Of Time and the River (104 page)

While this was going on, Captain Nicholl would be thrumming madly on the strings of a banjo. He kept the instrument gripped somehow below his withered arm, fingering the end strings with his two good fingers, knocking the tune out with his good right hand, and keeping time with a beating foot. Then with a sudden violent movement he would put the banjo down, snatch up the sticks of the trap drum, and begin to rattle out a furious accompaniment, beating the bass drum with his foot meanwhile, and reaching over to smash cymbals, chimes, and metal rings from time to time. He played with a kind of desperate fury, his mouth fixed in a strange set grin, his bright eyes burning with a sharp wild glint of madness.

They sang as they played, bursting suddenly into the refrain of some popular song with the same calculated spontaneity and spurious enthusiasm of the professional orchestra, mouthing the words of negro blues and jazz with an obvious satisfaction, with an accent which was remarkably good, and yet which had something foreign and inept in it that made the familiar phrases of American music sound almost as strange in their mouths as if an orchestra of skilful patient Japanese were singing them.

They sang:

“Yes, sir! That’s my baby Yes, sir! Don’t mean maybe Yes, sir! That’s my baby now!”

or:

“Oh, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more It ain’t gonna rain no more”

or:

“I got dose blu-u-ues”—

the young fellow at the piano rolling his eyes round in a ridiculous fashion, and mouthing out the word “blues” extravagantly as he sang it, the little dark fellow bending forward in an unctuous sweep as the note came gloating fatly from the horn, and Captain Nicholl swaying sideways in his chair as he strummed upon the banjo strings, and improvising a mournful accompaniment of his own, somewhat as follows: “I got dose blu-u-ues! Yes, suh! Oh! I got dose blues! Yes, suh! I sure have got ‘em—dose blu-u-ues— blu-u-ues—blu-u-ues!—” his mouth never relaxing from its strange fixed grin, nor his eyes from their bright set stare of madness as he swayed and strummed and sang the words that came so strangely from his lips.

It was a weird scene, an incredible performance, and somehow it pierced the heart with a wild nameless pity, an infinite sorrow and regret.

Something precious, irrecoverable, had gone out of them, and they knew it. They fought the emptiness in them with this deliberate, formidable, and mad intensity of a calculated gaiety, a terrifying mimicry of mirth, and the storm-wind howled around them in dark trees, and Eugene felt that he had known them for ever, and had no words to say to them—and no door.

LXXI

Once or twice a week Eugene went into town and had tea in the rooms of a boyhood friend whom he had known at school and who was now a Rhodes scholar at Merton College. The name of this youth was Johnny Park: he was a good-natured, industrious, and rather plodding boy, and thus far that patient, diligent and well-ordered plan of life which he had followed since his childhood had brilliantly succeeded. Formed in a native air, and followed out beneath familiar skies, that plan had never been interrupted by any doubt or strangeness, by any serious difficulty or dark confusion of the soul, or by any of the unforeseen surprises, shocks, or bewilderments of chance which break upon our lives with storm-like fury and twist our precious plans awry.

Therefore, when he had been awarded the Rhodes scholarship a few months before, during his last year at the university, it seemed that Johnny’s plan of life was marching onto its inevitable fulfilment. Everyone had known he would be appointed; it came to pass with an ordained precision, and Johnny had announced, just as he should, that he would study “International Law,” and everything was right and proper as it ought to be, and now he was here to march onward toward his shining goal, as he had always done.

But, for the first time in his life, something had gone wrong, something had gone terribly, appallingly amiss, and Johnny did not yet know what it was. Perhaps he never would, but now he was in the greatest trouble and confusion of his life, and he knew it. His voice was still slow, drawling, and good-natured, he was full of kindly warmth and friendliness as he had always been, he had responded quickly, dutifully, to all the customs and observances of the new life—had had grey baggy trousers and tweed coats made at the tailor’s shop, had made arrangements for trips and walking- tours upon the Continent with his fellows in vacation time, had met his tutors, found out about the proctors and the penalties, learned the system of the college bills and battels, joined the Union and learned to go out dutifully for sports in the afternoon—he had even learned the mysterious ceremonial of tea and had it in his rooms each afternoon—all this he had learned and done with a punctilious thoroughness; but something had gone wrong.

Everything about Johnny was just as it had always been—his smile, his slow, good-natured voice, his amiable warmth and modesty and friendliness—all was the same with him except his eyes. But the quiet, thoughtful, tranquilly assured expression of his eyes had changed: he had in them the stunned, bewildered look, full of pain and a groping confusion, of a man who has been brutally slugged at the base of the brain and is not yet certain what has happened to him.

His was an impossible situation, a tragic ordeal of loneliness, strangeness, and bewilderment among all the complex and alien forms of a new life for which nothing in the old had prepared him. Born in a small town in the South, going to school there and at his own State University, he had all his life breathed and lived in a familiar air, heard the familiar words of well-known voices all round him, known and seen nothing but assurance, certitude and success in everything he planned.

And now all this, even the earth beneath his feet, had melted from him like a wisp of smoke, and he was wandering blindly about in a life as strange to him as Asia, as far as the moon, and knew nowhere to turn, nothing to grasp, no door to enter. In his whole life he had never seen or visited a great city, and then had seen New York just for a day or two, and then for seven days had known for the first time the mystery of the sea and a great ship, and now was here in the green English country, in an ancient town, hurled cruelly, suddenly, naked and unprepared for it as he was, into a life more subtle, complex and confusing than his placid soul had ever dreamed a life could be.

When Eugene asked him if he had stopped in London on his way to Oxford, the look of pain and bewilderment in his eyes had deepened, and he had answered in a slow confused voice:

“We stopped there overnight but we never got to see much of it. We came on out here the next morning.”

The boy was silent a moment, then he laughed good-naturedly with a troubled and uncertain note.

“It sure looked big enough from what I could see of it. I want to get down there some time to see what it is like. I guess I’ve got a lot to learn,” he said.

He could remember London like a man who is whirled blindly at night through a huge, limitless, smoky kaleidoscope of sound and sight and moving objects, and this memory of that enormous terrifying age-encrusted web of life—that web without end or measure, which seems blackened, soaked, and saturated not only in the grey light that falls upon it with its weight of eight million lives, but also by the grey light of compacted centuries and all the countless men who lived there and have died—that great grey web appropriately known to seafaring men as “The Smoke” had added measurably to the sense of bewilderment, terror, and naked desolation in him.

And it was pitifully the same with all the rest of them—the little group of Rhodes scholars that gathered together in Johnny’s rooms every afternoon, and who seemed to huddle and cling together desperately as if they would try to shape, to resurrect, or to create some little pattern of familiar life, some small oasis of warmth and friendliness and familiar things to which they turned with desperate relief from all the alien and hostile loneliness of a life which they had never entered, which they could never make their own, which stood against them like a wall they could not pass, closed against them like a door they could not open.

Curiously, among this group of five or six Rhodes scholars, which formed the nucleus of the group which met in Johnny’s rooms, only two—Johnny and his room-mate, a youth named Price—were first-year men. The others were either in the second or the final year of their appointments, but they seemed to have made no friendships with anyone save with a few of the other Rhodes men, to have no other place to go, and to welcome the hospitality of these two boys with a desperate unspoken gratefulness.

There were, besides Johnny and his room-mate Price, three others who came there every day. One was a chunky, red-faced fellow, with coarse undistinguished features, who parted his short crinkly hair in the middle and had come there from Brown University, where he had been a member of the football team. He was in his second year abroad, and no longer wore his little golden football, but a good deal of his self-satisfied complacency was intact: he was thicker of hide and sense than any of the others, and evidently felt that his three years at Oxford were going to give him a kind of pick- and-choose freedom with any kind of employment when he got back home.

He asked Eugene how much he had been paid by the university in New York City where he had been employed as an instructor, and when Eugene told him, smiled tolerantly, saying that he wouldn’t mind “trying it for a year after I get back until I have a chance to look round.” He then informed Eugene graciously that he was open to an offer, and would even be willing to work for no more than they paid HIM, while he “looked round.” He added with a little smile:

“I don’t imagine that I’ll have much trouble: a man with an Oxford degree gets snapped up pretty quick over there, doesn’t he? Still,” he went on magnanimously, “I wouldn’t mind living in New York a year or two until I settle down—so you can give my name to them, if you don’t mind.”

The other two in the group that came to Johnny’s rooms were both third-year men. One was a frail, sensitive, and ćsthetic-looking youth named Sterling. Although he came from one of the Western states—Arizona or New Mexico—there was nothing in him to suggest the wildness, openness, and grandeur of his native scenery. Rather, he was a most precious, a most subtle, elegantly sad, quietly bitter and disdainful fellow: he was quietly, fervently, subtly a devoted follower of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and although he revealed his theories sparely, cautiously, and by evasive indirectness, there was in all he said a quiet air of more-in-this- than-meets-the-eye, as if he were saying: “If you want to follow me you’ve got to learn to read between the lines and get my meaning by what is implied rather than by what is said—since there’s no language that can say exactly what my meaning—which is too subtle and exact for any language—is.”

He wore about him always this air of elegant, cold, and slightly disdainful restraint, and he had a habit of looking across his thin arched hands with a faint disdainful smile, and listening coldly, saying nothing, while the others talked, as if the waste-land chatter of their tongues, the waste-land vacancy of their lost waste-land souls was something that he knew he must endure, but would endure with his cold faint disdainful smile, his soul steeped in cold and patient weariness till death should mercifully release him.

The other man was a Jew named Fried, and that man Eugene could never forget. Eugene didn’t know where he came from, how he got there, who made him a Rhodes scholar, but he knew that of them all, save Johnny, he was the only one who had maintained his integrity, the only one who did not have a spurious, fearful, uneasily evasive quality, the only one who came out with it, the whole packed load of bitterness and hate within him, the only one who had remained himself.

Perhaps it was a bad self to remain: it was certainly a self that was lacking in charm, that had the aggressive, abusive, curiously unrighteous quality of his race—but there he was, terrifically himself and unashamed of it—with a naked formidable integrity of self that blazed with a hard and naked light of a cut jewel, and that Eugene could never forget even when the characters of the rest of them had grown blurred and shapeless and obscure.

Eugene didn’t know where he came from, but he was sure it was from one of the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard—from New York, Boston, Baltimore or Philadelphia. He had seen his face, his figure, and his kind a million times upon the pavements of those cities and incredibly now, that dark unhappy face which never before had seemed to him to be a face at all, nothing but a tidal flood of nameless faces, that strident and abusive tongue which had never before seemed to him to be a single tongue, but just a common, nameless, and unnumbered ugliness of rasping voices, an anathema of bitter cries and harsh derisions—a constant phrase, a dissonance, a weather of the city’s life—all that had been nameless, faceless, characterless and obscure—the look, the sound, the smell of the man-swarm ciphers of the city as dark-eyed, dark- faced, and bitter-tongued they swarmed along the pavements of the cities—all this, in that strange place, was suddenly, weirdly, resumed into a single character—a character that was hard, bitter, unforgettably itself, and that no change of sky or land or custom, nor the huge impact of all the alien and formidable pageantry of the earth, could ever alter by a jot.

Theirs was a wretched, hopeless, lonely life, a futile, feeble, barren life, an impossible, groping, wretched insecure life—and Fried was the only one of them to meet it, to admit it, to denounce it with all the bitterness of his bitter soul, and to remain himself against it. The rest were frightened, bitter, lonely, homesick, and afraid—afraid of everything, afraid of their own loneliness and their own dismal unsuccess, afraid to confess the desolation of their souls, the bitter disappointment of their hopes, afraid to laugh too loud, to show too much exuberance or enthusiasm for anything, lest someone should consider them a “hearty,” and pin that feared and hated label on them.

They were afraid to express any native extravagance in dress, speech or manner lest they be branded as “bounders,” afraid to talk their natural speech in their own manner lest they seem too crudely, raucously and offensively American, and afraid to imitate too studiously the language of the nation for fear that their own fellows would sneer at them for servile snobbishness, for “speaking with an English accent.” Thus, caught in the web of a thousand fears, the meshes of a thousand impossible restraints, trying to maintain their lives, their characters, their native dignities even while they tried to subdue them by a thousand small half-mimicries, to be themselves even while they tried to shape themselves to something else, their characters finally, strained through the impossible weavings of this mad design, teetering frantically to maintain a crazy balance on a thousand wires, were reduced at last to the consistency of blubber—and trying to be everything, they succeeded finally in being nothing.