by Thomas Wolfe
"I here," he said, pointing, "you there--yis?"
He looked at George almost pleadingly, a little desperately--and suddenly George began to catch on.
"Oh! You mean I am right above you--" Katamoto nodded with instant relief--"and sometimes when I stay up late you hear me?"
"Yis! Yis!" He kept nodding his head vigorously. "Sometimes--" he smiled a little painfully--"sometimes--you will be tramp-ling!" He shook his finger at George with coy reproof and giggled.
"I'm awfully sorry," George said. "Of course, I didn't know you slept so near--so near the ceiling. When I work late I pace the floor. It's a bad habit. I'll do what I can to stop it."
"Oh, no-o!" he cried, genuinely distressed. "I not want--how you say it?--change your life!...If you ple-e-ese, sir! Just little thing--not wear shoes at night!" He pointed at his own small felt-shod feet and smiled up at George hopefully. "You like slippers yis?" And he smiled persuasively again.
After that, of course, George wore slippers. But sometimes he would forget, and the next morning Katamoto would be rapping at his door again. He was never angry, he was always patient and good-humoured, he was always beautifully courteous--but he would always call George to account. "You were tramp-ling!" he would cry. "Last night--again--tramp-ling!" And George would tell him he was sorry and would try not to do it again, and Katamoto would go away giggling, pausing to turn and wag his finger roguishly and call out once more, "Tramp-ling!"--after which he would flee downstairs, shrieking with laughter.
They were good friends.
In the months that followed, again and again George would come in the house to find the hall below full of sweating, panting movers, over whom Katamoto, covered from head to foot with clots and lumps of plaster, would hover prayerfully and with a fearful, pleading grin lest they mar his work, twisting his small hands together convulsively, aiding the work along by slight shudders, quick darts of breathless terror, writhing and shrinking movements of the body, and saying all the while with an elaborate, strained, and beseeching courtesy:
"Now, if--you--gentleman--a little!...You...yis--yis--yis-s!" with a convulsive grin. "Oh-h-h! Yis--yis-s! If you ple-e-ese, sir!...If you would down--a little--yis-s!--yis-s!--yis-s!" he hissed softly with that prayerful and pleading grin.
And the movers would carry out of the house and stow into their van the enormous piecemeal fragments of some North Dakota Pericles, whose size was so great that one wondered how this dapper, fragile little man could possibly have fashioned such a leviathan.
Then the movers would depart, and for a space Mr. Katamoto would loaf and invite his soul. He would come out in the backyard with his girl, the slender, agile little Japanese--who looked as, if she had some Italian blood in her as well--and for hours at a time they would play at handball. Mr. Katamoto would knock the ball up against the projecting brick wall of the house next door, and every time he scored a point he would scream with laughter, clapping his small hands together, bending over weakly and pressing his hand against his stomach, and staggering about with delight and merriment. Choking with laughter, he would cry out in a high, delirious voice as rapidly as he could:
"Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis!"
Then he would catch sight of George looking at him from the window, and this would set him off again, for he would wag his finger and fairly scream:
"You were tramp-ling!...Yis, yis, yis!...Last night--again tramp-ling!"
This would reduce him to such a paroxysm of mirth that he would stagger across the court and lean against the wall, all caved in, holding his narrow stomach and shrieking faintly.
It was now the full height of steaming summer, and one day early in August George came home to find the movers in the house again. This time it was obvious that a work of more than usual magnitude was in transit. Mr. Katamoto, spattered with plaster, was of course hovering about in the hall, grinning nervously and fluttering prayerfully around the husky truckmen. As George came in, two of the men were backing slowly down the hall, carrying between them an immense head, monstrously jowled and set in an expression of farseeing statesmanship. A moment later three more men backed out of the studio, panting and cursing as they grunted painfully around the flowing fragment of a long frock coat and the vested splendour of a bulging belly. The first pair had now gone back in the studio, and when they came out again they were staggering beneath the trousered shank of a mighty leg and a booted Atlantean hoof, and as they passed, one of the other men, now returning for more of the statesman's parts, pressed himself against the wall to let them by and said:
"Jesus! If the son-of-a-bitch stepped on you with that foot, he wouldn't leave a grease spot, would he, Joe?"
The last piece of all was an immense fragment of the Solon's arm and fist, with one huge forefinger pointed upwards in an attitude of solemn objurgation and avowal.
That figure was Katamoto's masterpiece; and George felt as he saw it pass that the enormous upraised finger was the summit of his art and the consummation of his life: Certainly it was the apple of his eye. George had never seen him before in such a state of extreme agitation. He fairly prayed above the sweating men: It was obvious that the coarse indelicacy of their touch made him shudder. The grin was frozen on his face in an expression of congealed terror. He writhed, he wriggled, he wrung his little hands, he crooned to them. And if anything had happened to that fat, pointed finger, George felt sure that he would have dropped dead on the spot.
At length, however, they got everything stowed away in their big van without mishap and drove off with their Ozymandias, leaving Mr. Katamoto, frail, haggard, and utterly exhausted, looking at the kerb. He came back into the house and saw George standing there and smiled wanly at him.
"Tramp-ling," he said feebly, and shook his finger, and for the first time there was no mirth or energy in him.
George had never seen him tired before. It had never occurred to him that he could get tired. The little man had always been so full of inexhaustible life. And now, somehow, George felt an unaccountable sadness to see him so weary and so strangely grey. Katamoto was silent for a moment, and then he lifted his face and said, almost tonelessly, yet with a shade of wistful eagerness:
"You see statue--yis?"
"Yes, Kato, I saw it."
"And you like?"
"Yes, very much."
"And--" he giggled a little and made a shaking movement with his hands--"you see foot?"
"Yes."
"I sink," he said, "he will be tramp-ling--yis?"--and he made laughing sound.
"He ought to," George said, "with a hoof like that. It's almost as big as mine," he added, as an afterthought.
Katamoto seemed delighted with this observation, for he laughed shrilly and said: "Yis! Yis!"--nodding his head emphatically. He was silent for another moment, then hesitantly, but with an eagerness that he could not conceal, he said:
"And you see finger?"
"Yes, Kato."
"And you like?"--quickly, earnestly.
"Very much."
"Big finger--yis?"--with a note of rising triumph in his "Very big, Kato."
"And pointing--yis?" he said ecstatically, grinning from ear to ear and pointing his own small finger heavenward.
"Yes, pointing."
He sighed contentedly. "Well, zen," he said, with the appeased' air of a child, "I'm glad you like."
For a week or so after that George did not see Katamoto again or even think of him. This was the vacation period at the School for Utility Cultures, and George was devoting every minute of his time, day and, night, to a fury of new writing. Then one afternoon; a long passage completed and the almost illegible pages of his swift scrawl tossed in a careless heap upon the floor, he sat relaxed, looking out of his back window, and suddenly he thought of Katamoto again. He remembered that he had not seen him recently, and it seemed strange that he had not even heard the familiar thud of the little ball against the wall outside or the sound of his high, shrill laughter. This realisation, with i
ts sense of loss, so troubled him that he went downstairs immediately and pressed Katamoto's bell.
There was no answer. All was silent. He waited, and no one came. Then he went down to the basement and found the janitor and spoke to him. He said that Mr. Katamoto had been ill, No, it was not serious, he thought, but the doctor had advised a rest, a brief period of relaxation from his exhausting labours, and had sent him for care and observation to the near-by hospital.
George meant to go to see him, but he was busy with his writing and kept putting it off. Then one morning, some ten days later, coming back home after breakfast in a restaurant, he found a moving van backed up before the house. Katamoto's door was open, and when he looked inside the moving people had already stripped the apartment almost bare. In the centre of the once fantastic room, now empty, where Katamoto had performed his prodigies of work, stood a young Japanese, an acquaintance of the sculptor, whom George had seen there several times before. He was supervising the removal of the last furnishings.
The young Japanese looked up quickly, politely, with a toothy grin of frozen courtesy as George came in. He did not speak until George asked him how Mr. Katamoto was. And then, with the same toothy, frozen grin upon his face, the same impenetrable courtesy, he said that Mr. Katamoto was dead.
George was shocked, and stood there for a moment, knowing there was nothing more to say, and yet feeling somehow, as people always feel on these occasions, that there was something that, he ought to say. He looked at the young Japanese and started to speak, and found himself looking into the inscrutable, polite, untelling eyes of Asia.
So he said nothing more. He just thanked the young man and went out.
* * *
4. Some Things Will Never Change
Out of his front windows George could see nothing except the sombre bulk of the warehouse across the street. It was an old building, with a bleak and ugly front of rusty, indurated brown and a harsh webbing of fire-escapes, and across the whole width of the facade stretched a battered wooden sign on which, in faded letters, one could make out the name--"The Security Distributing Corp." George did not know what a distributing corporation was, but every day since he had come into this street to live, enormous motor-vans had driven up before this dingy building and had backed snugly against the worn plankings of the loading platform, which ended with a sharp, sheared emptiness four feet above the pavement. The drivers and their helpers would leap from their seats, and instantly the quiet depths of the old building would burst into a furious energy of work, and the air would be filled with harsh cries:
"Back it up, deh! Back it up! Cuh-mahn! Cuh-mahn! Givvus a hand, youse guys! Hey-y! You!"
They looked at one another with hard faces of smiling derision, quietly saying "Jesus!" out of the corners of their mouths. Surly, they stood upon their rights, defending truculently the narrow frontier of their duty:
"Wadda I care where it goes! Dat's yoeh look-out! Wat t'hell's it got to do wit me?"
They worked with speed and power and splendid aptness, furiously, unamiably, with high, exacerbated voices, spurred and goaded by their harsh unrest.
The city was their stony-hearted mother, and from her breast they had drawn a bitter nurture. Born to brick and asphalt, to crowded tenements and swarming streets, stunned into sleep as children beneath the sudden slamming racket of the elevated trains, taught to fight, to menace, and to struggle in a world of savage violence and incessant din, they had had the city's qualities stamped into their flesh and movements, distilled through all their tissues, etched with the city's acid into their tongue and brain and vision. Their faces were tough and seamed, the skin thick, dry, without a hue of freshness or of colour. Their pulse beat with the furious rhythm of the city's stroke: ready in an instant with a curse, metallic clangours sounded from their twisted lips, and their hearts were filled with a dark, immense, and secret pride.
Their souls were like the asphalt visages of city streets. Each day the violent colours of a thousand new sensations swept across them, and each day all sound and sight and fury were erased from their unyielding surfaces. Ten thousand furious days had passed about them, and they had no memory. They lived like creatures born full-grown into present time, shedding the whole accumulation of the past with every breath, and all their lives were written in the passing of each actual moment.
And they were sure and certain, for ever wrong, but always confident. They had no hesitation, they confessed no ignorance or error, and they knew no doubts. They began each morning with a gibe, a shout, an oath of hard impatience, eager for the tumult of the day. At noon they sat strongly in their seats and, through fumes of oil and hot machinery, addressed their curses to the public at the tricks and strategies of cunning rivals, the tyranny of the police, the stupidity of pedestrians, and the errors of less skilful men than they. Each day they faced the perils of the streets with hearts as calm as if they were alone upon a country road. Each day, with minds untroubled, they embarked upon adventures from which the bravest men bred in the wilderness would have recoiled in terror and desolation.
In the raw days of early spring they had worn shirts of thick black wool and leather jackets, but now, in summer, their arms were naked, tattooed, brown, and lean with the play of whipcord muscles. The power and precision with which they worked stirred in George a deep emotion of respect, and also touched him with humility. For whenever he saw it, his own life, with its conflicting desires, its uncertain projects and designs, its labours begun in hope and so often ended in incompletion, by comparison with the lives of these men who, had learned to use their strength and talents perfectly, seemed faltering, blind, and baffled.
At night, too, five times a week, the mighty vans would line up at the kerb in an immense and waiting caravan. They were covered now with great tarpaulins, small green lamps were burning on each side, and the drivers, their faces faintly lit with the glowing points of cigarettes, would be talking quietly in the shadows of their huge machines. Once George had asked one of the drivers the destination of these nightly journeys, and the man had told him that they went to Philadelphia, and would return again by morning.
The sight of these great vans at night, sombre, silent, yet alive with powerful expectancy as their drivers waited for the word to start, gave George a sense of mystery and joy. These men were part of that great company who love the night, and he felt a bond of union with them. For he had always loved the night more dearly than the day, and the energies of his life had risen to their greatest strength in the secret and exultant heart of darkness.
He knew the joys and labours of such men as these. He could see the shadowy procession of their vans lumbering through the sleeping towns, and feel the darkness, the cool fragrance of the country, on his face. He could see the drivers hunched behind the wheels, their senses all alert in the lilac dark, their eyes fixed hard upon the road to curtain off the loneliness of the land at night. And he knew the places where they stopped to eat, the little all-night lunch-rooms warm with greasy light, now empty save for the dozing authority of the aproned Greek behind the counter, and now filled with the heavy shuffle of the drivers' feet, the hard and casual intrusions of their voices.
They came in, flung themselves upon the row of stools, and gave their orders. And as they waited, their hunger drawn into sharp focus by the male smells of boiling coffee, frying eggs and onions, and sizzling hamburgers, they took the pungent, priceless, and uncostly solace of a cigarette, lit between cupped hand and strong-seamed mouth, drawn deep and then exhaled in slow fumes from the nostrils. They poured great gobs and gluts of thick tomato ketchup on their hamburgers, tore with blackened fingers at the slabs of fragrant bread, and ate with jungle lust, thrusting at plate and cup with quick and savage gulpings.
Oh, he was with them, of them, for them, blood brother of their joy and hunger to the last hard swallow, the last deep, ease of sated bellies, the last slow coil of blue expiring from their grateful lungs. Their lives seemed glorious to him in the magic dark of su
mmer. They swept cleanly through the night into the first light and bird song of the morning, into the morning of new joy upon the earth; and as he thought of this it seemed to him that the secret, wild, and lonely heart of man was young and living in the darkness, and could never die.
* * *
Before him, all that summer of 1929, in the broad window of the warehouse, a man sat at a desk and looked out into the street, in a posture that never changed. George saw him there whenever he glanced across, yet he never saw him do anything but look out of the window with a fixed, abstracted stare. At first the man had been such an unobtrusive part of his surroundings that he had seemed to fade into' them, and had gone almost unnoticed. Then Esther, having observed him there, pointed to him one day and said merrily:
"There's our friend in the Distributing Corp again! What do you suppose he distributes? I've never seen him do anything! Have you noticed him--hah?" she cried eagerly. "God! It's the strangest thing I ever saw!" She laughed richly, made a shrug of bewildered protest, and, after a moment, said with serious wonder: "Isn't it queer? What do you suppose a man like that can do? What do you suppose he's thinking of?"
"Oh, I don't know," George said indifferently. "Of nothing, I suppose."
Then they forgot the man and turned to talk of other things, yet from that moment the man's singular presence was pricked out in George's mind and he began to watch him with hypnotic fascination, puzzled by the mystery of his immobility and his stare.
And after that, as soon as Esther came in every day, she would glance across the street and cry out in a jolly voice which had in it the note of affectionate satisfaction and assurance that people have when they see some familiar and expected object:
"Well, I see our old friend, The Distributing Corp, is still looking out of his window! I wonder what he's thinking of to-day."