Of Time and the River (78 page)

And yet these same letters, in which he protested the cold detachment of his spirit, his freedom from the romantic fleshliness which degraded the lives of lesser men, were invariably tagged and embellished by little verses of his own contriving, all of them inspired by the emotion he pretended to despise. He always had a number of these little poems written down in a small note-book of black leather which he carried with him, and in which, at this time, with a precise and meticulous hand, he noted down his rarest thoughts, excerpts from books he had been reading, and these brief poems. At this lime Abe was in a state of obscure and indefinable evolution: it was impossible to say what he would become, or what form his life would take, nor could he have told, himself. He walked along at a stooping loping gait, his face prowling around mistrustfully and with a glance full of tortured discontent: he was tormented by a dozen obscure desires and purposes and by a deep but murky emotionalism: his flesh was ugly, bowed and meagre—conscious of a dreary inferiority (thus, in later and more prosperous years, he confessed to Eugene that he loved to abuse and “order around” brusquely the waiters in restaurants, because of the feeling of power and authority it gave him), but his spirit was sustained by an immense and towering vanity, a gloomy egotism which told him he was not as other men, that his thoughts and feelings were too profound and rare to be understood and valued by the base world about him. At the same time he was secretly and fiercely ambitious, although the energy of his ambition was scattered in a half-dozen directions and could fasten on no purpose: by turn, he wanted to be a teacher and a great investigator in the sciences— and in this he might have succeeded, for he showed a brilliant aptness in biology and physics—or an economist, a critic of literature, an essayist, a historian, a poet, or a novelist. His desire was high: at this time he did not want to make money; he regarded a life that was given up to money-making with contempt, and although he sometimes spoke of the study of medicine, he looked at the profession of law, which was the profession his sister and his family wanted him to follow, with horror and revulsion: he shrank with disgust from the prospect of joining the hordes of beak-nosed crooks, poured out of the law school year by year and who were adept in every dodge of dishonourable trickery, in working every crooked wire, or squirming through each rat’s hole of escape and evasion the vast machinery of the law afforded them.

Such a man was Abe Jones when Eugene first knew him: dreary, tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual and joylessly poetic, his spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk, a grey pavement cipher, an atom of the slums, a blind sea-crawl in the drowning tides of the man-swarm, and yet, pitifully, tremendously, with a million other dreary Hebrew yearners, convinced that he was the Messiah for which the earth was groaning. Such was he in the state of becoming, an indefinable shape before necessity and his better parts—the hard, savage, tough and honest city sinew, hardened the mould—made a man of him,—this was Abe at this time, an obscure and dreary chrysalis, and yet a dogged, loyal, and faithful friend, the salt of the earth, a wonderfully good, rare, and high person.

LII

“Where shall I go now? What shall I do?” A dozen times that year he made these tormented journeys of desire. Why did he make them? What did he expect to find? He did not know: he only knew that at night he would feel again the huge and secret quickening of desire to which all life in the city moved, that he would be drawn again, past hope and past belief, to the huge glare, the swarming avenues of night, with their great tides of livid night-time faces. He only knew that he would prowl again, again, each night, the thronging passages of rats’ alley where the dead men were; that the million faces, forms and shapes of ungraspable desire would pass, would weave and throng and vanish from his grasp like evil figures in a dream, and that the old unanswered questions which have foiled so many million lives lost there in the labyrinthine maze and fury of the city’s life, would come back again, and that he never found an answer to them.

“What shall I do now? Where shall I go?” They returned to mock his furious prowling of kaleidoscopic night with their unsearchable enigmas and when this happened, instant, mad, and overwhelming the desire to burst out of these canyoned walls that held him in, this Tantalus mocker of a city that duped his hunger with a thousand phantom shapes of impossible desire. And when this blind and furious impulse came to him, he knew only one desire—to escape, to escape instantly from the great well and prison of the city; and he had only one conviction—wild, mad, overmastering in its huge unreason—that escape, fulfilment, a fortunate and impossibly happy fruition lay somewhere out across the dark and lonely continent— was somewhere there in any of its thousand silent sleeping little towns—could be found anywhere, certainly, instantly, by the divining rod of miraculous chance, upon the pounding wheels of a great train, at any random halt made in the night.

Thus, by an ironic twist which at the time he did not see or understand, this youth, who in his childhood, like a million other boys, had dreamed and visioned in the darkness of the shining city, and of the fortunate good and happy life that he would find there, was now fleeing from it to find in unknown little towns the thing that he had come to the great city to possess.

A dozen times that year he made these mad and sudden journeys: to New England many times, to Pennsylvania, or Virginia; and more than once at night up the great river towards the secret North.

One night that year, in the month of March, he was returning from the wintry North—from one of those sudden and furious journeys of caprice, which were decided on the impulse of the moment, towards which he was driven by the goadings of desire, and from which he would return, as now, weary, famished, unassuaged, and driven to seek anew in the city’s life for some appeasement.

Under an immense, stormy, and tempestuous sky the train was rushing across the country with a powerful unperturbed movement; it seemed in this dark and wintry firmament of earth and sky that the train was the only fixed and timeless object—the land swept past the windows of the train in a level and powerful tide of white fields, clumped woodland, and the solid, dark, and warmly grouped buildings of a farm, pierced scarcely by a light. High up, in the immense and tempestuous skies, the clouds were driving at furious speed, in an inexhaustible processional, across the visage of a wild and desolate moon, which broke through momently with a kind of savage and beleaguered reprisal to cast upon the waste below a shattered, lost and fiercely ragged light. Here then, in this storm-lost desolation of earth and sky, the train hung poised as the only motionless and unchanging object, and all things else—the driving and beleaguered moon, the fiercely scudding clouds, the immense regimentation of heaven which stormed onward with the fury of a gigantic and demoniacal cavalry, and the lonely and immortal earth below sweeping past with a vast fan-shaped stroke of field and wood and house—had in them a kind of unchanging changefulness, a spoke- like recurrence which, sweeping past into oblivion, would return as on the upstroke of a wheel to repeat itself with an immutable precision, an unvarying repetition.

And under the spell of this lonely processional of white field, dark wood and wild driven sky, he fell into a state of strange waking-sleepfulness, a kind of comatose perceptiveness that the motion of the train at night had always induced in him. In this weary world of sleep and wakefulness and all the flooding visions of old time and memory, he was conscious of the grand enchantments of the landscape which is at all times one of the most beautiful and lovely on the continent, and which now, under this wild spell of moon and scudding cloud and moving fields and wintry woods, for ever stroking past the windows of the train, evoked that wild and solemn joy—the sense of nameless hope, impossible desire, and man’s tragic brevity—which only the wildness, the cruel and savage loveliness of the American earth can give.

Thus, as he lay in his berth, in this strange state of comatose perceptiveness he was conscious first of the vast level snowclad fields of the Canadian boundaries, the lights of farms, the whipping past of darkened little stations; then of a wooded land, the foothills of the Adirondacks, dark with their wintry foresting, wild with snow; the haunting vistas of the Champlain country, strange as time, the noble music of Ticonderoga, with its tread of Indians and old wars, and then the pleasant swelling earth and fields and woods and lonely little towns set darkly in the night with a few spare lights; and pauses in the night at Saratoga, and for a moment the casual and familiar voices of America, and people crowding in the windows of the train, and old familiar words and quiet greetings, the sudden thrum and starting of a motor car, and then dark misty woods, white fields, a few spare lights and houses, all sweeping past beneath the wild beleaguered moon with the fan- like stroke of the immortal and imperturbable earth, with a wild and haunting loneliness, with tragic brevity and strong joy.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he started up into sharp wakefulness. The train had slackened in its speed, it was slowing for a halt at the outskirts of a town: in the distance upon the flanks of low sweeping hills he could see a bracelet of hard bright lights, and presently the outposts of the town appeared. And now he saw the spokes of empty wintry streets, and hard street lamps that cast a barren light upon the grimy façades of old houses; and now old grimy blocks of buildings of brown stone and brick, all strange and close and near and as familiar as a dream.

And now the train was slowing to its halt; the old red brick of station warehouses, the worn rust and grime of factory walls abutting on the tracks with startling nearness, and all of it was as it had always been, as he had always known it, and yet he had not seen the place before.

And now the train had slowed to a full halt; he found himself looking at a wall of old red brick at one of the station’s corners. It was one of the old brick buildings that one sees in the station section of almost any town: in the wall beside the tracks there was a dingy-looking door and above the door a red electric bulb was burning with a dim but sinister invitation. Even as he looked the door opened, a man stepped quickly out, looked quickly to both sides with the furtive and uneasy look men have when they come out of a brothel, and then, turning up the collar of his overcoat, he walked rapidly away.

And at the corner, in the first floor of the old brick building, he could see a disreputable old bar-room, and this, too, had this dreamlike, stage-like immediacy, it was so near to him that he could almost have touched the building with his hand, a kind of gigantic theatrical setting, overpowering in its immediacy, as strange and as familiar as a dream.

Without moving in his berth he could look through the windows of the bar, which were glazed or painted half-way up, and see everything that was going on inside. Despite the lateness of the hour—the round visage of a clock above the bar told him it was just four o’clock—there were several people in the place, and it was doing an open thriving business. Several men, who by their look were probably railway workers, taxi-drivers, and night-time prowlers of the station district—(one even wore black leather leggings and had the fresh red complexion and healthy robust look of a countryman)—were standing at the old dark walnut bar and drinking beer. The bartender stood behind the bar with his thick hands stretched out and resting on the bar, and with a wet cloth in one hand. He wore an apron and was in his shirtsleeves; he had the dead eyes and heavy sagging night-time face that some bartenders have, but he could be seen talking to the men, responding to their jests, with a ready professional cordiality that was nevertheless warily ready for any situation that might come up. And further down the bar, another man was drinking beer and with him was a woman. She was one of the heavy coarsely friendly and experienced prostitutes that one also finds in railway sections; she was drinking beer, talking to the man amiably and with coarse persuasiveness, and presently she took his arm with a rude persuasive gesture and jerking her head towards the stairs pulled him towards her. Grinning rather sheepishly, with a pleased but foolish look, he went along with her, and they could be seen going upstairs. When they were gone, the other men drinking at the bar spoke quietly to the bartender, and in a moment he could see them shaking with coarse guffawing laughter. Behind the bar, in old ornately carved walnut frames, there were big mirrors, and at the top of the central mirror there was an American flag, fluted and spread fan-wise, and below this there was a picture of the beetling eyebrows and nobly Roman features of the President of the United States, Warren G. Harding. The whole place looked very old and shabby, and yet somehow warm; dingy with old lights, and stained with drink and worn with countless elbows, and weary and worn and brutal with its memories of ten thousand nights of brawls and lust and drunkenness—its immeasurable age and dateless weariness of violence and desire.

Then the train moved slowly on, and left this scene for ever; it passed the street, and there were lights here, taxis, rows of silent buildings, and then the station, the sight of the baggage room big with trunks, piled with mail sacks, crates and boxes, and there were also a few people, a yardman with a lantern, a conductor waiting with a small case in his hand, a few passengers, the brick sides of the station, and the concrete quays.

Then the train stopped again, and this time it stopped across the street at the other end of the station. And again, from his dark berth, he could see without moving this whole immense and immediate theatre of human event, and again it gripped and held him with its dream-like magic, its unbelievable familiarity. At the corner, in another old brick building, there was a little luncheon-room of the kind he had seen ten thousand times before. Several taxi-cabs were drawn up along the curb, and from the luncheon-room he could hear the hoarse wrangling voices of the taxi-drivers, joined in their incessant and trivial debate, and through the misted window he could see the counterman, young, thin, sallow, wearily attentive, wearing a dirty apron, and in his shirt-sleeves, leaning back, his thin white arms humbly folded as he listened.