Of Time and the River (141 page)

The rails are laid across eight hundred miles of golden wheat, the rails are wound through mountains, they curve through clay-yellow cuts, they enter tunnels, they are built up across the marshes, they hug the cliff and follow by the river’s bank, they cross the plains with dust and thunder, and they leap through flatness and the dull scrub-pine to meet the sea.

Then he awakes at morning in a foreign land and thinks of home.

For we have awaked at morning in a foreign land and heard the bitter curse of their indictment, and we know what we know, and it will 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 stomach 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 goin’ 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 voice said with a convincing earnestness. “These guys know how to LIVE, see! This is my country where I belong, see! . . . Johnny, luh męme 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 that 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 $7000! . . . 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 really CARE to see, I MEAN, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or another—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. . . . “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-RVELLOUS?” 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 anything like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.

(Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, 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 sultry 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 I began by fondling gracefully 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?)

Oh, 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 Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.

Oh, 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 Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.

Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish made. 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 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 voices 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 labour—gently, brother, gently, it dealt with all of us, with easy condescension and amused disdain.

“I’m afraid, old boy,” the genteel voices of Oxenford remarked, “you’re up against it over thöh. . . . I really am. . . . Thöh’s no peace thö 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 yoähs. . . . It’s all so objective—if you see what I main—thöh’s no place left faw the innah life,” it said, oh, outward brother! “. . . We Europeans have often obsöhved (it’s VERY curious, you know) that the AMERican is capable 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 yoäh beastly dreadful sex- prawblem. . . . Yoäh women! . . . Oh, deah, deah! . . . Perhaps we’d bettah say no moah . . . but, thöh you AH!”—right in the eye, my brother. “Yoäh 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 an’ 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 undahstand my feelin’—faw aftah all, you ah a Yank—but thöh you ah! Sorry!” it said regretfully, as it spoke its courteous but inexorable judgments of eternal exile, brother, and removed for ever the possibility of your ever hearing it. “But that’s the way I feel! I hope you don’t mind,” the voice said gently, with compassion.

No, sir, I don’t mind. We don’t mind, he, she, it, or they don’t mind. Nobody minds, sir, nobody minds. Because, just as you say, sir, oceans are between us, seas have sundered us, there is a magic in you that we cannot fathom—a light, a flame, a glory—an impalpable, indefinable, incomprehensible, undeniable something or other, something which I can never understand or measure because— just as you say, sir—with such compassionate regret, I am—I am—a Yank.

‘Tis true, my brother, we are Yanks. Oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true! I am a Yank! Yet, wherefore Yank, good brother? Hath not a Yank ears? Hath not a Yank lies, truths, bowels of mercy, fears, joys, and lusts? Is he not warmed by the same sun, washed by the same ocean, rotted by the same decay, and eaten by the same worms as a German is? If you kill him, does he not die? If you sweat him, does he not stink? If you lie with his wife or his mistress, does she not whore, lie, fornicate and betray, even as a Frenchman’s does? If you strip him, is he not naked as a Swede? Is his hide less white than Baudelaire’s? Is his breath more foul than the King of Spain’s? Is his belly bigger, his neck fatter, his face more hoggish, and his eye more shiny than a Munich brewer’s? Will he not cheat, rape, thieve, whore, curse, hate, and murder like any European? Aye—Yank! But wherefore, wherefore Yank—good brother?

Brother, have we come then from a fated stock? Augured from birth, announced by two dark angels, named in our mother’s womb? And for what? For what? Fatherless, to grope our feelers on the sea’s dark bed, among the polyped squirms, the blind sucks and crawls and sea-valves of the brain, loaded with memory that will not die? To cry our love out in the wilderness, to wake always in the night, smiting the pillow in some foreign land, thinking for ever of the myriad sights and sounds of home?

“While Paris Sleeps!”—By God! while Paris sleeps, to wake and walk and not to sleep; to wake and walk and sleep and wake, and sleep again, seeing dawn come at the window-square that cast its wedge before our glazed, half-sleeping eyes, seeing soft, hated foreign light, and breathing soft, dull languid air that could not bite and tingle up the blood, seeing legend and lie and fable wither in our sight as we saw what we saw, knew what we knew.

Sons of the lost and lonely fathers, sons of the wanderers, children of hardy loins, the savage earth, the pioneers, what had we to do with all their bells and churches? Could we feed our hunger on portraits of the Spanish king? Brother, for what? For what? To kill the giant of loneliness and fear, to slay the hunger that would not rest, that would not give us rest.

Of wandering for ever, and the earth again. Brother, for what? For what? For what? For the wilderness, the immense and lonely land. For the unendurable hunger, the unbearable ache, the incurable loneliness. For the exultancy whose only answer is the wild goat-cry. For a million memories, ten thousand sights and sounds and shapes and smells and names of things that only we can know.

For what? For what? Not for a nation. Not for a people, not for an empire, not for a thing we love or hate.

For what? For a cry, a space, an ecstasy. For a savage and nameless hunger. For a living and intolerable memory that may not for a second be forgotten, since it includes all the moments of our lives, includes all we do and are. For a living memory; for ten thousand memories; for a million sights and sounds and moments; for something like nothing else on earth; for something which possesses us.

For something under our feet, and around us and over us; something that is in us and part of us, and proceeds from us, that beats in all the pulses of our blood.

Brother, for what?

First for the thunder of imperial names, the names of men and battles, the names of places and great rivers, the mighty names of the States. The name of The Wilderness; and the names of Antietam, Chancellorsville, Shiloh, Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbour, the Wheat Fields, Ball’s Bluff, and the Devil’s Den; the names of Cowpens, Brandywine, and Saratoga; of Death Valley, Chickamauga, and the Cumberland Gap. The names of the Nantahalahs, the Bad Lands, the Painted Desert, the Yosemite, and the Little Big Horn; the names of Yancey and Cabarrus counties; and the terrible name of Hatteras.

Then, for the continental thunder of the States: the names of Montana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Dakotas; the names of Oregon and Indiana, of Kansas and the rich Ohio; the powerful name of Pennsylvania, and the name of Old Kentucky; the undulance of Alabama; the names of Florida and North Carolina.

In the red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear—the rattle of arrows in laurel leaves, the war-cries round the painted buttes, and the majestical names of the Indian nations: the Pawnees, the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Blackfeet, the Seminoles, the Cherokees, the Sioux, the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Navajos, the Utes, the Omahas, the Onondagas, the Chippewas, the Crees, the Chickasaws, the Arapahoes, the Catawbas, the Dakotas, the Apaches, the Croatans, and the Tuscaroras; the names of Powhatan and Sitting Bull; and the name of the great Chief, Rain-In-The-Face. Of wandering for ever, and the earth again: in red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear. The arrows rattle in the laurel leaves, and the elm- roots thread the bones of buried lovers. There have been war-cries on the Western trails, and on the plains the gun-stock rusts upon a handful of bleached bones. The barren earth? Was no love living in the wilderness?