Of Time and the River (142 page)

The rails go westward in the dark. Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails? Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?

Of wandering for ever, and the earth again—the names of the mighty rails that bind the nation, the wheeled thunder of the names that net the continent: the Pennsylvania, the Union Pacific, the Santa Fé, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chicago and Northwestern, the Southern, the Louisiana and Northern, the Seaboard Air Line, the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul, the Lackawanna, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the Florida East Coast, the Rock Island, and the Denver and Rio Grande.

Brother, the names of the engines, the engineers, and the sleeping- cars: the great engines of the Pacific type, the articulated Mallets with three sets of eight-yoked driving-wheels, the 400-ton thunderbolts with J. T. Cline, T. J. McRae, and the demon hawk-eyes of H. D. Campbell on the rails.

The names of the great tramps who range the nation on the fastest trains: the names of the great tramps Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, Dixie Joe, Iron Mike, The Frisco Kid, Nigger Dick, Red Chi, Ike the Kike, and The Jersey Dutchman.

By the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the rocks, and stared. He had long hair, his eyes were deep and sombre, and he wore a cape; he was a poet, and there was magic and mystery in his touch, for he had heard the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. And by the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the cold, grey rocks, and commanded the sea to break—break—break! And the sea broke, by the waters of life, by time, by time, as Lord Tennyson commanded it to do, and his heart was sad and lonely as he watched the stately ships (of the Hamburg- American Packet Company, fares forty-five dollars and up, first- class) go on to their haven under the hill, and Lord Tennyson would that his heart could utter the thoughts that arose in him.

By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of the mighty rivers, the alluvial gluts, the drains of the continent, the throats that drink America (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song). The names of the men who pass, and the myriad names of the earth that abides for ever: the names of the men who are doomed to wander, and the name of that immense and lonely land on which they wander, to which they return, in which they will be buried— America! The immortal earth which waits for ever, the trains that thunder on the continent, the men who wander, and the women who cry out, “Return!”

Finally, the names of the great rivers that are flowing in the darkness (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song.)

By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of great mouths, the mighty maws, the vast, wet, coiling, never-glutted and unending snakes that drink the continent. Where, sons of men, and in what other land will you find others like them, and where can you match the mighty music of their names?—The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)—these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit.

Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber! You’d only be a suckling in that mighty land! And as for you, sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song: flow gently, gentle Thames, be well-behaved, sweet Thames, speak softly and politely, little Thames, flow gently till I end my song.

By the waters of life, by time, by time, and of the yellow cat that smites the nation, of the belly of the snake that coils across the land—of the terrible names of the rivers in flood, the rivers that foam and welter in the dark, that smash the levees, that flood the lowlands for two thousand miles, that carry the bones of the cities seaward on their tides: of the awful names of the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and even the little mountain rivers, brothers, in the season of the floods.

Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station: the canoe glides gently through the portals of the waiting-room (for whites). Full fathom five the carcass of old man Lype is lying (of his bones is coral made) and delicately they dive for luncheon-room Greeks before the railway station.

Brother, what fish are these? The floatage of sunken rooms, the sodden bridal-veils of poverty, the slime of mined parlour plush, drowned faces in the family album; and the blur of long-drowned eyes, blurred features, whited, bloated flesh.

Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station. The stern, good, half-drowned faces of the brothers Trade and Mark survey the tides. Cardui! Miss Lillian Leitzell twists upon one arm above the flood; the clown, half-sunken to his waist, swims upward out of swirling yellow; the tiger bares his teeth above the surges of a river he will never drink. The ragged tatters of the circus posters are plastered on soaked boards. And delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station.

Have we not seen them, brother?

For what are we, my brother? We are a phantom flare of grieved desire, the ghostling and phosphoric flicker of immortal time, a brevity of days haunted by the eternity of the earth. We are an unspeakable utterance, an insatiable hunger, an unquenchable thirst; a lust that bursts our sinews, explodes our brains, sickens and rots our insides, and rips our hearts asunder. We are a twist of passion, a moment’s flame of love and ecstasy, a sinew of bright blood and agony, a lost cry, a music of pain and joy, a haunting of brief, sharp hours, an almost captured beauty, a demon’s whisper of unbodied memory. We are the dupes of time.

For, brother, what are we?

We are the sons of our father, whose face we have never seen, we are the sons of our father, whose voice we have never heard, we are the sons of our father, to whom we have cried for strength and comfort in our agony, we are the sons of our father, whose life like ours was lived in solitude and in the wilderness, we are the sons of our father, to whom only can we speak out the strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit, we are the sons of our father, and we shall follow the print of his foot for ever.

XCVIII

How long he had remained at Tours he scarcely knew: suspended in this spell of time and memory, he seemed to have detached himself not only from the infinite connections that bound him to the past, but from every project and direction that he had considered for the future. Day after day he stayed in his little room above the cobbled court of the hotel; he ate his meals there, going out at nightfall to eat and drink in a café, to walk about the streets, once or twice to go home with a woman of the town, and finally to come back to his room, to write furiously for hours, and then, stretched out in bed, nailed to the rock of a furiously wakeful sleep, to live again through the immense and spaceless images of night, in an alert but comatose hypnosis of the will.

One morning he awoke with a shock of apprehension, the foreboding of calamitous mischance. It was the first time in weeks that he had taken thought of the state of his resources or felt any care or worry for the future. He counted his money with feverish haste, and discovered that less than 250 francs remained. For a moment he sat on the edge of the bed, holding the little wad of franc notes in his hand, stunned and bewildered by this sudden realization that his funds were exhausted, and for the moment not knowing what to do. His hotel bill for the week was due; he went at once to the bureau and asked for it; a hasty calculation assured him that when he had paid it, less than twenty francs would be left.

He knew no one in Tours to whom he could appeal for aid; one glance at the impeccable, cold courtesy of the female face, hard, dark and Gallic, in the bureau of the hotel—the basalt of the eyes, the line of hair across the brows—told him that he could as soon wring milk and honey from the cobble-stones as extract an ounce of charitable relief from the granite coffers of her soul. The brows drew in, the black eyes hardened with a cold narrowing of mistrust: even before he spoke he saw she had read the story of his profligate extravagance, and that from that moment the hard propriety of her suspicious soul had been turned against him with that virtuous dislike which such people feel for unmoneyed men. When he spoke, therefore, it was to tell her he was leaving that day: she inclined her dark, hard face impassively, saying: “Oui, monsieur,” and asked if he would have his room vacated by twelve o’clock.

He went to the railway station and looked up rates and distances. During the whole period of his stay in Tours—in fact, during the whole course of his wanderings since leaving Paris—he had been vaguely assured that he was moving in the general direction of Provence, Marseilles, and the South. He now discovered, on consulting a map, that he was off this course by some hundreds of kilometres, and on the southwest road to Bordeaux, the Pyrenees, and Spain. For a moment, he was decided to take the train for Bordeaux—a post card from Ann had been mailed from Carcassonne, and she had informed him that they were on their way to Biarritz. A brief inquiry, however, convinced him that his funds were by no means sufficient to get him even as far as Bordeaux and, over there, he felt, his case was more desperate than ever. He knew no one there and had no hope of meeting anyone he knew. He discovered also that the lowest fare back to Paris—the third-class fare—was about thirty-four francs, almost twice as much as he possessed.

Finally, with a feeling of malevolent joy—for, curiously, a growing realization of his plight, and the dark, hard eyes of the Frenchmen fixed on him in an expression of avaricious mistrust, had now wakened in him a jubilant indifference, a desire to roar with laughter—he thought of Orléans and the Countess.

He found that his funds were sufficient for third-class fare to Orléans, which was about seventeen francs, and that a train was leaving in an hour. Returning to the hotel, he packed his valise with frenzied haste, throwing his clothes in and stamping it down with his feet, rode to the station in the hotel’s horse-drawn bus, and an hour later was on his way back to Orléans.

Late March had come: the day was overcast with thin, grey clouds, an uncertain milky radiance of light; the fields and earth and forests, still bare, had a moist, thawed fertility that spoke of spring. On the way up, snow began to fall, a brief flurry of large, wet flakes that melted as they fell: it was soon over, and the sun broke through in thin, wavering gusts of light.

There were no other passengers in his compartment; he sat looking out of the window across the wet fields, and from time to time, as he visualized the look of startled, crafty apprehension on the Countess’s face when she saw him, he burst into wild, sudden whoops and yells of laughter that echoed loudly above the steady pounding of the wheels.

It was noon when he reached Orléans: he took his heavy bag and went limping out across the station square, pausing once to rest his aching arms and change his grip. On entering the hotel he found Yvonne in the bureau. She looked up from her ledger as he entered, her dark face hardening with a mistrust of cold surprise as she saw him.

“Monsieur has returned to stay?” she inquired, and looking towards his valise. “You wish a room?”

“I do not know yet,” he said easily. “I shall let you know in a few minutes. At present, I should like to speak to the Countess. Is she here?”

She did not answer for a moment, her black brows gathered in a line, and her eyes grew perceptibly harder, colder, more mistrustful as she looked at him.

“Yes. I s’ink she is in her room,” she said at length. “I vill see. . . . Jean!” she called sharply, and struck a bell.

The porter appeared, started with surprise when he saw the youth, and then smiled cordially and greeted him in friendly fashion. Then he turned inquiringly to Yvonne. She spoke curtly:

“Dites ŕ Madame la Comtesse que Monsieur le jeune Américain est revenu. Il attend.”

“Mais oui, monsieur,” the porter said briskly, turning towards him. “Et votre bagage?” he looked inquiringly at the valise. “Vous restez ici?”

“Je ne sais pas. Je vous dirai plus tard. Merci,” he said, as the porter took the valise and put it away behind the office desk.

The porter departed with his message. Yvonne returned to her books, and he waited, pacing the hall in a state of nervous elation, until he heard the old woman’s voice, sharp, startled, excited, speaking to the porter on the floor above. Then he heard her coming down the stairs, turned and faced her sharply-inquiring, apprehensive face as she came down, and was vigorously pumping her uncertain and unwilling little claw, before she had time to stammer out a greeting:

“But what—why—what brings you here?” she said. “I thought you had returned to Paris by now. Where have you been?” she asked sharply.

“In Tours,” he answered.

“Tours! But what were you doing there all this time? . . . What happened to you?” she asked suspiciously.

“Ah, Countess,” he said solemnly, “it is a long story.” Then, with a deliberate burlesque of portentous gravity, he lowered his voice and whispered hoarsely, “I fell among thieves.”

“What—?” she said in a faltering tone. “What are you saying? . . . You mean you have come back here . . . that you have no . . . how much money have you left?” she demanded sharply.

He thrust his hand into his trousers pocket, fished around and pulled out a few small coins: four two-franc pieces, a franc, two twenty-five-centime coins, a ten- and a five-centime piece—

“That’s all,” he said, counting them over. “Nine francs sixty- five.”

“W-w-w-w-what?” she stammered. “Nine francs sixty-five—do you mean that’s all you have left?”

“That’s all,” he said cheerfully, “but now that I’m here at last it doesn’t matter.”

“Here!” she gasped. “Do you mean you are going—what do you intend to do?” she said sharply.

“Oh,” he said easily, “I shall wait here until I get money from America.”

“And—and how long do you think that will take?” the old woman was twisting her skinny fingers with feverish apprehension.