You Can't Go Home Again (21 page)

He thought about his clothes. Elegant in dress, always excellently correct, he wore fresh garments every day. No cotton touched him. He bought underclothes of the finest silk, and he had more than forty suits from London. Every morning he examined his wardrobe studiously, choosing with care and with a good eye for harmony the shoes, socks, shirt, and necktie he would wear, and before he selected a suit he was sometimes lost in thought for several minutes. He loved to open wide the door of his great closet and see his suits hanging there in rows in all their groomed and regimented elegance. He liked the strong, clean smell of honest cloth, and in those forty several shapes and colours he saw as many pleasing reflections and variations of his own character. They filled him, as did everything about him, with a sense of morning confidence, joy, and vigour.

For breakfast he would have orange juice, two leghorn eggs, soft boiled, two slices of crisp, thin toast, and tasty little segments of pink Praguer ham, which looked so pretty on fresh parsley sprigs. And he would have coffee, strong coffee, cup after cup of it. So fortified, he would face the world with cheerful strength, ready for whatever chance the day might bring him.

The smell of earth which he had caught in the air this morning was good, and the remembrance of it laid a soothing unction on his soul. Although city-bred, Mr. Jack was as sensitive to the charms of Mother Earth as any man alive. He liked the cultivated forms of nature—the swarded lawns of great estates, gay regiments of brilliant garden flowers, and rich masses of clumped shrubbery. All these things delighted him. The call of the simple life had grown stronger every year, and he had built a big country house in Westchester County.

He liked the more expensive forms of sport. He would frequently go out in the country to play golf, and he loved bright sunlight on the rich velvet of the greens and the new-mown smell of fairways. And afterwards, when he had stood below the bracing drive of the shower and had felt the sweat of competition wash cleanly from his well-set form, he liked to loaf upon the cool veranda of the club and talk about his score, joke and laugh, pay or collect his bets, and drink good Scotch with other men of note. And he liked to watch his country’s flag flap languidly upon the tall white pole because it looked so pretty there.

Mr. Jack also liked the ruder and more natural forms of beauty. He liked to see tall grasses billowing on a hillside, and he liked old shaded roads that wound away to quietness from driven glares of speed and concrete. He was touched by the cosmic sadness of leafy orange, gold, and russet brown in mid-October, and he had seen the evening light upon the old red of a mill and felt deep stillness in his heart (“all—could anyone believe it?—within thirty miles of New York City”). On those occasions the life of the metropolis had seemed very far away. And often he had paused to pluck a flower or stand beside a brook in thought. But after sighing with regret as, among such scenes, he thought of the haste and folly of man’s life, Mr. Jack always came back to the city. For life was real, and life was earnest, and Mr. Jack was a business man.

He was a business man, so of course he liked to gamble. What is business but a gamble? Will prices go up or down? Will Congress do this or that? Will there be war in some far corner of the earth, and a shortage of some essential raw material? What will the ladies wear next year—big hats or little ones, long dresses or short? You make your guess and back it with your money, and if you don’t guess right often enough you don’t remain a business man. So Mr. Jack liked to gamble, and he gambled like the business man he was. He gambled every day upon the price of stocks. And at night he often gambled at his club. It was no piker’s game he played. He never turned a hair about a thousand dollars. Large sums did not appal him. He was not frightened by Amount and Number. That is why he liked great crowds. That is why the beetling cliffs of immense and cruel architectures lapped his soul in strong security. When he saw a ninety-storey building he was not one to fall down grovelling in the dust, and beat a maddened brain with fists, and cry out: “Woe! 0 woe is me!” No. Every cloud-lost spire of masonry was a talisman of power, a monument to the everlasting empire of American business. It made him feel good. For that empire was his faith, his fortune, and his life. He had a fixed place in it.

Yet his neck was not stiff, nor his eye hard. Neither was he very proud. For he had seen the men who lean upon their sills at evening, and those who swarm from rat holes in the ground, and often he had wondered what their lives were like.

Mr. Jack finished shaving and rinsed his glowing face, first with hot water, then with cold. He dried it with a fresh towel, and he rubbed it carefully with a fragrant, gently stinging lotion. This done, he stood for a moment, satisfied, regarding his image, softly caressing the velvet texture of dose-shaved, ruddy cheeks with stroking fingertips. Then he turned briskly away, ready for his bath.

He liked the morning plunge in his great sunken tub, the sensual warmth of sudsy water, and the sharp, aromatic cleanness of the bath salts. He had an eye for aesthetic values, too, and he liked to loll back in the tub and watch the dance of water spangles in their magic shift and play upon the creamy ceiling. Most of all, he liked to come up pink and dripping, streaked liberally with tarry-scented soap, and then he loved the stinging drive and shock of needled spray, the sense of hardihood and bracing conflict, and he liked the glow of abundant health as he stepped forth, draining down upon a thick cork mat, and vigorously rubbed himself dry in the folds of a big, crashy bath towel.

All this he now anticipated eagerly as he let fall with a full thud the heavy silver-headed waste-pipe stopper. He turned the hot-water tap on as far as it would go, and watched a moment as the tumbling water began smokily to fill the tub with its thick boiling gurgle. Then, scuffing the slippers from his feet, he rapidly stripped off his silk pyjamas. He felt with pride the firm-swelling flexor muscle of his upper arm, and observed with keen satisfaction the reflection in the mirror of his plump, well-conditioned body. He was well-moulded and solid-looking, with hardly a trace of unwholesome fat upon him—a little undulance, perhaps, across the kidneys, a mere suggestion of a bay about the waist, but not enough to cause concern, and far less than he had seen on many men twenty years his junior. Content, deep and glowing, filled him. He turned the water off and tested it with a finger, which he jerked back with an exclamation of hurt surprise. In his self-absorption he had forgotten the cold water, so now he turned it on and waited while it seethed with tiny milky bubbles and sent waves of trembling light across the hot blue surface of his bath. At last he tried it with a cautious toe and found it tempered to his liking. He shut the water off.

And now, stepping back a pace or two, he gripped the warm tiling of the floor with his bare toes, straightened up with military smartness, drew in a deep breath, and vigorously began his morning exercises. With stiffened legs he bent strongly towards the floor, grunting as his groping finger-tips just grazed the tiling. Then he swung into punctual rhythms, counting: “One!—Two!—Three!—Four!” as his body moved. And all the time while his arms beat their regular strokes through the air, his thoughts continued to amble down the pleasant groove that his life had worn for them.

To-night was the great party, and he liked the brilliant gaiety of such gatherings. He was a wise man, too, who knew the world and the city well, and, although kind, he was not one to miss the fun of a little harmless byplay, the verbal thrust and parry of the clever ones, or the baiting of young innocents by those who were wily at the game. Something of the sort could usually be counted on when all kinds of people were brought together at these affairs. It gave a spice and zest to things. Some yokel, say, fresh from the rural districts, all hands and legs and awkwardness, hooked and wriggling on a cruel and cunning word—a woman’s, preferably, because women were so swift and deft in matters of this nature. But there were men as well whose skill was great—pampered lap-dogs of rich houses, or feisty, nimble-witted little she-men whose mincing tongues were always good for one or two shrewd thrusts of poison in a hayseed’s hide. There was something in the face of a fresh-baited country boy as it darkened to a slow, smouldering glow of shame, surprise, and anger and sought with clumsy and inept words to retort upon the wasp which had stung it and winged away—something so touching—that Mr. Jack, when he saw it, felt a sense of almost paternal tenderness for the hapless victim, a delightful sense of youth and innocence in himself. It was almost as if he were revisiting his own youth.

But enough was enough. Mr. Jack was neither a cruel nor an immoderate man. He liked the gay glitter of the night, the thrill and fever of high stakes, and the swift excitements of new pleasures. He liked the theatre and saw all the best plays, and the better, smarter, wittier revues—the ones with sharp, satiric lines, good dancing, and Gershwin music. He liked the shows his wife designed because she designed them, he was proud of her, and he enjoyed those evenings of ripe culture at the Guild. He also went to prize-fights in his evening clothes, and once when he came home he had the red blood of a champion on the white boiled bosom of his shirt. Few men could say as much.

He liked the social swim, and the presence of the better sort of actors, artists, writers, and wealthy, cultivated Jews round his table. He had a kind heart and a loyal nature. His purse was open to a friend in need. He kept a lavish table and a royal cellar, and his family was the apple of his eye.

But he also liked the long velvet backs of lovely women, and the flash of jewellery about their necks. He liked women to be seductive, bright with gold and diamonds to set off the brilliance of their evening gowns. He liked women cut to fashion, with firm breasts, long necks, slender legs, flat hips, and unsuspected depth and undulance. He liked their faces pale, their hair of bronze-gold wire, their red mouths thin, a little cruel, their eyes long, slanting, cat-grey, and lidded carefully. He liked a frosted cocktail shaker in a lady’s hands, and he liked a voice hoarse-husky, city-wise, a trifle weary, ironic, faintly insolent, that said:

“Well! What happened to you, darling? I thought that You would never get here.”

He liked all the things that men are fond of. All of them he had enjoyed himself, each in its proper time and place, and he expected everyone to act as well as he. But ripeness with Mr. Jack was everything, and he always knew the time to stop. His ancient and Hebraic spirit was tempered with a classic sense of moderation. He prized the virtue of decorum highly. He knew the value of the middle way.

He was not a man to wear his heart upon his overcoat, nor risk his life on every corner, nor throw himself away upon a word, nor spend his strength on the impulse of a moment’s wild belief. This was such madness as the Gentiles knew. But, this side idolatry and madness he would go as far for friendship’s sake as any man. He would go with a friend up to the very edge of ruin and defeat, and he would even try to hold him back. But once he saw a man was mad, and not to be persuaded by calm judgment, he was done with him. He would leave him where he was, although regretfully. Are matters helped if the whole crew drowns together with a single drunken sailor? He thought not. He could put a world of sincere meaning in the three words: “What a pity!”

Yes, Mr. Frederick Tack was kind and temperate. He had found life pleasant, and had won from it the secret of wise living. And the secret of wise living was founded in a graceful compromise, a tolerant acceptance. If a man wanted to live in this world without getting his pockets picked, he had better learn how to use his eyes and ears on what was going on around him. But if he wanted to live in this world without getting hit over the head, and without all the useless pain, grief, terror, and bitterness that mortify human flesh, he had also better learn how not to use his eyes and ears. This may sound difficult, but it had not been so for Mr. Jack. Perhaps some great inheritance of suffering, the long, dark ordeal of his race, had left him, as a precious distillation, this gift of balanced understanding. At any rate, he had not learned it, because it could not be taught: he had been born with it.

Therefore, he was not a man to rip the sheets in darkness or beat his knuckles raw against a wall. He would not madden furiously in the envenomed passages of night, nor would he ever be carried smashed and bloody from the stews. A woman’s ways were no doubt hard to bear, but love’s bitter mystery had broken no bones for Mr. Jack, and, so far as he was concerned, it could not murder sleep the way an injudicious wiener schitzel could, or that young Gentile fool, drunk again, probably, ringing the telephone at one a.m. to ask to speak to Esther.

Mr. Jack’s brow was darkened as he thought of it. He muttered wordlessly. If fools are fools, let them be fools where their folly will not injure or impede the slumbers of a serious man.

Yes, Men could rob, lie, murder, swindle, trick, and cheat—the whole world knew as much. And women—well, they were women, and there was no help for that. Mr. Jack had also known something of the pain and folly that twist the indignant soul of youth—it was too bad, of course, too bad. But regardless of all this, the day was day and men must work, the night was night and men must sleep, and it was, he felt,
intolerable

“One!”

Red of face, he bent stiffly, with a grunt, until his fingers grazed the rich cream tiling of the bathroom floor.

—_intolerable!_----

“Two!”

He straightened sharply, his hands at his sides.

—_that a man with serious work to do_----

“Three!”

His arms shot up to full stretching height above his head, and came swiftly down again until he held clenched fists against his breast.

—_should be pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night by a crazy young fool!_----

“Four!”

His closed fists shot outwards in a strong driving movement, and came back to his sides again.