and lonely Alpine land of snow and dark enchanted forest, he felt the sense of familiar recognition instantly, the feeling that he had always known this place, that it was home. And something dark, wild, jubilant, and strange was exulting, swelling in his spirit like a grand and haunting music heard in dreams.
And now, a friendly acquaintance having been established, the specter, with the insatiate, possessive curiosity of his race, began to ply his companion with innumerable questions concerning his life, his home, his profession, the journey he was making, the reason for that journey. The young man answered readily, and without annoyance. He knew that he was being pumped unmercifully, but the dying man’s whispering voice was so persuasive, friendly, gentle, his manner so courteous, kind, and insinuating, his smile so luminous and winning, touched with a faint and yet agreeable expression of weariness, that the questions almost seemed to answer themselves.
