Thomas Wolfe, page 458
The young man was an American, was he not? . . . Yes. And how long had he been abroad—two months? Three months? No? Almost a year! So long as that! Then he liked Europe, yes? It was his first trip? No? His fourth?—The specter lifted his eyebrows in expressive astonishment, and yet his sensitive thin mouth was touched all the time by his faint, wearily cynical smile.
Finally, the boy was pumped dry: the specter knew all about him. Then for a moment he sat staring at the youth with his faint, luminous, subtly mocking, and yet kindly smile. At last, wearily, patiently, and with the calm finality of experience and death, he said:
“You are very young. Yes. Now you vant to see it and to haf it all—but you haf nothing. Zat is right—yes?” he said with his persuasive smile. “Zat vill all change. Some day you vill vant only a little—maybe, then, you haf a little—” and he flashed his luminous winning smile again. “And dat iss better—Yes?” He smiled again, and then he said wearily, “I know. I know. Myself, I had gone everyvere like you. I haf tried to see everyt’ing—and I haf had nothing. Now I go no more. Everyvere it iss de same,” he said wearily, looking out the window, with a dismissing gesture of his thin white hand. “Fields, hills, mountains, rifers, cities, peoples—You vish to know about zem all. One field, one hill, one rifer,” the man whispered, “zat iss enough!”
He closed his eyes for a moment: when he spoke again, his whisper was almost inaudible—“One life, one place, one time.”
Darkness came, and the lights in the compartments were turned on. Again that whisper of waning life made its insistent, gentle, and implacable demand upon the youth. This time it asked that the light in the compartment be extinguished, while the specter stretched himself out upon the seat to rest. The younger man consented willingly and even gladly: his own journey was near its end, and outside, the moon, which had risen early, was shining down upon the Alpine forests and snows with a strange, brilliant, and haunting magic which gave to the darkness in the compartment some of its own ghostly and mysterious light.
The specter lay quietly stretched out upon the cushions of the seat, his eyes closed, his wasted face, on which the two bright flags of burning red now shone with a vermilion hue, strange and ghastly in the magic light as the beak of some great bird. The man scarcely seemed to breathe: no sound or movement of life was perceptible in the compartment except the pounding of the wheels, the leathery stretching and creaking sound of the car, and all the strange-familiar and evocative symphony of sounds a train makes—that huge symphonic monotone which is itself the sound of silence and forever.
For some time held in that spell of magic light and time, the youth sat staring out the window at the enchanted world of white and black that swept grandly and strangely past in the haunting and phantasmal radiance of the moon. Finally he got up, went out into the corridor, closing the door carefully behind, and walked back down the narrow passageway through car after car of the rocketing train until he came to the dining car.
Here all was brilliance, movement, luxury, sensual warmth and gaiety. All the life of the train now seemed to be concentered in this place. The waiters, surefooted and deft, were moving swiftly down the aisle of the rocketing car, pausing at each table to serve people from the great platters of well-cooked food which they carried on trays. Behind them the sommelier was pulling corks from tall frosty bottles of Rhine wine: he would hold the bottle between his knees as he pulled, the cork would come out with an exhilarating pop, and he would drop the cork into a little basket.
At one table a seductive and beautiful woman was eating with a jaded-looking old man. At another a huge and powerful-looking German, with a wing-collar, a shaven skull, a great swine face, and a forehead of noble and lonely thought, was staring with a concentrated look of bestial gluttony at the tray of meat from which the waiter served him. He was speaking in a guttural and lustful tone, saying, “Ja! . . . Gut! . . . und etwas von diesem hier auch . . .”
The scene was one of richness, power, and luxury, evoking as it did the feeling of travel in a crack European express which is different from the feeling one has when he rides on an American train. In America, the train gives one a feeling of wild and lonely joy, a sense of the savage, unfenced, and illimitable wilderness of the country through which the train is rushing, a wordless and unutterable hope, as one thinks of the enchanted city toward which he is speeding; the unknown and fabulous promise of the life he is to find there.
In Europe, the feeling of joy and pleasure is more actual, ever-present. The luxurious trains, the rich furnishings, the deep maroons, dark blues, the fresh, well-groomed vivid colors of the cars, the good food and the cosmopolitan look of the travelers—all of this fills one with a powerful sensual joy, a sense of expectancy about to be realized. In a few hours’ time one goes from country to country, through centuries of history, a world of crowded culture, and whole nations swarming with people, from one famous pleasure-city to another.
And instead of the wild joy and nameless hope one feels as he looks out the window of an American train and sees the lonely, savage, and illimitable earth that strokes past calmly and imperturbably like the visage of time and eternity, one feels here (in Europe) an incredible joy of realization, an immediate sensual gratification, a feeling that there is nothing on earth but wealth, power, luxury, and love, and that one can live and enjoy this life, in all the infinite varieties of pleasure, forever.
When the young man had finished eating and paid his bill, he began to walk back again through corridor after corridor along the length of the rocketing train. When he got back to his compartment, he saw the specter lying there as he had left him, stretched out upon the seat, with the brilliant moonlight still blazing on the great beak of his face.
The man had not changed his position by an atom, and yet at once the boy was conscious of some subtle, fatal change he could not define. What was it? He took his seat again and for some time stared fixedly at the silent ghostly figure opposite him. Did he not breathe? He thought, he was almost sure, he saw the motion of his breathing, the rise and fall of the emaciated breast, and yet he was not sure. But what he saw plainly now was that a line, vermilion in its moon-dark hue, had run out of the corner of the firm-set mouth, and that there was a large vermilion stain upon the floor.
What should he do? What could be done? The haunted light of the fatal moon seemed to have steeped his soul in its dark sorcery, in the enchantment of measureless and inert calmness. Already, too, the train was slackening its speed, the first lights of the town appeared, it was his journey’s end.
Was it not well to leave all things as he had found them in silence at the end? Might it not be that in this great dream of time in which we live and are the moving figures, there is no greater certitude than this, that having met, spoken, known each other for a moment, as somewhere on this earth we were hurled onward through the darkness between two points of time, it is well to be content with this, to leave each other as we met, letting each one go alone to his appointed destination, sure of this only, needing only this—that there will be silence for us all and silence only, nothing but silence in the end?
And now the train was slowing to a halt. There were the flare of rails, the switch-lights of the yard, small, bright, and hard, green, red, and yellow, poignant in the dark, and on other tracks he could see the little goods cars and the strings of darkened trains, all empty, dark, and waiting with their strange attentiveness of recent life. Then the long station quays began to slide slowly past the windows of the train, and the sturdy goat-like porters were coming on the run, eagerly saluting, speaking, calling to the people in the train who had already begun to pass their baggage through the windows.
Softly the boy took his overcoat and suit-case from the rack above his head and stepped out into the narrow corridor. Quietly he slid the door of the compartment shut behind him. In the semi-darkness of the compartment the spectral figure of the cadaver lay upon the cushions, did not move. Already the train had come to a full stop. The boy went down the corridor to the end, and in a moment, feeling the bracing shock of the cold air upon his lungs, he was going down the quay with a hundred other people, all moving in the same direction, some toward certitude and home, some toward a new land, hope, and hunger, the swelling prescience of joy, the promise of a shining city. He knew that one day he was going home again.
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THE NAMES OF THE NATION
[Modern Monthly, December 1934]
Brother, I know and I know and yet it will always be the same. They said that we are base and false, our lives shabby, ugly, paltry, worthless, dull, and let them have it as they will, for I know and I know, they said that beauty, mercy, pity, peace, and love had no place in us, and I know, I know, they said there was no glory, grandeur, greatness in our lives, and I know, and I know, and I know!
But we heard a sound of marching in the night, we heard a sound of great hooves on the land by night, and in night-time, in the dark, Lee rode by us in Virginia on his great white horse.
Brother, I know and I know, and many years have passed since we rushed forward in the dark together, and the river has flowed onward in the night, and yet it will always be the same forever.
For I have heard the thousand phrases of their disbelief—the scorn of clever men, the ridicule of their bright bitter minds, the weariness and mockery of a barren people, the certain knowledge of the knowing fool, the bitter curse of exiled men, the harsh indictment of the wanderer—and all they said was true enough, but there was something yet which never has been spoken, and I knew and I knew, and it would always be the same.
“One time!” their voices cried, leaning upon a bar the bitter weight of all their discontent. “One time! I’ve been back one time—just once in seven years,” they said, “and Jesus that was plenty! One time was enough. To hell with that damned country! What have they got now but a lot of cheap spaghetti joints and skyscrapers?” they said. “If you want a drink, you sneak down three back alleyways, get the once-over from a couple of ex-prize fighters, and then plank down a dollar for a shot of varnish that would rot the guts out of a goat! . . . And the women!”—the voices rose here with infuriated scorn. “What a nice lot of cold-blooded gold-digging bastards they’ve turned out to be! . . . I spent thirty dollars taking one of ’em to a show and to a night club afterward. When bedtime came, do you think I got anything out of it? . . . ‘You may kiss my little hand,’ she says . . . ‘You may kiss my little-, that’s what you may do,’” the voices snarled with righteous bitterness. “When I asked her if she was going to come through, she started to yell for the cops! . . . A woman who tried to pull one like that over here would get sent to Siberia! . . . A nice country I don’t think! . . . Now, get this! Me, I’m a Frenchman, see!” the voices said with a convincing earnestness. “These guys know how to live, see? This is my country, where I belong. See? . . . Johnny, luh meme chose pour mwah et m’seer! . . . Fill ’em up again, kid.”
“Carpen-teer!” the voices then rose jeeringly, in true accents of French pugnacity. “Sure, I’m a Frenchman—but Carpen-teer! Where do yuh get that stuff? Christ, Dempsey could a took that frog the best day he ever saw! . . . An accident!” the voices yelled. “Whattya mean—an accident? Didn’t I see the whole thing with my own eyes? Wasn’t I back there then? . . . Wasn’t I talkin’ t’ Jack himself an hour after the fight was over? . . . An accident! Jesus! The only accident was that he let him last four rounds. ‘I could have taken him in the first if I wanted to,’ Jack says to me. . . . Sure, I’m a Frenchman!” the voice said with belligerent loyalty. “But Carpenteer! Jesus! Where do you get that stuff?”
And, brother, I have heard the voices you will never hear discussing the graces of a life more cultured than any you will ever know—and I know and I know, and yet it is still the same.
Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more! the flying leaf, the broken cloud—“I think,” said they, “that we will live here now I think,” they said, “that we are running down to Spain next week so Francis can do a little writing. . . . And really,” their gay yet cultivated tones continued, “it’s wonderful what you can do here if you only have a little money. . . . Yes, my dear!” their refined accents continued in a tone of gay conviction. “It’s really quite incredible, you know . . . I happen to know of a real honest-to-goodness château near Blois that can be had for something less than seven thousand dollars! . . . It’s all rather incredible, you know,” those light half-English tones went on, “when you consider what it takes to live in Brookline! . . . Francis has always felt that he would like to do a little writing, and I feel somehow the atmosphere is better here for all that sort of thing—it really is, you know. Don’t you think so?” said those gay and cultivated tones of Boston which you, my brother, never yet have heard. “And after all,” those cultivated tones went on in accents of a droll sincerity, “you see all the people here you care to see, I mean, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or other—I mean, the trouble really is in getting a little time alone for yourself. . . . Or do you find it so?” the voices suavely, lightly asked me. . . . “Oh, look! Look at that—there!” they cried with jubilant elation. “I mean that boy and his girl there walking along with their arms around each other! . . . Don’t you just a-do-o-re it? . . . Isn’t it too ma-a-rvelous?” those refined and silvery tones went on with patriotic tenderness. “I mean, there’s something so perfectly sweet and unselfconscious about it all!” the voices said with all the cultivated earnestness of Boston. “Now where?—where?—would you see something like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.
(Seldom in Brookline, lady. O rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade—did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and gelid month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove—it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)
“. . . I mean—these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do. . . . They’re so much simpler about it. . . I mean so much more graceful with that kind of thing. . . . “Il faut un peu de sentiment, n’est-ce pas? . . . Or do you think so?” said those light, those gay, those silvery and half-English tones of cultivated Boston which you, my brother, never yet have heard.
(I got you, lady. That was French. I know . . . But if I felt your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg and said, “Chérie! Petite chérie!”—would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)
O bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but, brother, there are corn-haired girls named Nielsen out in Minnesota, and the blonde thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.
O bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more, the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they’re still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orleans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.
O bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more, and of their flesh is codfish made, but Big Brother’s still waiting for you with his huge red fist behind the barn up in the State of Maine, and they’re still having shotgun marriages at home.
Oh, brother, there are voices that you will never hear—ancestral voices prophesying war, my brother, and rare and radiant voices that you know not of, as they have read us into doom. The genteel voice of Oxenford broke once like chimes of weary unenthusiastic bells across my brain, speaking to me compassionately its judgment on our corrupted lives, gently dealing with the universe, my brother, gently and without labor—gently, brother, gently it dealt with all of us with easy condescension and amused disdain:
“I’m afraid, old boy,” the genteel voice of Oxenford remarked, “you’re up against it over thöh. . . . I really am . . . Thös no place thöh faw the individual any longah,” the genteel voice went on, un-individual brother. “Obviously,” that tolerant voice instructed me, “obviously, thöh can be no cultuah in a country so completely lackin’ in tradition as is yöahs. . . . It’s all so objective—if you see what I main—thös no place left faw the innah life,” it said, oh outward brother! . . . “We Europeans have often obsöved (it’s very curious, you know) that the American is incapable of any real feelin’—it seems quite impawsible faw him to distinguish between true emotion an’ sentimentality—an’ he invayably chooses the lattah! . . . Curious, isn’t it?”—or do you think so, brother? “Of co’se, thöh is yoah beastly sex-prawblem. . . . Yoah women! . . . Oh, deah, deah! . . . Perhaps we’d bettah say no moah . . . but, thöh you ah!”—right in the eye, brother. “Yoah country is a matriahky, my deah fellah . . . it really is, you know” . . . if you can follow us, dear brother. “The women have the men in a state of complete subjection . . . the male is rapidly becomin’ moah sexless and emasculated”—that genteel voice of doom went on—“No!—decidedly you have quite a prawblem befoah you. . . . Obviously thöh can be no cultuah while such a condition puhsists. . . . That is why when my friends say to me, ‘You ought to see America. . . . You really ought, you know’ . . . I say, ‘No thanks. . . . If you don’t mind, I’d rathah not. . . . I think I’ll stay at home’” . . . “I’m sorry,” the compassionate tones of Oxenford went on, “but that’s the way I feel—it really is, you know. . . . Of co’se, I know you couldn’t understand my feelin’—faw aftah all, you ah a Yank—but thöh you ah! Sorry!” it said regretfully, as it spoke to me its courteous and inexpiable judgments of eternal exile, brother, and removed forever the possibility of your ever knowing him. “But that’s the way I feel! I hope you don’t mind,” the voice said gently, with compassion.
