But when the lawyer left us, we traveled very simply. Kirby was the most unpretentious of men. He showed himself as much at home in the most inconvenient farmhouse as in the most luxuriant hotel. And always he was very thoughtful about fitting my expense to the budget.
I have always remembered Senator Kirby as a sort of historic American. That is, he reminds me of The American written by Henry James. Not the American of the seething new age where all is changing, but the American along more classic lines. He was wealthy, and most of his life had been spent in making money. Some who make a lot of money are fat in the face somewhere as if they have put a few extra swindled rolls up there, but he had a beautiful, dignified face, very clean-cut, straight and definite. He was very fond of machinery, and at the slightest excuse would get into his khaki overalls and tinker around with that big car. I admired his accuracy in every move and gesture. (Always he stopped and let me get out to read the signs, never driving on and on like some motorists, for he said he detested backing, he detested a track that was wrong.) In his devotion to Wilson he had some of that missionary ideal of the classic American. Also about prohibition. He thought America ought to have prohibition, not from the individual’s point of view but because of drink’s social evil for poor people, whose families could not be protected. Kirby was not exactly puritan (he came from Chicago) but he was not exactly anti-puritan either. He said to me that he was much disgusted with ordinary American morality—he couldn’t stand men who weren’t serious fooling around with women; but on the other hand he was much disgusted, too, with American hypocrisy that said one thing in church and another in Elks meetings. He had not much use for churches, yet his morals seemed to be church morals . . . except that he would swear somewhat. I was reminded of Doctor Ko, who was a Korean Confucian to the marrow of his bones, though never speaking out, though actually divorced from that. In the same way Senator Kirby would remain Christian American to the end, no matter what church creeds he disbelieved. He was the product forever of American Jeffersonianism and American Puritanism blended, of American faith and American idealism, of all the Marlowesque stages of American industry. Kirby was on his way to California, where he had moved for the sake of his wife’s health. But he himself was proud to call himself an Illinoisan, and obviously had much in him of the Midwest. When he spoke of Mrs. Kirby’s health, his face was transparent in showing worry and clouds. She was in poor health. He mentioned her a great deal and it was always with great tenderness and pride. And I thought theirs must be a beautiful relation which had lasted through the span of twenty or more years.
I was with Senator Kirby for almost a week, for he had business in many places, and he liked me so much, he urged me to accompany him. We were very harmonious. I told him much about myself. He said, “Yes, young man, I can see you have come to America to stay, and I’m proud and glad. Now you must definitely make up your mind to be American. Don’t say, ‘I’m a Korean’ when you’re asked. Say ‘I’m an American.’”
“But an Oriental has a hard time in America. He is not welcomed much.”
“There shouldn’t be any buts about it! Believe in America with all your heart. Even if it’s sometimes hard, believe in her. I have seen many countries. But this is still the greatest country in the world for youth, for a full life, and ambitious enterprise. This land is like Christopher Marlowe’s country when he was a boy. Young man, it’s seldom I see any one with as much of that same spirit as I see in you. I tell you, sir, you belong here. You should be one of us.”
“But legally I am denied.”
Senator Kirby actually pooh-poohed this objection. “There are still ways and means of proving exceptions. And that unfair law perhaps will not always last. Next time I hold government office” (this was the time of the great reaction against Woodrow Wilson, and his party had been out for a long time), “write me and I will help you.”
2
I was in New York once more. I now had a regular job, one I had more or less created for myself. I interviewed the editor of a certain critical monthly, and taking my free-lancing work on other papers, I told him I wanted to sum up Oriental news regularly for his review. He accepted the proposal. I was assured by that of about fifty dollars a month.
That fall, I was sitting in on a short-story course at Columbia presided over by a very well-known figure in American life, letters, economics and business, a man of enormous energy, still young, with a wide range of knowledge and experience. He was a new type of American professor to me, so new that it was hard to think of him as “professor” at all. To a solid scholastic foundation, he added a lucid sense of reality in human relations. He was a born popularizer, and practical manager of every piece of information he gathered; and in his great pigeonholing mind, he had the greatest assemblage of facts I have ever seen. Every fact he made do some work for him. Yes, his startling regimentation of scholastic facts arrayed on the march, to arrest and catch the mind of the ordinary American, is one of the most spectacular things I have seen in this modern civilization. He was engaged at this time as an American editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 14th edition. He and that work gripped my mind. I had a long talk with him, and the upshot was that, with the swift definite decision and action characteristic of him, he made me an editorial worker on his staff.
I felt that I had come back to New York for good, after a series of spiral flights. I had aimed. I had dropped. I had captured my little opening. It was significant more as an entering wedge in the professionally intellectual world, than as anything else. But my satisfaction was supreme. It was enough to make New York loom up powerfully again as the dream-come-true dazzling city. And as I walked New York streets, it did not seem possible that Trip could not be here, she who had been mystically interwoven into my whole dream of America. I was desperately eager to find her somewhere. I wrote to Laura James. I urged her to visit New York, to try for something on the art staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica, for many young artists I knew were being employed there. And I asked with emphasis for Trip’s address. Laura wrote that she was at work in Boston, and could not come to New York. And she made no mention of Trip or Trip’s whereabouts. Well, no business can ever be done by a letter, that was my sad thought. I must go to Boston and interview Laura, in person. This conspiracy of time and of silence could not forever keep up. I was a disciple now of my editor-superior’s action.
One cold night in early winter I was in Chinatown, my mind still habitually abnormal with thrilling possibilities, bright-hued hopes, my mind still in New York fever, thoughts conscious of an electric pulse, thoughts a harbor rim of dark sea where lights sparkled questioning an unknown space. I was in my favorite downstairs eating place, the one that had first received me when I had only five cents. And there I found somebody else. I could not believe my eyes. The last I had heard, he had been in Europe on a newspaper, but of course you never can tell where Oriental exiles will be turning up next. Certainly I had always associated this exile with New York. (Boston for Helen, but for Kim New York.) For it was Kim. It was surely Kim. But I was terribly shocked. At first I noted the physical man so changed, his shabbiness, soiled shirt, frayed clothes, broken shoes—and Kim in personal appearance had always been rather elegant, rather nice. But far worse was the spiritual transformation, for I seemed to be looking at the empty shell of a Korean, one not so old in years, but broken in mood and in heart.
My dear friend showed himself not especially glad to see me and yet not sorry. The spark in his eyes flickered once more, but the old Kim did not come back. We sat there together. And he didn’t say much. He had been eating a cheap meal, eating with a routine air and without much pleasure. When I ordered something good by way of a celebration, he didn’t eat much of that. Yet Koreans always like to eat. They like good things at a Chinese restaurant. At first he listlessly parried my eager questions, my surprise and delight at having found him once more after so long a time. I thought to myself, he looks so fatigued and lusterl
ess, as if having just come from some long imprisonment—or maybe just out on bail. Indifferent he seemed to contradiction or argument, whether you called a cow a horse, or named black white. Had he merely grown more secluded in his monastic world, more disciplined in social intercourse and less dogmatic? But where was that exalted far-seeing eye of pessimism, where those ironical quips as well as the childlike glee—were these all gone? More or less in a stolid disposition he seemed, as if a prisoner already proved guilty, content to wait for the execution hour.
I went with Kim to his lodging. As if some word of explanation was necessary, he told me of the failing of his family. His father had been a fabulously wealthy man, with the annual income from many bags of rice. His father had died. Possibly half-brothers had mishandled the estate. But in these times of stress, not like the old days, there was nothing unusual in that ruin. The biggest Korean fortune now will often fail, leaving the heirs stranded penniless abroad, on student passports. I know of many many cases just like Kim’s. At any rate, Kim lived no more on Eastern bags of rice.
Since he would not say much, I began to tell him of my new work, how I had followed his advice all these years and now was ready for his help again. I could give him much to do in my department. (One of my duties in the Encyclopædia was the picking of men for various Oriental articles.) He was the very man I had been looking for. But Kim listened without much interest. He appeared to feel that his ideas would never command attention nor his personality cause any sensation. And he rebelled no longer. He was perfectly willing to be a caged animal looking out on the world through the steel bars of his own isolation. But what had he done, I wondered, with his soul? Where had he buried that ironic laughter and all those sarcastic remarks? No more an undertaker to bury an idea, no more a philosopher to play with anything—no praise, no blame, no cry, no sigh.
He was in a cheap room near Bleecker and 8th streets. It was up over a stable. At least it smelled so. However, it had a mysterious gateway to indicate that there was a mysterious man inside and around the corner. And the inside was better than the outside where Italian children played amidst horses and trucks. You crossed a small soiled courtyard of flagstones; a narrow stairway then led straight to his room. He had inside a fireplace with a coal skuttle, a few odd chairs and a stool, a rickety small couch for sleeping and a good-sized old and scarred table for eating and writing. On the table was half a loaf of bread sticking out of waxed paper. The room was not so small; it had a gas stove in the bathroom and two windows. But there was not much light.
What was his financial state? I kept insisting to know. He laughed, as he confessed he had sold everything he once owned. Furniture, clothes, ring, watch. He had kept his books to the last, but they, too, were all gone now. He had made them over to a second-hand dealer recently for $125.
“That wasn’t much!” I cried, horrified, remembering all his rare Oriental books.
But he showed me a roll of bills that he still had, as if to put my mind at rest. While I was there, a kitten crept into the room, wandering up from the courtyard, and Kim wanted to turn all my attention to watching that kitten, its funny lithe movements, its leaps, its springs and its antics in chasing its tail.
I asked about Mr. Brown. He had not seen Brown since he saw me. I asked about Helen Hancock.
“Helen?” For a moment he looked as if he did not know whom I meant. “Oh, yes. Helen.”
He considered the name. He told me, so far as he knew, just what had happened . . . and without emotion. He had not heard from Helen since leaving America. His days in Europe at first had been spent wandering about, thinking of her and waiting. He certainly expected some message, some word to the waiting lover of rendezvous, some word of good-bye, if the Helen he knew had been changed. No word ever came. Well, he hardly knew what he had done since we met. . . .
“But you were writing good things. I read them in various Korean papers. I always looked for your name.”
Yes, he agreed, perhaps. He only knew he had lost interest. At last something stirred in his brain. He had to get back to New York. He was in Italy at the time. He had gone out to the English graveyard. And somehow he could not bear it—the death of the dead that lay there. “Even to die in America,” said Kim slowly, “seemed to have more of a future than to live like a ghost with them.” He had had much trouble getting in.
“And then? Why didn’t you go straight to Helen?”
“I began to think that there wasn’t any such girl,” Kim smiled wistfully—he was blinking and watching that kitten, and in the dim light of that little cheap lampshade, he really looked a man of shadow—“that with Helen, I had been like that kitten chasing its tail.”
(“No! Oh, no!” something in me cried violently.) And I said, “I do not believe they let her get your letters.” And Kim said, that might be. But the story did have a sequel. For Kim was not so removed from it all then as now. Unknown to the Browns, he had haunted their street, he had intercepted their maid. He had taken her out to dinner and questioned her minutely, making her promise never to tell this to Arthur Brown. He had asked her of Helen. Well, queer as it may seem, she had overheard something. And how much she made up and how much she heard, one can’t say. Even as Kim told it to me, it seemed blurred and hazy, and one felt that for him the fate of Helen was wrapped in an unending mystery. But according to this maid, Helen had stayed alone with her father and aunt, not seeing anybody, and being sent off from time to time to various sanatoriums for rest cures. She had been interviewed by many psychiatrists. It was over that, Brown blew up, and loudly gave his views which had been overheard by the maid. He hated Helen’s branch of the family anyhow, and while they accused him, he accused them, and according to him, the psychiatrists had finished what Helen’s upbringing began.
All of this was, as I say, a blur to poor Kim. The thing he got from the maid was, Helen was dead. She had died in a rest home outside of Boston. But all along Kim seemed to be talking of someone he only casually heard of and never knew well. He couldn’t tell how she died. Kim seemed impassive more or less, but I remembered his friend Hsu Tsimou’s words, that Kim had no road now but Helen or communism. He had come to America again, not to Russia. And there was no Helen.
Then I tried to preach to Kim, to come out of his lethargy, to work in the actual world, since surely work now was to him a physical necessity. I could not rouse Kim.
“But man, you know you must work for self-preservation.”
“I have no instinct for self-preservation,” Kim argued listlessly. “Animals use all sorts of shields and shells, strong teeth and legs and claws, to protect themselves. Plants, even plants, know how to develop poisonous secretions and sharp thorns. The cuttlefish blackens the water so it can remain unseen in isolation. But I have none of this art. Or I have lost it. . . . Rats, while appeasing their own hunger, eat up the bodies of plague-dead rats, and so contract deadly disease. That is like me. Get away from me. I advise you. I don’t want to give that disease, as the rats give it to other animals. . . . Really, the sight of the dead body, that moves no more, gives me no panic. I have seen too much. And what is one more corpse over so many dead worlds?”
I left him, heartsick, intending to come back soon. But a kind of horror was upon me, too. Almost I did dread the effect of Kim upon myself. I seemed to hear in my ears Kim’s unsaid soliloquy: “Was only I insane? No, all the West is. Insane since the time of that first Helen whose ghost destroyed one world and built another. Without Helen, Ulysses would never have been shipwrecked again and again in the black treacherous sea. Always he tried to reach the receding horizon. The Israelites were more wise, half-Asiatics, playing upon the Red Sea, sailing cautiously along some near-by coast. And look, they inherit the earth. Not like the Greeks, the unruly Greeks who fashioned Helen and fostered Jesus Christ. And all of this means that we have to stick close to this miserable earth. We must not imagine ourselves to be immortal. Man may fill the earth with
grand ideals and may draw deep breaths of lofty philosophies. But wait and see—there is no way out. Reality, there is none. Man’s drunken imagination hunts in the haunted garret. Terrors, fears, heartbreak, these only wait. Let him follow the Israelite. Let him stay close to the earth that fed him, let him never look up, let him toil and sorrow close to the dust that will suffocate on the last day his breath. Suffocated, dead, buried and no more . . . what then remains of high thoughts?”
Yes, I ran from Kim. A silent life, a motionless life, an unpraised life, an unblamed life, and now a wholly undistinguished life at the end—a life that had lived in the ego and in the inner dream, that did not know if it was in inner dream or in outer reality, a life that had never accepted its real worldliness, did not know if it came once to be transplanted or was hopelessly in exile, did not even know if it felt real grief that its Helen of the new age of time had been lost, or if it had only contracted some disease from the Western dead men. I ran from Kim. . . .
3
I went to Boston after my meeting with Kim. And I found Laura, and I made my inquiries concerning Trip. Laura was plainly reticent now, and a little horrified at such importunity. That was mortifying, but I kept on. Trip was still living with Van and Marietta. Where were they? And Laura gave me a worried laugh. Why, I could find their phone number under Marietta’s name in the phone book. (Plainly she did not want to be implicated this time in my calling.) But she gave me Marietta’s last name. Such a small thing as that had been at the root of my trouble in finding Trip. Many times I had looked under Van’s name and under Trip’s in the New York phone book—yes, for three years—but I had never tried Marietta’s.
I returned to New York with the definite, accurate way—as swift as thought—of addressing a dream and a vision . . . something grown fertilely in mystic splendor enclosed in a soul’s inner life. A number and telephone wires. How fantastic, how feasible! (How perhaps impossible!) . . . but what would my Browning say from his comfortable spiritual chair before Fichte was quite discredited, Don Quixote went sparring again, or science invaded forever the West and the East?
East Goes West Page 43