by Thomas Wolfe
Jack stared at her with an expression of apoplectic horror. This, this, Great God, to a man who had gone out and conquered the great world and who had known all the luxury and wealth that world could offer. This to a man who lived only in the best hotels when he travelled anywhere, whose room at home was a chamber twenty feet each way,—yes, by God, a room twenty feet each way in a city where every foot of space was worth its weight in gold.
Then his cousin Karl, winking at him drolly, had opened the door of the little walnut cabinet beside the bed and sharply rapped a knuckle against the chamber-pot with a mellow echoing ping. All the others had screamed with laughter, coarsely, while he sat there foolishly with a burning face. Were they mad? Was it a clownish joke that they were playing on him? But when he looked into their faces and saw the depth of love and tenderness in them he knew that it was not and the words of hot anger were silenced on his lips.
In the morning, before he was up, he heard Anna toiling heavily up the ancient winding stairs. Broad and red of face and breathing stertorously, she entered, bearing a tray with a silver pot, an enormous cup and saucer of fine thin china, a crispy flaky roll and a pot of jam. Eagerly, Jack seized the handle of the silver pot, tilted the tall frail spout into the cup and then discovered that the pot contained hot thick chocolate instead of the strong black coffee which he had had for thirty years, and must have now. But when he demanded irritably of Anna if she had no coffee, and why she had not brought it to him, she looked at him first with an expression of stupefaction, and then with alarm and reproach.
“Why, Mister Freddy,” she said chidingly, “you’ve always had your chocolate every morning of your life. Surely you haven’t gone and started drinking coffee while you were away. Why, what would your mother say if she knew you’d gone and formed the coffee-habit? You know she’d never let you have it. Ach! That’s what comes of all this gadding about and going to America,” she muttered. “It’s Mister Max who got you into this—with all his crazy Yankee ways he’s picked up over there—oranges for breakfast, if you please!—Gott!—putting all that acid in your stomach before you’ve got any solid food in you—I told your mother when you left—I said that something of this sort would happen—‘He’s not to be trusted with that child!’ I said. ‘You mark my words, you let him go with Mr. Max and something will happen you’ll be sorry for!’ Come, now, Freddy” she said coaxingly and with a bantering jocosity that infuriated him, “Drink your nice chocolate that I made for you while it’s good and hot. It’s just the thing you need.” Then, seeing the angry protest in his face, she relented a little, saying: “Well, I’ll ask your mother if you can have a cup of coffee for your Second Breakfast. If she says it’s all right, I’ll make it for you.”
Zweite Frühstück! He had forgotten that abomination! At nine o’clock in the morning beer, sausages, sauerkraut, cold cut meats, and liverwurst, pumpernickel, butter, jam—and beer again! Bah! He started to tell her savagely that, so far as he was concerned, there would be no second breakfast; he’d have coffee, toast, two eggs and orange juice right now, or not at all. Yes, by God! And he’d put an end to this Mister Freddy business once for all. Did this old fool think he was a schoolboy that he should have to whine and wheedle like a ninny for a cup of coffee? Ask his mother!
The sense of injury and indignity rose up choking in his throat. Why, damn them all, he’d show them if he was to be treated like a child in arms. He’d show them that they had a grown man to deal with, who had gone out and faced the world alone, and made his own way in a foreign country while the rest of them stayed home and went to seed in a one horse town. Where would they all be now if it hadn’t been for him? Who had moved heaven and earth during the war to get food through to them? Who had smuggled, bribed, pulled wires, wrote letters, sweated blood, made use of every stratagem and exerted every influence, and spared no labor and expense to keep them all from starving? Whose money had kept them going in the years that followed the Armistice? Who was it? Oh, they knew, they knew well enough! Mister Freddy was the boy! And was the man who had done all this to ask permission of his mother to drink a cup of coffee? By God, he did not think so!
Yet, when he looked up with a tongue of fierce reproof, he saw Anna’s broad red face, which had in it all the love, the loyalty, the concern, and simple trust of those innocent and child-like people who spend their lives in serving others, and whose lives are lived only in the lives of those they serve and love. When Jack saw this, he could not speak the hot and angry words. Instead, his heart was twisted in him with wild nameless pity. It seemed to him that his life had been steeped in all the hard and iniquitous dyes of the great earth, that he could never recapture his lost innocence again, nor make these people understand the man be had become. To them he was still the child who had left them; to him they seemed themselves like children. The strange dark light of time fell over him, and he had no tongue to utter what he wished to say.
Then his mother came and sat beside him, her dark convulsive face marked deep with pride and tenderness. And one by one the others came and stood fondly around his bed; wild fury choked him, shame covered him, pain and pity stabbed his heart, but they stood round him while he dressed.
They were always with him. They were with him in the house and in the garden. They were with him when he went out in the street. They watched him eat, they came to watch him when he bathed. Each night they ushered him to bed, and every morning they were standing round him when he woke. He was never for a moment free of them, he had not a moment’s peace or privacy; horror, boredom, a feeling of loss and agony drowned his spirit. He turned on them to curse them with all the fury of his maddened and exasperated flesh, but when he looked into their faces alive with love and tenderness his heart was torn with wild pity, and he could not speak.
In the house it was always night or morning. In the street it was always morning, and under the lime trees in the garden behind the house where bright geraniums grew, it was always afternoon. And they were always with him. They prodded him with gleeful fingers, they winked at him with knowing and secretive winks, they rubbed their hands in exultant anticipation, as they hinted, darkly, at some new delight they had prepared for him. Sometimes it was Anna with something held behind her back: a plate covered with a napkin—“Guess what’s here?” He could not. It would be a heavy peach-cake, glutinous with its syrups, and covered with a luscious inch-thick coat of “schlagsahne.” And with beer! Great God! With beer! His stomach turned against this richness, his Yankee notions cautioned a trim girth for business men, and careful diets, and his man-like dignity cursed with rage because a mature and worldly man must grin and gloat like a boy over a cookie which a fool of an old woman had given him. Nevertheless, he took it smiling, trying to show the right degree of stupefied surprise and ecstasy the old woman expected him to feel.
Then the others rubbed their hands exultantly as they hinted at surprises, or told him of delights in store for him. On Monday they were invited out to Uncle Abe’s for dinner—his heart sank down with leaden weariness; on Wednesday Cousin Jake was coming with his wife for tea—his flesh turned grey with apathy; on Sunday—oh! he’d grin all over when he heard what they had planned for Sunday!—they were taking the Rhine-boat for a picnic in the woods across the river ten miles up, after which they would cross by ferry, and walk home again.
Desolation.
Jack thought that he endured it all—dinner at Uncle Abe’s together with young Abie’s stamp collections, and songs and selections at the piano by young Lena afterwards; tea with the family and Cousin Jake and his wife Sadie, and all that pompous fool’s smart-Aleck questions about America—which he had never visited but which he could talk about, of course, with all his customary conceit, assurance, and unfathomed ignorance.
Jack endured it all—food, weddings, the interminable family gatherings, and reunions, funerals, gossip, visits and receptions. He endured all the questions endlessly repeated and patiently answered to circles of dark oily faces, smiling with
benignant and approving pride above fat paunches comfortably crossed by hands. He endured the picnics up the river and the long walks back, blistered feet and prehistoric plumbing, beer evenings of a sodden jollity in enormous and cavernous drinking halls, thick with a murk of smoke, glutinous with the warmth and odor of a thousand heavy bodies and roaring with the thick mixed tumults of guttural voices and Wagnerian music.
Jack endured it all, and fear ate like a vulture at his heart, desolation rested in his bowels, and his heart was torn with nameless horror and pity as he saw how like a ghost he had become to all that was a part of him, to everything with which his life was most familiar. And always time lay feeding at his heart. It crept along the channels of his blood, it grew within his flesh and flowered in his brain like a grey and cancerous plant. He lay tranced below its hypnotic pressure, like a rabbit caught and held under the baleful spell of a serpent’s eye, he was powerless to act or move, but always he was conscious of his life wasting and consuming fatally under the strange dark light of time. In his heart there dwelt forever the horror of a memory, almost captured, of a word almost spoken, of a decision almost understood and made. The knowledge of some great labor left undone, of a terrible duty unfulfilled, of the irrevocable years that had been passed and wasted and of friends and works forgot while he lay tranced and stricken by time’s sorcery, haunted him day and night, but what the goal, the labor, and the duty were, he could not say.
Smoke! His life was passing like a dream under the strange and terrible visages of time, and Jack sought for some door he could enter, and he found none open. He longed for some goal and home and harbor, and he had nowhere to go.
Then, out of the old house where all lay sleeping he crept one day into the high and ancient street where all the houses tottered and leaned together like conspiring crones and where bright sunlight cut cool depths of Gothic shadows and where it was always morning.
* * * * *
Now Jack was walking in an ancient cobbled street, but not the one he lived in. The old gabled houses with their mellow timbers, their bright rich colors, and their high Gothic overhang seemed to bend and lean like old live things above the narrow cobbled ways, conferring quietly in all the attitudes of familiar personal intimacy. They had a look of old witch-haggery, crone-like, wise and ancient, and yet unmalign. They were like old benignant wives and gossips of the town huddled above some juicy morsel of town scandal, and yet they seemed innocent and familiar.
Although the street was hundreds of years old, it had a quality that was wonderfully fresh and living. The slow wear and waste of time, the rich alluvial deposits of centuries seemed only to have given to the street a richer and profounder sort of life. This life had not only entered or worked its way into the old houses, it had also got into the cobbles and the narrow pavements before the houses, giving a line of life, a rich and vital color to everything. The old timbers of the houses were seasoned in the hues of time, and even in the warp and wave of ancient walls, in the sag and bend of roofs and basements, there was a rich undulant vitality which only time could bring. Moreover, all harsh lines and angles seemed to have been rubbed and softened by this slow enormous chemistry of time. And this chemistry had given the street a warmth and life which seemed to Jack to make it not only richer in quality, but somehow more young and wholesome than the streets of home.
The street sprang instantly into living unity, with a tone and quality which was incomparable and unique, and yet the houses were richly varied by all the colors and designs of an elfin and capricious architecture. But in comparison to this street, a street at home with its jargon of ugly and meaningless styles, its harsh pale colors broken with gloomy interspersions of dingy grey and rusty brown, the prognathous rawness of apartment houses, lofts, and office buildings of new raw brick or glaring stone, that ranged from dreary shambles of two stories to forty glittering floors of arrogant steel and stone, the ragged confusion of height, and the beaten weariness of grey pavements bleakly worn by a million feet, seemed sterile, raw, and lifeless in its senseless and chaotic fury.
It was morning, the sun cut crisply and yet with an autumnal mellowness into the steep old shadows of the street. The sun felt warm and drowsy, but in the shadows of the houses Jack felt at once the premonitory breath of frost.
Before one of the old houses a woman with thick mottled arms and wide solid-looking hams was down upon her hands and knees, vigorously “going for” the stone step before a door. Jack noticed that the step was of old red stone, worn and hollowed deeply by the feet of four hundred years, and at the same time he noticed that the street and pavement was made of this same red stone, and had been worn, rounded, and enriched by time just as everything else had been. The woman who was scrubbing the stone finished, and got up like a strong clumsy animal. Her face was red, flushed triumphantly by her labor, and with a swift motion of her thick red hand she brushed back some strands of blown hair. Then she seized the bucket of grey sudsy water and dashed it out into the gutter. Finally she began to talk loudly and cheerfully to a woman who was passing along the other side of the street with an enormous market basket on her arm. And Jack felt that all of this was just as it had always been. All his former sensations of strangeness and phantasmal unreality had vanished. He felt secure and certain and exultant. He seemed always to have known this street, and all the people in it, and this knowledge gave him a feeling of the most extraordinary happiness he had ever known.
A man rode slowly by upon a bicycle. The man wore a flat cap, he had a straight stiff collar and wore a stringy necktie. He had on a belted coat, and he wore thick solid shoes and long black woollen stockings. He pedalled with deliberate care, pausing at the apex of his stroke, while his wheel wobbled perilously on the cobbles, and pedalling downward with a strong driving motion that sent him swiftly forward again. The man had a small lean face, a little bristly tuft of moustache, and hard muscular jaws that writhed unpleasantly. Jack was sure he knew this man. And all along the street there were small shops with panes of leaded glass and little bells that tinkled as one entered. Some had old wooden signs that hung out in the streets before them, and some had Gothic lettering of rich faded colors on the wall of the house above the shop. The windows were crammed to bursting with fat succulent looking sausages, rich pastries, chocolate, rolls and bread, flasks of wine or bundles of cigars made of strong coarse looking tobacco. And Jack knew that when one entered the shop the proprietor would greet him with a long, droll, gutturally friendly “Mo-o-o-rgen!”
Jack did not know why he was walking in this street, but he knew that a meeting with someone he had known was impending, and this certain knowledge increased the feeling of joy and security he had already. And suddenly he saw them all about him in the street—the friends and schoolmates of his youth—and he knew instantly why he was there among them.
And now another curious fact appeared. Here were the companions of his early years in the grammar school, and here were those he had known later in the gymnasium. He knew and recognized them instantly, and yet he saw with a sense of sorrow and without surprise that all of them had grown old. He had seen none of them since his childhood, and now the children he had known had grown into old men with worn eyes and wrinkled faces. Jack saw this instantly and yet it caused him no surprise; when he looked at them he could see they were old men but he seemed to look straight through their old faces into the faces of the children he had known. And the moment that he saw them they came to him and grasped him by the hand. They spoke to him with kindly friendship and with no surprise or questioning, and there was something infinitely sorrowful, weary, and resigned in their voices.
Then they were sitting all together at a pleasant table in an old beer house, looking with quiet eyes into the street. The waiter came to take their order, and they ordered beer. Jack saw that the waiter was a heavily built man of middle age who walked with a heavy limp. His head was shaven, he wore a long apron that went from neck to ankles and that had been woven out of a coarse blue threa
d. The man had a kindly brutal face, and the same quiet and sorrowful eyes the others had. He said “Was soll es sein?” in a gruff and friendly tone, taking their orders with a rough male friendliness and limping away to fill them.
They sat at a table of old dark wood, scored and carved with many deep initials and shining with the cleanliness of countless scrubbings. The place was vast and deep; it was full of old dark woods and cool depths, and the strong wet reek of beer came freshly on the air.
With Jack sitting at the table and looking out into the street were Walter Grauschmidt, Paul Heyst, and Ludwig Berniker. Ludwig had become a mountain of a man, with a bald, shining, completely hairless head and a swinish face. And yet the head and face had also a profound and massive strength, a curious and tragic mixture of swinish gluttony and lonely and sorrowful thought, as if the beast and the angel of the race had come together there. Jack had seen these faces in his youth ten thousand times, and they had haunted his memory with the enigma of their bestial and hateful swinishness and their massive and lonely power and dignity, but now he noticed also that Ludwig’s head was disfigured at the temple with a clean bullet hole, bluish and bloodless at the edges, and drilled cleanly through his brain. Then he remembered having heard that Ludwig who had served throughout the war as an officer of infantry had been killed, or it was thought, had killed himself, in the week before the Armistice. Yet neither this fact, nor the clean bullet hole in Ludwig’s temple, caused Jack any surprise whatever.
Instead, a quiet and certain knowledge, an old and sorrowful acceptation which had no need or words, seemed to bind them all together as they sat at their pleasant table, looking out into the street. Then, as they sat there at their beer, looking with quiet eyes into the street, Jack saw the figure of his once hated enemy Hartmann, stumping by. And Hartmann, too, had grown old and battered. He also walked with a heavy limp, which he had got in the war, he was poorly and shabbily dressed, and he wore the flat cap of a working man.