At morning, in a foreign land, whether upon the mournful plains of Hungary or in some quiet square of Georgian houses, embedded in the immensity of sleeping London, he awakes and thinks of home; or in some small provincial town of France, he starts up from his sleep at night, he starts up in the living, brooding stillness of the night, for suddenly he thinks that he has heard there the sounds of America and the wilderness, the things that are in his blood, his heart, his brain, in every atom of his flesh and tissue, the things for which he draws his breath in labour, the things that madden him with an intolerable and nameless pain.
And what are they? They are the whistle-wail of one of the great American engines as it thunders through the continent at night, the sound of the voices of the city streets — those hard, loud, slangy voices, full of violence, humour, and recklessness, now stronger and more remote than the sounds of Asia — the sounds that come up from the harbour of Manhattan in the night — that magnificent and thrilling music of escape, mystery, and joy, with the mighty orchestration of the transatlantics, the hoarse little tugs, the ferry boats and lighters, those sounds that well up from the gulf and dark immensity of night and that pierce the entrails of the listener.
For this will always be one of the immortal and living things about the land, this will be an eternal and unchanging fact about that city whose only permanence is change: there will always be the great rivers flowing around it in the darkness, the rivers that have bounded so many nameless lives, those rivers which have moated in so many changes, which have girdled the wilderness and so much hard, brilliant, and sensational living, so much pain, beauty, ugliness, so much lust, murder, corruption, love, and wild exultancy.
They’ll build great engines yet, and grander towers, but always the rivers run, in the day, in the night, in the dark, draining immensely their imperial tides out of the wilderness, washing and flowing by the coasts of the fabulous city, by all the little ticking sounds of time, by all the million lives and deaths of the city. Always the rivers run, and always there will be great ships upon the tide, always great horns are baying at the harbour’s mouth, and in the night a thousand men have died while the river, always the river, the dark eternal river, full of strange secret time, washing the city’s stains away, thickened and darkened by its dumpings, is flowing by us, by us to the sea.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land and he thinks of home. He cannot rest, his heart is wild with pain and loneliness, he sleeps, but then he knows he sleeps, he hears the dark and secret spell of time about him; in ancient towns, thick tumbling chimes of the cathedral bells are thronging through the dark, but through the passages of his diseased and unforgetful sleep the sounds and memory of America make way: now it is almost dawn, a horse has turned into a street and in America there is the sound of wheels, the lonely clop-clop of the hooves upon deserted pavements, silence, then the banging clatter of a can.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land, he draws his breath in labour in the wool-soft air of Europe: the wool-grey air is all about him like a living substance; it is in his heart, his stomach, and his entrails; it is in the slow and vital movements of the people; it soaks down from the sodden skies into the earth, into the heavy buildings, into the limbs and hearts and brains of living men. It soaks into the spirit of the wanderer; his heart is dull with the grey weariness of despair, it aches with hunger for the wilderness, the howling of great winds, the bite and sparkle of the clear, cold air, the buzz, the tumult and the wild exultancy. The wet, woollen air is all about him, and there is no hope. It was there before William the Conqueror; it was there before Clovis and Charles “the Hammer”; it was there before Attila; it was there before Hengist and Horsa; it was there before Vercingetorix and Julius Agricola.
It was there now; it will always be there. They had it in Merry England and they had it in Gay Paree; and they were seldom merry, and they were rarely gay. The wet, woollen air is over Munich; it is over Paris; it is over Rouen and Madame Bovary; it soaks into England; it gets into boiled mutton and the Brussels sprouts; it gets into Hammersmith on Sunday; it broods over Bloomsbury and the private hotels and the British Museum; it soaks into the land of Europe and keeps the grass green. It has always been there; it will always be there. His eyes are mad and dull; he cannot sleep without the hauntings of phantasmal memory behind the eyes; his brain is overstretched and weary, it gropes ceaselessly around the prison of the skull, it will not cease.
The years are walking in his brain, his father’s voice is sounding in his ears, and in the pulses of his blood the tom-tom’s beat. His living dust is stored with memory: two hundred million men are walking in his bones; he hears the howling of the wind around forgotten eaves; he cannot sleep. He walks in midnight corridors; he sees the wilderness, the moon-drenched forests; he comes to clearings in the moonlit stubble, he is lost, he has never been here, yet he is at home. His sleep is haunted with the dreams of time; wires throb above him in the whiteness, they make a humming in the noonday heat.
The rails are laid across eight hundred miles of golden wheat, the rails are wound through mountains, they curve through clay-yellow cuts, they enter tunnels, they are built up across the marshes, they hug the cliff and follow by the river’s bank, they cross the plains with dust and thunder, and they leap through flatness and the dull scrub-pine to meet the sea.
Then he awakes at morning in a foreign land and thinks of home.
For we have awaked at morning in a foreign land and heard the bitter curse of their indictment, and we know what we know, and it will always be the same.
“One time!” their voices cried, leaning upon a bar the bitter weight of all their discontent. “One time! I’ve been back one time — just once in seven years,” they said, “and Jesus! that was plenty. One time was enough! To hell with that damned country! What have they got now but a lot of cheap spaghetti joints and skyscrapers?” they said. “If you want a drink, you sneak down three back-alleyways, get the once-over from a couple of exprize-fighters, and then plank down a dollar for a shot of varnish that would rot the stomach out of a goat! . . . And the women!”— the voices rose here with infuriated scorn —“What a nice lot of cold-blooded gold-digging bastards THEY’VE turned out to be! . . . I spent thirty dollars taking one of ’em to a show, and to a night-club afterward! When bedtime came do you think I got anything out of it? . . . ‘You may kiss my little hand,’ she says. . . . ‘You may kiss my little — that’s what you may do,’” the voices snarled with righteous bitterness. “When I asked her if she was goin’ to come through she started to yell for the cops! . . . A woman who tried to pull one like that over here would get sent to Siberia! . . . A nice country, I don’t think! . . . Now, get this! ME, I’m a Frenchman, see!” the voice said with a convincing earnestness. “These guys know how to LIVE, see! This is my country where I belong, see! . . . Johnny, luh même chose pour mwah et m’seer! . . . Fill ’em up again, kid.”
“Carpen-TEER!” the voices then rose jeeringly, in true accents of French pugnacity. “Sure, I’m a Frenchman — but Carpen-TEER! Where do yuh get that stuff? Christ! Dempsey could ‘a’ took that frog the best day that he ever saw! . . . An accident!” the voices yelled. “Whattya mean — an accident? Didn’t I see the whole thing with my own eyes? Wasn’t I back there then? . . . Wasn’t I talkin’ t’ Jack himself an hour after the fight was over? . . . An accident! Jesus! The only accident was that he let him last four rounds. ‘I could have taken him in the first if I wanted to,’ Jack says to me. . . . Sure, I’m a Frenchman!” the voice said with belligerent loyalty. “But CarpenTEER! Jesus! Where do you get that stuff?”
And, brother, I have heard the voices you will never hear, discussing the graces of a life more cultured than any you will ever know — and I know and I know, and yet it is still the same.
Bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more! the flying leaf, the broken cloud —“I think,” said they, “that we will live here now. I think,” they said, “that we are running down to Spain next week, so Francis can do a little writing. . . . And really,” their gay yet cultivated tones continued, “it’s wonderful what you can do here if you only have a little money. . . . YES, my dear!” their refined accents continued in a tone of gay conviction. “It’s really quite incredible, you know. . . . I happen to know of a real honest-to-goodness chateau near Blois that can be had for something less than $7000! . . . It’s all rather incredible, you know,” those light, half-English tones went on, “when you consider what it takes to live in Brookline! . . . Francis has always felt that he would like to do a little writing, and I feel somehow the atmosphere is better here for all that sort of thing — it really is, you know. Don’t you think so?” said those gay and cultivated tones of Boston which you, my brother, never yet have heard. “And after all,” those cultivated tones went on in accents of a droll sincerity, “you see all the people here you really CARE to see, I MEAN, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or another — I MEAN, the trouble really is in getting a little time alone for yourself. . . . Or do you find it so?” the voices suavely, lightly, asked. . . . “Oh, look! look at that — there!” they cried with jubilant elation, “I mean, that boy and his girl there, walking along with their arms around each other! . . . Don’t you just a-do-o-re it? . . . Isn’t it too MA-A-RVELLOUS?” those refined and silvery tones went on with patriotic tenderness. “I mean, there’s something so perfectly sweet and unselfconscious about it all!” the voices said with all the cultivated earnestness of Boston! “Now WHERE? — where? — would you see anything like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.
(Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade — did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and sultry month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove — it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)
“ . . . I MEAN— these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do. . . . They’re so much SIMPLER about it. . . . I mean, so much more graceful with that kind of thing. . . . Il faut un peu de sentiment, n’est-ce pas? . . . Or do you think so?” said those light, those gay, those silvery, and half-English tones of cultivated Boston, which you, my brother, never yet have heard.
(I got you, lady. That was French. I know. . . . But if I felt your leg, if I began by fondling gracefully your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg, and said, “Chérie! Petite chérie!”— would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but brother, there are corn-haired girls named Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they’re still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish made. Big brother’s still waiting for you with his huge, red fist, behind the barn up in the State of Maine, and they’re still having shotgun marriages at home.
Oh, brother, there are voices you will never hear — ancestral voices prophesying war, my brother, and rare and radiant voices that you know not of, as they have read us into doom. The genteel voices of Oxenford broke once like chimes of weary, unenthusiastic bells across my brain, speaking to me compassionately its judgment on our corrupted lives, gently dealing with the universe, my brother, gently and without labour — gently, brother, gently, it dealt with all of us, with easy condescension and amused disdain.
“I’m afraid, old boy,” the genteel voices of Oxenford remarked, “you’re up against it over th?h. . . . I really am. . . . Th?h’s no peace th? faw the individual any longah,”— the genteel voice went on, unindividual brother. “Obviously,” that tolerant voice instructed me, “obviously, th?h can be no cultuah in a country so completely lackin’ in tradition as is yo?hs. . . . It’s all so objective — if you see what I main — th?h’s no place left faw the innah life,” it said, oh, outward brother! “ . . . We Europeans have often obs?hved (it’s VERY curious, you know) that the AMERican is capable of any real feelin’— it seems quite impawsible faw him to distinguish between true............