by Conrad Aiken
Galion—Marion—Sidney—Muncie——:
Ohio—Indiana—Illinois——:
“Ommernous,” he muttered; “it’s all ommernous; every bit of it is ommernous! Waking and sleeping we lay waste our powers.…”
The cry of the whistle punctuated his sleep; and then the glaring ball of the sun above the low rich land, blazing straight into his eyes over the cindered window sill; the rich land reeling fanlike in ribs and volutes of green, a file of cattle, a dog, haystacks by a clump of trees, a house dark against the brightened east. Blades of yellow light, too, from beneath the lowered curtain, light and sound mixing confusedly as if positively they might interchange: the rails beating at his cheeks and eyes like light, the sun’s rays assailing his ears in an overbearing intricacy of endless rhythm. And then the early morning passengers, the new arrivals, the intruders——
“—well, I always think——”
“—yes, isn’t that strange——?”
“—rather annoyed at a reaction a child gave, several years ago——”
“—and so long, and then we flop——”
“—yes—and he met her that night!——”
“—worldly, mundane sort of a girl——”
“—place where you stay is very comfortable, single room with bath——”
“—association. No, I don’t keep up——”
“—well, what I don’t know about T.B.——”
“—expose the whole pleural cavity—right middle left lower lobe—lot of lymph——”
“—and use a cautery along that line——”
“—no, just a——”
“—capillary?”
“—just an ordinary——”
“—Christian Scientist, with a tumor of the lung—back five weeks afterward—yes, sir, five weeks——”
“—hope you’ll give my regards to the good wife——”
“—I surely will——!”
“—and my regrets that she doesn’t turn up at Atlantic City any more——”
Blah—blah—blah—blah.—Comfort. Safety. Scenic Interest. A great fleet of fast trains at convenient hours between the East and Midwest. Centrally located terminals. The ever beautiful and historic Hudson River and Mohawk Valley. Majestic and inspiring Niagara Falls. Electric automatic signals and automatic train stop.…
Swaying and cursing in the tiny lavatory he had shaved the sleep-blanched face, noting the hollows under the dark eyes, steadying himself with one hand on the metal basinrim, his legs braced apart. Blom the lighthouse, Blom looking not quite so well. The floor had been flooded by someone’s indiscretion, he tried to keep his feet in the drier places. Paper towels only; he was glad they had thought of pinching towels out of the Pullman on their way back from the diner the night before—that had been Gil’s idea. Clever. The night before? Already it seemed centuries ago. The clamor of the train was louder and more immediate in the lavatory, came up rounded and echoing, drafty, almost musical, through the w.c. A good thing to shave today and tomorrow, because after that, when they got into Mexico, God alone knew——
And then Gil was saying, as they waited for Noni, wiping his hands a little nervously with a handkerchief, just the tips of the fingers, then tucking it back in his breastpocket:
“Look here, Blom. I haven’t wanted to ask you before, in fact there hasn’t really been any chance, and I don’t quite know how to say it, but don’t you think all this is a little queer?”
“What do you mean, Gil?”
“Well, the suddenness of it. The abruptness.”
Gil swayed his head and shoulders forward and back, very slightly, very quickly, a habit he had when he was nervous: the pointed lean face, ascetic and Bostonian, but kindly, and the gray eyes, peering through the thick glasses, were frankly puzzled.
“To be candid, Gil,” and he tapped on the tablecloth with the prongs of his fork, “I hadn’t really thought about it. I’ve been too damned busy just getting it arranged!”
“Just the same, doesn’t it strike you as odd——?”
“I don’t know—Noni’s of course sometimes impulsive.”
“Yeah, Blom, but not like this, it’s not really like her, in a thing so important—she’s usually, if anything, rather deliberate.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. What were you thinking about it.”
“That’s what I thought you might know.”
“Me? No.”
He shook his head slowly, smiling at the slightly swaying tweed figure, the earnest eyes. Gil looked back at him rather fixedly for a moment, then said:
“When was it exactly that Noni first talked to you about it?”
“Sunday afternoon. Just after she had called up you. And then I saw her later that evening of course.”
“I thought maybe she might have told you earlier.”
“No. That was the first I knew of it. She told me she’d already talked with you and the lawyer.”
“Well, it’s really very funny. It’s not a bit like Noni—after all these years, so suddenly like this——”
He stared out at the sliding landscape—a farmhouse surrounded by tall trees, two red silos, a car speeding levelly along the flat road parallel with the train, a vast plowed field with the plow lines telescoping in swift perspective—then added:
“Not, of course, that I’m not frightfully glad. As you know.”
“You bet. I think it’s simply grand, Gil. My own only real regret is that you fellers haven’t got together years ago.”
“Yes. It’s just a little bewildering. But I suppose she must have had her reasons. For the sudden decision, I mean.”
“Possibly. Just possibly! But my guess is that she just up and did it on the spur of the moment. Because if she had any special reasons, it’s not like Noni to conceal them. You know as well as I do, Gil, that the one thing Noni cannot do is keep a secret!…”
Smiling broadly for the exchange of this shared knowledge, he elicited deliberately an answering smile from Gil; Gil’s face relaxed, lost the slight sadness which had clouded it; for the first time he seemed to feel a little at ease. With just a hint of some reservation, nevertheless? Gil had perceptions, Gil was no fool. In a way it was a dirty trick—the mere deception, quite apart from the nature of the deception—to keep anyone so lucid, so lucid by nature, thus helplessly in the dark. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t fair even to himself. An accessory after the artifact! He smiled at the thought, whistling the little Bach tune. For a moment he felt almost gay; smoke sprawled in sinuous shapelessness past the window, the swift shadows forming and vanishing beneath it, the sun shone, the hurrying train drew him powerfully into its deep-rhythmed nostalgic hypnosis. Again and again the engine, far ahead, cried for the innumerable crossings of this dull rich flatland, its voice now half stifled, now clear, as the wind shifted. Whooooo—whooooo—whoo-whoo—a somber and deep-timbred voice, whose tone he likened, as he listened, to the color of bronze, the color of winter sunlight on black ice. Everything was so beautiful—everything—but then the cold metallic pang shut round his heart once more, for all this beauty was nothing at all but the backdrop, the décor, for Noni’s dream, Noni’s ballet, of which the end might so easily be tragic. The reason for all this beauty, this wonder—the train, the new and strange landscape, the incredible adventure, this hurrying breakfast table with Gil and himself sitting at it, and all the unshaped but already so powerfully creative future beginning even now to tower in vaguely predictable color and form above them—the reason for this was the possibility that Noni might die. It ran through the landscape, ran through the whole world, like a shadow. It grew in a dark corner of the picture like the deadly nightshade. It was the first note, offstage, tentative and tender, of the tragedian’s song, the goat song. Goat song in Mexico.…
The thought was almost intolerable, it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from jumping to his feet, muttering some sort of excuse, and fleeing to the smoker. But Gil was saying:
“Careful, Blom! Here’s Noni now.”
Not like the deadly nightshade, no, beautiful as that was—but the narcissus!
“Noni, you’re late!”
“Don’t you envy me? I overslept! Positively.”
“I don’t believe it. I suppose you and Gil know the one, speaking of all the train stories we know, about the fellow who was too tall for a sleeping car berth, and had to open the window and put his feet out?”
Noni’s blue eyes were naughty with delight, she was already beginning to laugh.
“No,” she said, fascinated. “No, you can tell us!”
“Well, when he took his feet in, in the morning, he found he had two red lanterns and a mailbag …”
“Fie! I don’t call that a story at all! Did it happen to you, Blom?”
The bland Negro waiter interrupted her glee; they sat back while with swift legerdemain he moved water bottle and sugar bowl to spread the new cloth, flung down and arranged his handful of bright silver. How well she looked, despite the ever-so-slight flush, and with what perfect unselfconsciousness she managed things! She sipped her water, looked over the glass brim to inspect their fellow voyagers, looked out of the wide window, studied the breakfast menu with delight. Then, with her hand on Gil’s sleeve, she said:
“It’s a lovely book!”
“What book, darling?”
“The one Nancy brought. The Cloud Messenger, it’s called, it’s a Hindu poem, very old——”
“Ah!” Gil said; “too highbrow for me. More to Blom’s taste!”
“Blom, you would love it. You must read it! So refreshing in this wasteland—a lover separated from his sweetheart who sends a cloud to her with a message—isn’t that nice? isn’t it lovely?—and the message is the poem——”
She broke off, her own eyes clouding, clouding even as she looked at him, the glass of water held before her: it was as if she were reading the poem, the message, watching that passage of symbol-bearing cloud, in his own eyes and face, retreating magically to another time, another life, another language. Strange counterpoint; for somehow he felt that while she thus held fixed before her, embodied in himself, the past, and explored it lovingly and deeply, she was also aware of the rushing and violent present, fluid beneath and around them, and the future, toward which the train was speeding, unknown but already as fixed and marmoreal as the past. A sibyl—she was like a sibyl. Was it the prospect, the terribly real prospect, of death, which now gazed with such manifest divination out of the grave eyes and gave the fair face such a wonderful stillness? The sunlight touched her hair, to which a slight untidiness lent an additional charm; he noticed with pleasure the copper color in the little braids that crossed the top of her head, as against the slighter gold of the light wind-stirred fibrils at the temples. The cloud messenger—the Megha Duta—he had seen the title as they stood in the South Station, talking with Nancy, and had then wondered what it might be. And now there seemed to him to be something curiously and esoterically appropriate, a sort of obscure fatality, in Nancy’s choice. For Noni was herself a kind of cloud messenger, and so was the train, and so was all motion, whether it was a going-toward or a coming from: a vanishing signal, of fleetingest poignancy, like the blue shadows that flew away over these empty fields under the flying smoke. Impermanent, impermanent! she seemed to say; and then suddenly the blue eyes were laughing above the glass of water, laughing at Gil and his passion for detective magazines—and the conductor was coming down the aisle—and she said, between sips of ice water, “Now I suppose he’ll be taking another yard of ticket——”
And then the Great Divide; in no time at all, in a single flash, they had come upon it—after the interminable dull landscape, featureless as the arid and somehow so bloodless and soulless people who dwelt on its surface, but with something dreadful and eternal about them, too, a melancholy defeated persistence—after this sad land what a relief to foresee this symbol of power and magnificence, in all its rank majesty. It was odd; they had waited at the windows, all three of them, for a half-hour or more, feeling as if by some queer terrestrial empathy that it was near, and that when they at last saw it they would experience something very definite, a sort of secret baptism in the holy waters of their own land.
“It’s only then,” said Noni, half kneeling, half standing, by the window, “that we shall become really indigenous. Really belong. Don’t you feel that, Gil? Don’t you feel that, Blom? Indigenes!”
“Indigenes,” Gil said. “What words you do think up, Noni.”
“Noni reads the dictionary for fun.”
“And with profit, I assure you! Did I tell you about the worm?”
“What worm.”
“The earthworm, Blom. Just the earthworm! But according to Mr. Webster—you’d never believe it—he’s a ‘burrowing, terrestrial, megadrilic worm.’ And the megadrilic, I think you’ll admit, is something to think about. And have you noticed, you two——”
She broke off, looking more intently at the swift landscape, a flock of starlings swooping low over a cornfield, spreading out flat like a wave on a beach, then as quickly mounting again in cloudform. Her hand was against the glass.
“Have you noticed that we’ve come straight into summer, already? This year we shall have no spring. We’ve come through it, overnight.…”
Blom stared, amused.
“It’s true. Wonderful observant Noni! And a fascinating idea. We’ve dived right through it—as if the train were a swimmer, and spring a northward-breaking wave of flower and leaf, a surf of blossom, across the whole continent——”
“Yes, the corn is half-grown. And in Boston, and the Berkshires, the leaves were only beginning——”
“No spring for us, this year!”
“It’s a little sad …”
They were all silent, watching the changing land, the land which now rapidly divulged itself in long, parallel hollows, as if at some time channeled and flood-swept. Shacks, shanties, tiny Negro settlements. And then what was unmistakably a levee—and the ramshackle huts of squatters, on the foreshore—rowboats in gardens tied to shabby porches, rowboats riding the lush inland grass—and suddenly sure enough, the river——!
“Ah,” said Noni, “the Mississippi—the father of waters—now we can go home!”
“Go home——?” said Gil.
Her hands on the sill, looking downward from the bridge at the wide brown water, and as if somehow extraordinarily at peace, Noni gave a little sigh.
“Yes, Gil, go home. Go anywhere, I mean—go where we’ve got to go! Do you see what I mean?”
Gil shook his head, amused. He was himself gazing down at the river, entranced.
“She’s off again!” he said.
“Go to Mexico, for instance—or even back to Boston! I feel as if in the twinkling of an eye—or while, in fact, we were crossing that bridge—my soul had shot under water all the way down to New Orleans, even into the Gulf of Mexico, and back again. And now it belongs to me.…”
In a wide slow circle the train turned southward, bent its course parallel with the river, and the somber walls of the city came to meet them. East St. Louis, St. Louis—already the train felt empty, a little desolate and abandoned; its sounds were becoming subdued; the little cries from the trucks and wheels, as they slipped from one switch to another, one track to another, jolting slightly, were minor and musical; they had almost arrived, they were almost there. Almost there? No such thing, nothing so simple as that. They were only beginning! But if Noni could feel—or was it an incomparable piece of acting?—this astonishing sense of peace—or begin, as she seemed to be doing, to let go——
He looked ahead, as they assembled the bags and coats once more, to the days to come; allowed them to flow forward into the present, and to mingle with the immediate; and now it was Little Rock and Texarkana, Palestine and Troup and San Antonio, Laredo and Monterey and Mexico City, the mountains and the jungle, that came alongside with the bobbing and running caps of the Red Caps, the rumbling
trucks, the roar of steam against the grimed glass roof of the great station. They were walking with the future. The future joined them as they checked the bags at the kiosk, as they drank cold beer out of tall glasses and ate lunch in the station restaurant, as they inquired about the train, to make sure, and as they walked through the wind and dust of the St. Louis streets toward the river. Fantastic city, down-at-heel jumble of romantic past and shoddy present; skyscrapers, Parthenons, monoliths, and then the old quarter of tumbledown but somehow dignified and beautiful red-brick and clapboard houses, somber or florid, where once the life of the city had flowed fastest. Meretricious, the whole thing—streets that were spacious, but without beauty, buildings that were massive and elaborate, but nevertheless looked as hollow and impermanent as the cream-puff fantasies of a world’s fair, something indescribably dreary and provincial and—yes, Noni found the word—temporary, about the whole place. The wilderness would come back—the wilderness had never really been defeated, here; it waited around the corner, waited for the dark.… A beauty parlor, with wide window, from which fixed doll-like faces stared at the pedestrians outside, while a bedizened beauty, with heavily enameled mouth, stood grinning at the open door and beckoned them in … “Specializing in Photos for Chauffeurs.” Shabby little shops, dreary shirts and socks, taverns and beer parlors. In one of these, on a corner, they stopped for beer and to ask their way to the river—over the radio a baseball game was coming from Shibe Park. And remember, folks, this broadcast comes to you by courtesy of—and now somebody’s down there warming up, I’ll tell you who it is in a minute—yes, just as I thought——!