He had spells and rhymes of magic numbers which would enable him, he thought, to read all of the million books in the great library. This was a furious obsession with him all the time. And there were other spells and rhymes which would enable him to know the lives of 50,000,000 people, to visit every country in the world, to know a hundred languages, possess 10,000 lovely women, and yet have one he loved and honoured above all, who would be true and beautiful and faithful to him.
And by the all-resuming magic of these spells he would go everywhere on earth, while keeping one place to return to; and while driven mad with thirst and hunger to have everything, he would be peacefully content with almost nothing; and while wanting to be a famous, honoured, celebrated man, he would live obscurely, decently, and well, with one true love for ever. In short, he would have the whole cake of the world, and eat it, too — have adventures, labours, joys, and triumphs that would exhaust the energies of ten thousand men, and yet have spells and charms for all of it, and was sure that with these charms and spells and sorceries, all of it was his.
He would rush out of the great library into the street and take the subway into Boston. And as the train smashed and rocked along, he would sit there solemnly with his lungs expanded to the bursting point and his chest swollen and stuck out like the breast of a pouter pigeon, while his eyes bulged, the veins on his forehead stuck out, and his face slowly turned an apoplectic purple as he sat there rocking with the agony of his effort.
Then the train would roar into the Central Station, and the breath would come sobbing and soughing out of his tortured lungs like wind out of an organ bellows. And for several seconds, while the train was stopped there at the station (for in these magic formulas these stops at stations “did not count”) he would pant and gasp for breath like a fish out of water, gulping a new supply ravenously down into his lungs again, as if he thought he was being shot in a projectile through the terrific vacuum of unmeasured space.
Then, as the train roared out into the tunnel’s dark again, he would repeat the effort, sitting as solemn as an owl with his bulging eyes, stuck-out chest, the stolid apoplectic purple of his swollen face, while little children looked at him with frightened eyes, their mothers with a glance of nervous apprehension, and the men in all the various attitudes of gape-jawed astonishment and stupefaction. Yet, at that time, he saw nothing strange or curious in this mad behaviour. Rather, to hold his breath there in the tunnel’s dark, to make that mystery of rite and number, and to follow it with a maniacal devotion seemed as inevitable and natural to him as the very act of life, of breath itself, and he was sometimes bitterly incensed when people stared at him because of it.
Those faces — the secret, dark, unknown, nameless faces, the faces of the million instant casual meetings of these years, in the cars of subway trains or on the swarming streets — returned in later years to haunt him with a blazing, unforgettable intensity of vision, with an overwhelming sense of strangeness, loss and sorrow, a poignancy of familiarity, affection and regret, which was somehow, unbelievably, as wordless, grievous, full of an instant rending and unfathomable pity, as those things a man has known best and loved with all the life and passion in him, and has lost for ever — a child’s quick laugh of innocence and exultant mirth, a woman’s smile, an intonation in her voice, the naked, child-like look remembered in the eyes of simple, faithful people who have gone, or the snatches of the song one’s brother sang when he lay drowned in darkness and delirium, as he died.
Why did the unknown faces of these years come back to him? For he could not forget the million obscure faces of those first years of his wandering when for the first time he walked alone the streets of a great city, a madman, a beggar, and a king, feeling the huge joy of the secret world impending over him with all the glory of its magic imminence, and when each furious prowl and quest into the swarming streets of life, each furious journey through the tunnel’s depth was living with the intolerable prescience of triumph and discovery — a life more happy, fortunate, golden and complete than any life before had ever been.
He did not know. He never knew why all those obscure, nameless and unknown faces of a million strangers who passed and vanished in an instant from his sight, or whom he passed a hundred times upon the streets without a word or sign of recognition, should return to haunt him later with a sense of loss, affection, and the familiarity of utter knowledge. But he knew that they came back to him in images of unfading brightness, and that the light of time, dark time, was on them all, and that there was revealed to him, in later years, something strange and mad and lonely in the lives of all of them, which he had accepted instantly, and felt no wonder or surprise at, when he had seen them.
But these images of the past would come back in later years, and with a feeling of bitter loss and longing he would want to find, to see, to know them all again, to ask them what their lives had been, and what had happened to them. It was a weird, strange, assorted crew — that company of memory — on whom the light of time would fall with such a lonely hue, and how they were all got together in that magic consonance he could never tell, but he could not forget them.
One was an old man, an old man with fierce restless eyes, and bedraggled moustaches of a stained tobacco yellow who kept a lodging-house where a student that he knew had rooms, and whose house, from the basement to the attic, was a museum to the old man’s single mania. For that house was crowded with old tottering stacks of books, a mountain of junk, uncounted and uncountable, a weariness and desolation of old print, dusty, yellowed, and unreadable — and all were memoirs of a single man, Napoleon.
Another was a woman with a mass of henna hair, piled up in a great crown upon her head, who sat smugly, day after day, like something ageless and embalmed, a presence deathless and hermetic to all the things that change and pass, in a glass cage before a moving-picture house on Washington Street, where people thronged in the dense and narrow line before her all the time, and glass steps and a rotating stairway went steeply up beside her cage, and flashing cascades of bright water foamed and tumbled underneath the glassy stairs, as the woman with piled henna hair sat always in her cage, deathless, smug, hermetic, and embalmed.
Another was an old man with a mad, fierce, handsome face and wild strewn hair of silvery white, who never wore a hat or overcoat, and who muttered through the streets of Cambridge, over the board walks of the Harvard Yard, in every kind of weather; winter was around him always, the rugged skies of wintry sunsets, red and harsh, the frozen desolation of old snow in street and Yard and gutter, the harsh, interminable, weary savagery of grey winter.
One was a waitress in a restaurant on Tremont Street, a woman quiet, decent, and demure in manner, who wore faintly on her lips continually the most sensual, tender, and seductive mystery of a smile that he had ever seen on any woman’s face, who drew him back into that place to eat a thousand times, who made him think of her at night, and prowl the streets and think of her, and go back to that restaurant night after night, with a feeling of wild joy and imminent possession when he thought of her, and yet who said, did, promised nothing that was not sedate, decent, and correct, or that could give him comfort, hope, or knowledge of her life.
He never got to know her, he never even knew her name, some secrecy and pride in him prevented him from speaking to her with familiar warmth or curiosity, but he spent thousands of good hours in thinking of her — hours filled with all the passion, dreams, and longing youth can know. The woman was no longer young; the other waitresses were younger, fresher, better-looking, had better legs and finer figures; he had no way at all of knowing the quality of her life, mind, spirit, speech — save that when he heard her speak her voice was a little husky and coarse-fibred — but that woman became the central figure of one of those glittering and impossible fantasies young men have.
It was a great legend of wealth and fame and love and glory in which this woman lived as a creature of queenly beauty, delicacy, intelligence, and grandeur of the soul — and every obstacle of cold and acid fact that interposed itself between him and his vision he would instantly destroy by the wild fantastic logic of desire.
And because of her he prowled a hundred streets, and walked three thousand miles, and ate one thousand sirloin steaks in that one restaurant. He would wait for night to come with furious impatience, and would feel his hands grow weak, his entrails numb, his heart begin to pound, and his throat to swell with this intolerable exultancy of joy as he approached the restaurant. Then when he got inside, and had gone upstairs to where the restaurant was, his whole body would be stirred with such a shifting iridescence of passion, happiness, hunger, triumph, music, and wild exuberant humour that he felt he could no longer hold the swelling power of ecstasy that he felt in him.
Everything in the restaurant would become impossibly good, wonderful, and happy. The beautifully clean, crisply-waisted, and voluptuous-looking waitresses would be passing all around him bearing trays of food, the empress of his desire would pass by clean and neat and dainty, sedate and decent and demure, smiling that proud, smoke-like, faint, ghost-phantom smile of maddening tenderness and seduction, the three-piece orchestra would be playing briskly, softly, languorously, strains of popular music, filling his heart with the swelling p?ans of another, prouder, grander, more triumphant music; while he listened, some robust, handsome, clear-eyed and lusty-figured New England girls would be sitting at a table, smartly, roughly dressed, their fine legs clothed with woollen stockings, their feet shod with wide-open galoshes, looking almost ripe for love and tenderness if something could be done to them — and all of this spurred his hunger with a kind of maddening relish, and made the food taste better than any he had ever had before.
Everything he saw would fill him with haunting sorrow, hunger, joy, the sense of triumph, glory, and delight, or with a limitless exuberance of wild humour. The motto of the restaurant, fixed on the wall in shields embossed with a flamboyant coat of arms, was written in a scroll beneath the coat of arms, as follows: “Luxuria cum Economia.” The effect these words wrought on his spirit was unbelievable: he could never say what he wished to say, or what he felt about them, and to say that they were “the funniest words he ever saw” would not begin to convey their real effect on him.
For what they did to him was so far beyond mere funniness that he had no name to give to the emotion they evoked. But instantly, when he saw them, the wild wordless surge of a powerful and idiotic exuberance of humour would swell up in him and split his features with an exultant grin.
He would want to roar with laughter, to shout out and pound upon the table in his joy, but instead the wild voices of a goat-like exuberance would swell up in his throat until the people at the other tables would begin to stare at him as if he had gone mad. And later, on the streets, or in his room at night, he would suddenly remember them again, and then that idiotic, wordless, and exultant glee would burst out of him in one roar of joy.
Yet the words gave him a strange happiness and content as well. He felt a feeling of tenderness for the people who had written them, for the owners of the restaurant who had solemnly and triumphantly thought them out, for all the doctrines of “taste,” “class,” and “refinement” they evoked, for something mistaken and most pitiful that had got into our lives, and that was everywhere, something grotesquely wrong, ridiculous and confused that made one somehow feel a warm, a wordless affection for its victims.
But this was the reason why these things could never be forgotten — because we are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America. Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on for ever and we have no home. Therefore, it is not the slow, the punctual sanded drip of the unnumbered days that we remember best, the ash of time; nor is it the huge monotone of the lost years, the unswerving schedules of the lost life and the well-known faces, that we remember best. It is a face seen once and lost for ever in a crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and vanished on a passing train, it is a prescience of snow upon a certain night, the laughter of a woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the memory of a single moon seen at the pine’s dark edge in old October — and all of our lives is written in the twisting of a leaf upon a bough, a door that opened, and a stone.
For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life alone.
It is the place of the howling winds, the hurrying of the leaves in old October, the hard clean falling to the earth of acorns. The place of the storm-tossed moaning of the wintry mountain-side, where the young men cry out in their throats and feel the savage vigour, the rude strong energies; the place also where the trains cross rivers.
It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
It is the place of exultancy and strong joy, the place of the darkened brooding air, the smell of snow; it is the place of all the fierce, the bitten colours in October, when all of the wild, sweet woods flame up; it is also the place of the cider press and the last brown oozings of the York Imperials. It is the place of the lovely girls with good jobs and the husky voices, who will buy a round of drinks; it is the place where the women with fine legs and silken underwear lie in the Pullman berth below you; it is the place of the dark-green snore of the Pullman cars and the voices in the night-time in Virginia.
It is the place where great boats are baying at the harbour’s mouth, where great ships are putting out to sea; it is the place where great boats are blowing in the gulf of night, and where the river, the dark and secret river, full of strange time, is for ever flowing by us to the sea.
The tugs keep baying in the river; at twelve o’clock the Berengaria moans, her lights slide gently past the piers beyond Eleventh Street; and in the night a tall tree falls in Old Catawba, there in the hills of home.
It is the place of autumnal moons hung low and orange at the frosty edges of the pines; it is the place of frost and silence, of the clean dry shocks and the opulence of enormous pumpkins that yellow on hard dotted earth; it is the place of the stir and feathery stumble of the hens upon their roost, the frosty, broken barking of the dogs, the great barn-shapes and solid shadows in the running sweep of the moon-whited countryside, the wailing whistle of the fast express. It is the place of flares and steamings on the tracks, and the swing and bob and tottering dance of lanterns in the yards; it is the place of dings and knellings and the sudden glare of mighty engines over sleeping faces in the night; it is the place of the terrific web and spread and smouldering, the distant glare of Philadelphia and the solid rumble of the sleepers; it is also the place where the Transcontinental Limited is stroking eighty miles an hour across the continent and the small dark towns whip by like bullets, and there is only the fanlike stroke of the secret, immense and lonely earth again.
I have foreseen this picture many times: I will buy passage on the Fast Express.
It is the place of the wild and exultant winter’s morning and the wind, with the powdery snow, that has been howling all night long; it is the place of solitude and the branches of the spruce and hemlock piled with snow; it is the place where the Fall River boats are tethered to the wharf, and the wild grey snow of furious, secret, and storm-whited morning whips across them. It is the place of the lodge by the frozen lake and the sweet breath and amorous flesh of sinful woman; it is the place of the tragic and lonely beauty of New England; it is the place of the red barn and the sound of the stabled hooves and of bright tatters of old circus posters; it is the place of the immense and pungent smell of breakfast, the country sausages and the ham and eggs, the smoking wheat cakes and the fragrant coffee, and of lone hunters in the frosty thickets who whistle to their lop-eared hounds.
Where is old Doctor Ballard now with all his dogs? He held that they were sacred, that the souls of all the dear lost dead went into them. His youngest sister’s soul sat on the seat beside him; she had long ears and her eyes were sad. Two dozen of his other cherished dead trotted around the buggy as he went up the hill past home. And that was eleven years ago, and I was nine years old; and I stared gravely out of the window of my father’s house at old Doctor Ballard.
It is the place of the straight stare, the cold white bellies and the buried lust of the lovely Boston girls; it is the place of ripe brainless blondes with tender lips and a flowery smell, and of the girls with shapely arms who stand on ladders picking oranges; it is also the place where large slow-bodied girls from Kansas City, with big legs and milky flesh, are sent East to school by their rich fathers, and there are also immense and lovely girls, with the grip of a passionate bear, who have such names as Neilson, Lundquist, Jorgenson, and Brandt.
I will go up and down the country, and back and forth across the country on the great trains that thunder over America. I will go out West where States are square; Oh, I will go to Boise, and Helena and Albuquerque. I will go to Montana and the two Dakotas and the unknown places.
It is the place of violence and sudden death; of the fast shots in the night, the club of the Irish cop, and the smell of brains and blood upon the pavement; it is the place of the small-town killings, and the men who shoot the lovers of their wives; it is the place where the negroes slash with razors and the hillmen kill in the mountain meadows; it is the place of the ugly drunks and the snarling voices and of foul-mouthed men who want to fight; it is the place of the loud word and the foolish boast and the violent threat; it is also the place of the deadly little men with white faces and the eyes of reptiles, who kill quickly and casually in the dark; it is the lawless land that feeds on murder.
“Did you know the two Lipe girls?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “They lived in Biltburn by the river, and one of them was drowned in the flood. She was a cripple, and she wheeled herself along in a chair. She was strong as a bull.” “That’s the girl,” he said.
It is the place of the crack athletes and of the runners who limber up in March; it is the place of the ten-second men and the great jumpers and vaulters; it is the place where spring comes, and the young birch trees have white and tender barks, of the thaw of the earth, and the feathery smoke of the trees; it is the place of the burst of grass and bud, the wild and sudden tenderness of the wilderness, and of the crews out on the river and the coaches coming down behind them in the motor-boats, the surges rolling out behind when they are gone with heavy sudden wash. It is the place of the baseball players, and the easy lob, the soft spring smackings of the glove and mit, the crack of the bat; it is the place of the great batters, fielders, and pitchers, of the nigger boys and the white, drawling, shirt-sleeved men, the bleachers and the resinous smell of old worn wood; it is the place of Rube Waddell, the mighty untamed and ill-fated pitcher when his left arm is swinging like a lash. It is the place of the fighters, the crafty Jewish lightweights and the mauling Italians, Leonard, Tendler, Rocky Kansas, and Dundee; it is the place where the champion looks over his rival’s shoulder with a bored expression.
I shall wake at morning in a foreign land thinking I heard a horse in one of the streets of home.
It is the place where they like to win always, and boast about their victories; it is the place of quick money and sudden loss; it is the place of the mile-long freights with their strong, solid, clanking, heavy loneliness at night, and of the silent freight of cars that curve away among raw piny desolations with their promise of new lands and unknown distances — the huge attentive gape of emptiness. It is the place where the bums come singly from the woods at sunset, the huge stillness of the water-tower, the fading light, the rails, secret and alive, trembling with the oncoming train; it is the place of the great tramps, Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, and the Jersey Dutchman, who grab fast rattlers for the Western shore; it is the place of old blown bums who come up in October skirls of dust and wind and crumpled newspapers and beg, with canned heat on their breaths: “Help Old McGuire: McGuire’s a good guy, kid. You’re not so tough, kid: McGuire’s your pal, kid: How about McGuire, McGuire —?”
It is the place of the pool-room players and the drug-store boys; of the town whore and her paramour, the tough town driver; it is the place where they go to the woods on Sunday and get up among the laurel and dogwood bushes and the rhododendron blossoms; it is the place of the cheap hotels and the kids who wait with chattering lips while the nigger goes to get them their first woman; it is the place of the drunken college boys who spend the old man’s money and wear fur coats to the football games; it is the place of the lovely girls up North who have rich fathers, of the beautiful wives of business men.
The train broke down somewhere beyond Manassas, and I went forward along the tracks with all the other passengers. “What’s the matter?” I said to the engineer. “The eccentric strap is broken, son,” he said. It was a very cold day, windy and full of sparkling sun. This was the farthest north I’d ever been, and I was twelve years old and on my way to Washington to see Woodrow Wilson inaugurated. Later I could not forget the face of the engineer and the words “eccentric strap.”
It is the place of the immense and lonely earth, the place of fat ears and abundance where they grow cotton, corn, and wheat, the wine-red apples of October, and the good tobacco.
It is the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the innocent place; it is the wild lawless place, the vital earth that is soaked with the blood of the murdered men, with the blood of the countless murdered men, with the blood of the unavenged and unremembered murdered men; but it is also the place of the child and laughter, where the young men are torn apart with ecstasy, and cry out in their throats with joy, where they hear the howl of the wind and the rain and smell the thunder and the soft numb spitting of the snow, where they are drunk with the bite and sparkle of the air and mad with the solar energy, where they believe in love and victory and think that they can never die.
It is the place where you come up through Virginia on the great trains in the night-time, and rumble slowly across the wide Potomac and see the morning sunlight on the nation’s dome at Washington, and where the fat man shaving in the Pullman washroom grunts, “What’s this? What’s this we’re coming to — Washington?”— And the thin man glancing out of the window says, “Yep, this is Washington. That’s what it is, all right. You gettin’ off here?”— And where the fat man grunts, “Who — me? Naw — I’m goin’ on to Baltimore.” It is the place where you get off at Baltimore and find your brother waiting.
Where is my father sleeping on the land? Buried? Dead these seven years? Forgotten, rotten in the ground? Held by his own great stone? No, no! Will I say “Father” when I come to him? And will he call me “Son”? Oh, no, he’ll never see my face; we’ll never speak except to say —
It is the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage, the tragic lonely beauty of New England, and the web of Boston; the place of the mighty station there, and engines passive as great cats, the straight dense plumes of engine smoke, the acrid and exciting smell of trains and stations, and of the man-swarm passing ever in its million-footed weft, the smell of the sea in harbours and the thought of voyages — and the place of the goat-cry, the strong joy of our youth, the magic city, when we knew the most fortunate life on earth would certainly be ours, that we were twenty and could never die.
And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished, and the word; the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and never have forgotten. And these are the things that we remember of America, for we have known all her thousand lights and weathers, and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life alone.