by Thomas Wolfe
“Jack! Jack! 1st Friedrich Jack hier?”
He came to with a sharp start of confusion as that harsh and choleric voice broke in upon his revery, and the class whose attention had been riveted for some seconds on his dreaming face burst into a sharp and sudden yelp of glee as he scrambled frantically to his feet, straightened his shoulders, and stammered out confusedly,
“Hier, bitte. Ja. Ich bin hier.”
That high and hateful face, hairless, skull-like, seamed and parchment dry, scarred hideously upon one sallow cheek, with its livid scorpion of saber wounds, and with thin convulsive lips drawn back above a row of big yellow teeth, now peered at him above its glasses with a stare of wall-eyed fury. In a moment the stringy tendons of the neck craned hideously above the choker collar, and the harsh voice rasped with fury as old Kugel’s ramrod form bowed with a slightly ironic courtesy in its frock coat sheathing of funereal black.
“Wenn sie sind fertig, Excellenz,” he said.
“Ja—Ja—fertig,” Frederick stammered foolishly and incoherently, wondering desperately what the question was, and if it had already been asked. The class tittered with expectancy, and already unnerved by his shock and confusion, Frederick blurted out with no sense at all of what he was saying: “Ich meine—Ich bin fertig—Onkel!”
A sickening wave of shame and mortification swept over him the moment that he spoke the words, and as the instant roar of the class brought to him the knowledge of his hideous blunder. Onkel! Would he ever hear the end of this? And how could he have been such a fool as to identify, even in a moment of forgetfulness, this cruel and ugly old ape with the princely and heroic figure of his Uncle Max. Tears of shame welled in his eyes, he stammered out incoherent apologies and explanations that went unheard in the furious uproar of the class, but he could have bitten his tongue out for rage and mortification.
As for Kugel, he stood stock still, his eyes staring with horror, like a man who has just received a paralytic stroke. In a moment, recovering his powers of speech, and torn with fury between the roaring class and the culprit who stood trembling before him, he snatched up a heavy book, lifted it high above his head in two dry, freckled hands, and smashed it down upon the table with terrific force.
“Schweig!” he yelled. “Schweigen sie!” a command that was no longer necessary, since all of them had subsided instantly into a stunned cowed silence.
He tried to speak but could not find the words he wanted. In a moment, pointing a parched trembling finger at Frederick, he said in a small choked whisper of a voice:
“Das wort—das wort—für Bauer.” He craned convulsively above his collar as if he was strangling.
Frederick gulped, opened his mouth and gaped wordlessly.
“Was?” screamed Kugel taking a step toward him.
“Ag-ag-ag!” he stuttered like a miserable idiot.
“Was!”
He had known the word a moment before—he knew it still, he tried frantically to recall it, but now, his fright, shame, and confusion were so great that he could not have pronounced it if he had had it written out before him on a piece of paper.
Desperately he tried again.
“Ag-ag-ag,” but at the titter of laughter that began to run across the class again, he subsided helplessly, completely disorganized and unable to continue.
Kugel stared at him a moment over the rims of his thick glasses, his yellow bulging eyeballs fixed in an expression of hatred and contempt.
“Ag-ag-ag!” he sneered, with hateful mimicry. “Erst es war onkel—und jetzt müsst er den Schlucken haben!”
He regarded Frederick a moment longer with cold hate, and then dismissed him.
“Schafskopf! Setzen sie,” he said.
Frederick sat down.
* * * * *
That day as the children were going away from school, he heard steps pounding after him and a voice calling to him, a word of command and warning raucous, surly, hoarse. He knew it was Albert Hartmann, and he did not stop. He quickened his step a little and walked on doggedly. Hartmann called again, this time with menace in his voice.
“Hey—Jack!” Frederick did not pause. “Excellenz! Onkel!” it cried with a jeering note.
“Ag—ag! Schafskopf!” At the last word, Frederick stopped abruptly and turned, his face flushed with anger. He was a small neat figure of a boy, well-kept, round-featured, with straight black hair and the dark liquid eyes of his race. His somewhat chubby face was ruddy and fresh colored, his neat blue jacket and his flat student’s cap were of far better cut and quality than Albert Hartmann’s, which were poorly made and of mean material, and his firm plump features had in them a touch of the worldly assurance and scornful complacency, the sense of material appraisal that the children of wealthy merchants sometimes have.
Hartmann pounded up, breathing thickly and noisily through the corners of his blunt ugly mouth. Then he seized Frederick roughly by the sleeve, and said:
“Well, Ag-ag, do you think you’ll know the word next time he asks you? Have you learned your lesson? Hey?”
Frederick detached his sleeve from Albert Hartmann’s grasp, and surveyed him coldly. He did not answer him. At this moment, Walter Grauschmidt, another of the boys in the class, came up and joined them. Albert Hartmann turned and spoke to him with an ugly grin.
“I was asking Ag—Ag here if he’d know the word for farmer the next time Kugel calls on him,” he said.
“No. He’ll never know the word for farmer,” Walter Grauschmidt answered calmly, and with assurance. “He’ll know the word for money. He’ll know the word for cash. He’ll know the word for interest and loan in every language in the world. But he’ll never know the word for farmer.”
“Why?” said Albert Hartmann looking at his more gifted and intelligent companion with a stupid stare.
“Why,” said Walter Grauschmidt deliberately, “because he is a Jew, that’s why. A farmer has to work hard with his hands. And there never was a Jew who would work hard with his hands if he could help it. He lets the others do that sort of work, while he sits back and takes the money in. They are a race of pawnbrokers and money lenders. My father told me.” He turned to Frederick and spoke quietly and insultingly to him. “That’s right, isn’t it? You don’t deny it, do you?”
“Ja! Ja!” cried Albert Hartmann excitedly, now furnished with the words and reasons he had not wit enough to contrive himself. “That’s it! That’s the way it is! A Jew! That’s what you are!” he cried to Frederick. “You never worked with your hands in your life! You wouldn’t know a farmer if you saw one!”
Frederick looked at them both silently, and with contempt. Then he turned and walked away from them.
“Yah! Pawnbroker! Your people got their start by cheating other people out of money! Yah!”
The hoarse and inept jibes followed him until he turned the corner of the street in which he lived. It was a narrow cobbled street of ancient gabled houses, some of which hung out with such a crazy Gothic overhang that they almost touched each other across the street. But the street was always neat and tidy. The houses were painted with bright rich colors and there were little shops with faded Gothic signs above them. The old irregular cobbles had a clean swept appearance, and the old houses were spotless in their appearance. The stones and brasses seemed always to have been freshly scrubbed and polished, the windows glittered like flat polished mirrors, and the curtains in the windows were always crisp, fresh and dainty looking. In Spring and Summer, the window ledges were gay with flower boxes of bright geraniums.
In an old four-story house half way down this little street, Frederick lived with his mother, a sister, his uncle and his aunt. His father had died several years before, and had left his family a comfortable, although not a great, inheritance. And now his uncle carried on the family business.
They were a firm of private bankers and they had always borne a respected name. Beginning with Frederick’s grandfather, over sixty years before, the firm had carried on its business in the tow
n of Koblenz. And it had always been assumed, without discussion, that Frederick also would go into the firm when he had finished school.
Frederick went along the pleasant ancient street until he came to the old house where he lived. In this house, members of his family had lived for eighty years. His bedroom was on the top floor of the house. It was a little gabled room below the eaves and at night before he went to sleep he could hear the voices of people passing in the street, sometimes a woman’s laughter suddenly, and sometimes nothing but footsteps which approached, passed, and faded with a lonely echoing sound.
The street ended in a broad tree-shaded promenade that crossed it at right angles and which was one of the leading thoroughfares of the town.
Beyond that was the river Rhine.
MORNING
• • •
JACK ASLEEP
• • •
Jack thought he had gone back home to visit his family. Although his uncle had been dead for twenty years, and his aunt for twelve, and his sister was now an elderly married woman, with grown-up children of her own, who lived in Frankfort, and his mother was an old woman in the seventies, it seemed to Jack that they were all living in the old house in the Weinfass Gasse, and that none of them had grown any older. He was himself a spruce, smartly groomed, grey-haired man, but no one seemed to notice this. Everyone treated him as if he was a child, and as if he had been away from home for forty days, instead of forty years.
But now that he was back among them, he was haunted day and night by intolerable images of fear and pity. Nothing around him seemed to have changed one jot. The old house in the Wine-Cask Street looked just the same as it had always looked, and when he entered a room it leaped instantly into all its former life for him and he remembered the place of every minute object in it, even the place in an old wooden clock where the winding-key was kept, although these were things he had not thought of for many years. And the heavy deliberate tock of the old clock in the silent room suddenly awoke, with its own single character of time, the memory of a thousand winter evenings when he had bent above his book under the warm light of the table lamp, and had felt time slowly wear away around him, the grey ash of its slow intolerable fire.
These images of the past returned to him instantly, and they filled him with weariness and horror. Everything was as familiar as it was the day he left it, and yet it was stranger than a dream. He had returned to all that he had known and was part of, and yet it no longer seemed a part of him. It seemed incredible that it had ever been a part of him, and its very familiarity filled his soul with terror and unbelief. And this same doubt and terror chilled his heart when he thought of all the years since childhood that he had spent in America, and of the life he had lived there. The old life of his youth had instantly possessed him with all its terror of strangeness and familiarity and now it seemed impossible to believe that he had ever been away.
Then, Jack thought he went to bed in the little room of his childhood and that he dreamed he had gone to America, and that all his life there had been nothing but a dream. He thought he awoke suddenly at dawn to hear a cart rumbling on the narrow cobbled street below and to think for a moment that he was in New York. Then he would sweat with horror for it seemed that he belonged to nothing he had known, and could never tell whether his life had been a dream or a reality, or whether he had ever known a home or made a voyage. And it seemed to him that he was doomed forever to be a traveller upon the illimitable and protean ocean of time, borne constantly across its stormy seas upon a dark phantasmal ship that never reached a port, haunted forever by dreams of homes and cities he had never known. Grey horror gripped him. The snake of desolation ate his heart.
Yet, it seemed to Jack that his family saw nothing strange in his appearance or demeanour. He had returned to them, but he was still a boy of seventeen to them. He looked into the mirror in his little room, and he saw the grey hair and the worldly features of a man past fifty. This was the self he knew and saw, but his mother, his aunt, his uncle, his sister, his cousin, Karl, and the servant Anna, saw no change in him at all. And just as nothing in the street or house had changed a jot, so all of them looked just the same age as they had looked when he was seventeen.
Moreover when he tried to speak to them, he found he had forgotten his native German tongue. He understood every word they spoke to him, yet when he tried to answer a strange wordless jargon broke harshly from his lips, filling his heart with shame and terror. And yet they seemed to know just what he wished to say, and answered him without surprise.
Alone, with fear slow-feeding with its poisonous lip against his heart, he would try to speak to himself in English, but the words came rustily with a guttural outlandish accent, strange and difficult to his own ears and, he felt, incomprehensible to others. It seemed that he was tongueless, homeless, and a phantom, that he belonged to nothing, was sure of nothing, and that his whole life might be nothing but an image in the dream of time.
Jack thought he had returned to his own people for only a short visit and yet, at the very instant of returning, he was filled with horror and desolation to the roots of his soul, and with a desire to escape as soon as possible. But, escape where? He was no longer sure of his own life in America, or that he had ever been there, and the thought of his return there filled him with the same doubt, horror, and confusion. And his family treated him as if he had returned to live with them forever, and was still a child. They lavished upon him the kind of tenderness and affection that people lavish on a beloved child who has returned from a long journey, and their incessant kindness, their constant efforts to amuse, interest, and delight him choked him with a sense of furious exasperation and indignity, and at the same time with an unutterable rending pity. Their eager attentions, their constant solicitude, their gleeful certainty that the childish entertainment they had prepared for him was just the thing that would enrapture him rasped his nerves to a frenzied irritation. Hot and angry words rose to his lips, words of curt refusal, angry requests that he be given an hour’s peace and privacy alone, but when he tried to speak them he could not. They were themselves like children in their eager innocence, and to answer their tender love, to repay their pitiable preparations, with sharp and angry words would have been like meeting the love of children with a blow.
Yet, their well-intentioned kindliness was maddening. On his arrival, they had all insisted on panting up the steps behind him to his room. The little room beneath the gables that he had slept in as a child had been made ready for him, but now it seemed small and cramped. The same bed he had slept in as a boy was spread tightly with clean coarse linen sheets and pillows, and covered with the fat pleated yellow comforter beneath whose warmth he had lain snugly as a child but which would now only warm his feet and legs while his shoulders froze, or cover back and neck, while feet congealed. He wondered how he could ever fit into such a bed, or find repose on the granite hardness of its two thick mattresses, or wash himself out of the little half-pint bowl and pitcher which sat tidily upon its school boy’s washstand, or dry his face upon the scrap of towel, or crouch down low enough to see to shave himself in the little square of mirror in whose mottled surface the face blurred, swelled, or contracted with a mercurial uncertainty.
But they all stood around and beamed and winked at one another gleefully as if his heart must be simply bursting with speechless rapture in face of all this luxury. Anna,—Die Grosse Anna—the servant who had worked for his family as long as he could remember waddled heavily to the bed and pranced her stiffened fingers up and down on it a dozen times, turning to look at him triumphantly as if to say: “What do you think of that, hey?”
Then Anna and his mother had made him sit down upon the bed and bounce up and down on it in an experimental manner, while all the others stood and looked on admiringly. He had obliged them dutifully, but suddenly, as he was bouncing up and down there like a fool, he had looked straight into the little mirror and seen his image, bobbing clownishly, reflected there. He saw h
is face, the plump, ruddy face of a well-kept man of fifty-four, the neat grey moustache, crisply trimmed, and twisted at its ends into waxed points, the clipped grey hair, neatly parted in the middle, the straight square shoulders set-off trimly with a coat that fit him beautifully, the crisp business like style of the collar and the rich dull fabric of his necktie, with the white carnation in his buttonhole. It was the figure of a man of mark and dignity, but now he saw it disfigured by a foolish simpering leer, and prancing up and down upon a bed like an idiot. It was intolerable, intolerable, and suddenly Jack began to choke with speechless rage.
But everyone stood around him goggle eyed and gap-jawed with a look of rapture, and Anna said to him with exultant satisfaction: “Ah, I tell you what! It’s good to be back in your own bed again, isn’t it, Mr. Freddy? I’ll bet you thought of it many’s the time while you were gone. Hey? I thought so!” the old fool said triumphantly, although he had said nothing. “Sleeping among all those foreigners,” the ignorant woman cried contemptuously, “in beds you don’t know who’s been in the night before! Well, Mister Freddy,” she went on in a bantering tone, “home’s not such a bad place after all, is it?” She prodded him stiffly with her thick red fingers, chuckling craftily.