You Can't Go Home Again (66 page)

—Women!

—To be folded, sheltered, guarded, kept from all the danger, violence, and savagery, the grimed pollution of this earth’s coarse thumb, each to ply her needle, learn to keep her house, do a woman’s work, be wifely, and—and—“lead the sort of life a woman ought to lead,” Fox whispers to himself—“the kind of life she was intended for.”

Which is to say, produce more fleecelings for the fold, Fox? Who will, in turn, find “good” husbands, and a fold, learn sewing, housewifery, and “lead the sort of life a woman ought to lead,” produce still other fleecelings, and so on,
ad infinitum
, to world’s end for ever, or until----

—The day of wrath, the huge storm howling through the earth again—again the Terror and Jemappes I—again November and Moscow!—the whole flood broke through, the mighty river re-arisen, the dark tide flowing in the hearts of men, and a great wind howling through the earth, good Fox, that tears off roof-tops like a sheet of paper, bends the strongest oak-trees to the ground, knocks down the walls, and levels the warmest, strongest, and most solid folds that ever sheltered fleecelings in security—leaving fleecelings where?

O Fox, is there no answer?

Leaving fleecelings there to knit a pattern of fine needlework on the hurricane? Leaving fleecelings there to ply housewifery on the flood? Leaving fleecelings to temper the bleak storms of misery to the perfumed tenderness of fleeceling hides? To find “good” husbands in the maelstrom’s whirl? To produce more fleecelings in order to be secure, protected, in doing a woman’s work, in leading “the kind of life she was intended for”----

Oh, where, Fox, where?

—To draw compassion from the cobble-stones? Security from iron skies? Solicitude from the subduer’s bloody hand? Arthurian gallantries from the brutal surge of the on-marching mass? Still no answer, subtle Fox?

What, then? Will not hoarse voices fogged with blood and triumph soften to humility when they behold the fleeceling loveliness? And while the blind mob fills the desolated streets, will not a single cloak be thrown down for dainty fleeceling feet to tread upon? Will the shattered masonries of all those (as we thought) impregnable securities, with which the Foxes of the world have sheltered fleecelings, no longer give the warmth and safety which once were so assured and certain? And must those fountains so unfailing in the flow of milk and honey, on which fleecelings feed, be withered at their source? Must they be fountains, rather, dyed with blood—blood of the lamb, then? Fleeceling blood?

O Fox, we cannot think of it!

Fox reads on, intent, with the keen hunger of a fascinated interest, the shade of a deep trouble in his eye. The sober, close-set columns of the
Times
give up their tortured facts, revealing a world in chaos, man bewildered, life in chains. These substantial rages, so redolent of morning and sobriety—of breakfast in America, the pungency of ham and eggs, the homes of prosperous people—yield a bitter harvest of madness, hatred, dissolution, misery, cruelty, oppression, injustice, despair, and the bankruptcy of human faith. What have we here, mad masters?—for surely if ye be masters of such hell-on-earth as sober
Times
portrays, then ye be mad!

Well, here’s a little item:

It is announced, my masters, that on Saturday next, in the Land of the Enchanted Forest, land of legends and the magic of the elves, land of the Venusberg and the haunting beauties of the Gothic towns, land of the truth-lover and the truth-seeker, land of the plain, good, common, vulgar, and all-daring Sense of Man, land where the great monk nailed his blunt defiance to the doors at Wittenberg, and broke the combined powers, splendours, pomps, and menaces of churchly Europe with the sledge-hammer genius of his coarse and brutal speech—land from that time onwards of man’s common noble dignity, and of the strong truth of sense and courage, shaking its thick fist into the face of folly—yes! land of Martin Luther, land of Goethe, land of Faust, land of Mozart and Beethoven—land where immortal music was created, glorious poetry written, and philosophy cultivated—land of magic, mystery, matchless loveliness, and unending treasure-hordes of noble art—land where the Man of Weimar, for the last time in the modern world, dared to make the whole domain of art, culture, and learning the province of his gigantic genius—land, too, of noble, consecrated youth, where young men sang and wrote, loved truth, went through apprenticeships devoted to the aspiration of a high and passionate ideal—well, mad masters, it is announced that this same enchanted land will consecrate the devotion of another band of youth
this
Saturday—when the young men of the nation will burn books before the Town Halls, in all the public squares of Germany!

Well, then, Fox?

And elsewhere on this old tormented globe, goes it much better? Fire, famine, flood, and pestilence—these trials we have always had. And hatred—most firelike, faminelike, floodlike, and most pestilential of all evils—yes, we have always had
that
, too. And yet, Great God! When has our old unhappy earth been stricken with such universal visitation? When has she ached in every joint as she aches now? When has she had such a universal itch, been so spavined, gouty, poxy, so broken out in sores all over?

The Chinese hate the Japanese, the Japanese the Russians, the Russians also hate the Japanese, and the hordes of India the English. The Germans hate the French, the French hate the Germans, and then look wildly round to find other nations to help them hate the Germans; but find they hate almost everyone as much as they hate Germans; they can’t find enough to hate outside of France, and so divide themselves into thirty-seven different cliques and hate each other bitterly from Calais to Menton—the Leftists hate Rightists, the Centrists hate Leftists, the Royalists hate Socialists, the Socialists hate Communists, the Communists hate Capitalists, and all unite in hatred of one another. In Russia, the Stalinites hate Trotskyites, the Trotskyites hate Stalinites, and both hate Republicans and Democrats. Everywhere the Communists (so they say) hate their cousin Fascists, and the Fascists hate the Jews.

In this year of Our Gentle Lord 1934, “expert” observers say, Japan is preparing to go to war again with China within two years, Russia will join in with China, Japan will ally herself with Germany, Germany will make a deal with Italy, and then make war on France and England, America will try to stick her head into the sand, and so keep out of it, but will find it cannot be done and will be drawn in. And in the end, after everybody has fought everybody else up and down the globe, the whole Capitalistic world will join up finally against Russia in an effort to crush Communism—which eventually must win—will lose—is bound to triumph—will be wiped out—will supplant Capitalism, which is on its last legs—which is only suffering a temporary relapse—which grows more dropsical, greedy, avaricious, bloated, and monopolistic all the time—which is mending its ways and growing better all the time—which must be preserved at all costs if the “American System” is to endure—which must be destroyed at all costs if America is to endure—which is just beginning—which is ending—which is gone already—which will never go----

And so it goes—round, round, round the tortured circumference of this aching globe—round, round, and back again, and up and down, with stitch and counterstitch until this whole earth and all the people in it are caught up in one gigantic web of hatred,’ greed, tyranny, injustice, war, theft, murder, lying, treachery, hunger, suffering, and devilish error!

And we, old Fox? How goes it in our own fair land—our great America?

Fox winces quickly, cranes his neck into his collar, and mutters hoarsely a passionate regret:

“Too
bad!
Too
bad!
We should have
had
it! We were just beginning—we should have had it fifty years ago, as Rome had it, and as England had it! But all this turmoil came too soon—we didn’t have it long enough! Too
bad!
Too
bad!
”

Yes, Fox, it is too bad. Too bad, indeed, that in our pride, our self-respect, and our taut horror the Medusa-visage of the whole tormented earth may be an anodyne for us, lest we have to look too closely at the honour of our own America.

31. The Promise of America

For four years George Webber lived and wrote in Brooklyn, and during all this time his life was about as solitary as any that a modern man can know. Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance, is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. Not only has this been true of the greatest poets, as evidenced by the huge unhappiness of their published grief, but now it seemed to George to apply with equal force to all the nameless cyphers who swarmed about him in the streets. As he saw them in their strident encounters with each other, and overheard their never-varying exchanges of abuse, contempt, distrust, and hatred, it became increasingly clear to him that one of the contributing causes of their complaint was loneliness.

To live alone as George was living, a man should have the confidence of God, the tranquil faith of a monastic saint, the stern impregnability of Gibraltar. Lacking these, he finds that there are times when anything, everything, all and nothing, the most trivial incidents, the most casual words, can in an instant strip him of his armour, palsy his hand, constrict his heart with frozen horror, and fill his bowels with the grey substance of shuddering impotence and desolation. Sometimes it would be a sly remark dropped by some all-knowing literary soothsayer in the columns of one of the more leftish reviews, such as:

“Whatever has become of our autobiographical and volcanic friend, George Webber? Remember him? Remember the splash he made with that so-called ‘novel’ of his a few years back? Some of our esteemed colleagues thought they detected signs of promise there. We ourselves should have welcomed another book from him, just to prove that the first was not an accident. But
tempus fugit
, and where is Webber? Calling Mr. Webber! No answer? Well, a pity, perhaps; but then, who can count the number of one-book authors? They shoot their bolt, and after that they go into the silence and no more is heard from them. Some of us who were more than a little doubtful about that book of Webber’s, but whose voices were drowned out by the Oh’s and Ah’s of those who rused headlong to proclaim a new star rising in the literary firmament, could now come forward, if we weren’t too kindly disposed towards our more emotional brethren of the critical fraternity, and modestly say: ‘We told you so!’”

Sometimes it would be nothing but a shadow passing on the sun, sometimes nothing but the gelid light of March falling on the limitless, naked, sprawling ugliness and squalid decencies of Brooklyn streets. Whatever it was, at such a time all joy and singing would go instantly out of day, Webber’s heart would drop out of him like a leaden plummet, hope, confidence, and conviction would seem lost for ever to him, and all the high and shining truth that he had ever found and lived and known would now turn false to mock him. Then he would feel like one who walked among the dead, and it would be as if the only things that were not false on earth were the creatures of the death-in-life who moved for ever in the changeless lights and weathers of red, waning, weary March and Sunday afternoon.

These hideous doubts, despairs, and dark confusions of the soul would come and go, and George knew them as every lonely man must know them. For he was united to no image save that image which he himself created. He was bolstered by no knowledge save that which he gathered for himself out of his own life. He saw life with no other vision save the vision of his own eyes and brain and senses. He was sustained and cheered and aided by no party, was given comfort by no creed, and had no faith in him except his own.

That faith, though it was made up of many articles, was at bottom a faith in himself, a faith that if he could only succeed in capturing a fragment of the truth about the life he knew, and make it known and felt by others, it would be a more glorious accomplishment than anything else he could imagine. And through it all, animating this faith and sustaining it with a promise of rewards to come, was a belief—be it now confessed—that if he could only do this, the world would thank him for it, and would crown him with the laurel of its fame.

The desire for fame is tooted in the hearts of men. It is one of the most powerful of all human desires, and perhaps for that very reason, and because it is so deep and secret, it is the desire that men are most unwilling to admit, particularly those who feel most sharply its keen and piercing spur.

The politician, for example, would never have us think that it is love of office, the desire for the notorious elevation of public place, that drives him on. No, the thing that governs him is his pure devotion to the common weal, his selfless and high-minded statesmanship, his love of his fellow-man, and his burning idealism to turn out the rascal who usurps the office and betrays the public trust which he himself, as he assures us, would so gloriously and devotedly maintain.

So, too, the soldier. It is never love of glory that inspires him to his profession. It is never love of battle, love of war, love of all the resounding titles and the proud emoluments of the heroic conqueror. Oh, no. It is devotion to duty that makes him a soldier. There is no personal motive in it. He is inspired simply by the selfless ardour of his patriotic abnegation. He regrets that he has but one life to give for his country.

So it goes through every walk of life. The lawyer assures us that he is the defender of the weak, the guardian of the oppressed, the champion of the rights of defrauded widows and beleaguered orphans, the upholder of justice, the unrelenting enemy, at no matter what cost to himself, of all forms of chicanery, fraud, theft, violence, and crime. Even the business man will not admit a selfish motive in his money-getting. On the contrary, he is the developer of the nation’s resources. He is the benevolent employer of thousands of working men who would be lost and on the dole without the organising genius of his great intelligence. He is the defender of the American ideal of rugged individualism, the shining exemplar to youth of what a poor country boy may achieve in this nation through a devotion to the national virtues of thrift, industry, obedience to duty, and business integrity. He is, he assures us, the backbone of the country, the man who makes the wheels go round, the leading citizen, Public Friend No. 1.