Of Time and the River (67 page)

As for his mother, she sat staring straight into the fire and made no answer. Then, for a long time, he sat there melancholy, saying nothing, while the woman looked straight ahead, hands clasped across her waist, looking into the fire with a fixed stare of her white face and puckered mouth. At length she spoke:

. . . “I have brought them all into the world,” she said quietly, “and seen them all grow up . . . and some are dead now . . . and some have done nothing with their lives. . . . You were the youngest, and the last . . . my only hope. . . . Oh, to see them all, all go the same way . . . to hope and pray year after year that there would be one of them who would not fail—and now!” her voice rose strongly, and she shook her head with the old convulsive tremor, “to think that you—the one on whom my hope was set—the one who has had the education and the opportunity that the others never had—should go the way that the others went. . . . It’s too bad to bear!” she cried, and suddenly burst into tears. “Too much to ask of me!” she whispered huskily, and suddenly drew the sleeve of the old frayed sweater across her weak wet eyes, with the pathetic gesture of a child—a gesture that tore him with a rending anguish of pity, shame and inexpiable regret. “Too hard . . . too hard,” she whispered. “Surely there’s a curse of God upon us if after all the pain and sorrow all are lost.”

And he sat there sick with shame, self-loathing and despair, unable to reply. And then he heard again the remote demented howling of the wind, the creaking of bare boughs, the vast dark prowling of the beast of night about his mother’s house. And again he heard, as he had heard a thousand times in childhood, far, faint, and broken by the wind, the wailing whistle of a distant train. It brought to him, as it had brought to him so many times, the old immortal promises of flight and darkness, the golden promises of morning, new lands and a shining city. And to his sick and desperate soul the cry of the great train now came with a sterner and more desperate hope than he had ever known as a boy. Suddenly he knew that now there was one road, and only one before him— flight from this defeat and failure which his life had come to, redemption by stern labour and grim loneliness, the stern challenge, the sharp peril and the grand reward—the magic and undying image of the city. And suddenly he knew that he would go.

The night before he went away he went out and prowled restlessly about the streets of the town until the hour was very late. A letter from a friend had informed them that there was hope of a teaching appointment at one of the city universities, later, when the spring term began. Meanwhile, a swift exchange of telegrams had promised him temporary employment in New York, soliciting funds from alumni of his university for a memorial building. And uncertain, specious, and disheartening as this employment seemed to him, he had eagerly seized the offer when it came. He was leaving home the next day.

Now, sick of soul and driven by the unquiet heart, the furious unrest, he prowled the barren night-time streets of his native town. The Square was bleak and lifeless and deserted, with its hard glare of lights: along the main street of the town a few belated citizens hurried past from time to time, faces and voices he remembered from his childhood, driven by like ghosts. Everything he saw and touched was strange and familiar as a dream— a life which he had known utterly and which now vanished from his grasp whenever he approached it—his for ever, buried in his blood and memory, never to be made his own again.

When he returned home it was after midnight and his mother’s old gaunt house was dark. He went quietly up the steps and into the broad front hall, closing the heavy door quietly behind him. For a minute he stood there in that living dark, the ancient and breathing darkness of that old house which seemed to speak to him with all the thousand voices of its vanished lives—with all the shapes and presences of things and people he had known, who had been there, and who had passed or vanished, or had died.

Then quietly he groped his way along the dark old hall and towards the kitchen and the little room beyond in which his mother slept.

When he got to the kitchen the room was dark save for the soft flare and crumble of the fading ashes in the old coal range. But the kitchen was still warm, with a curious and recent currency of warmth and silence, as if it were still filled with his mother’s life and as if she had just been there.

He turned on the light and for a minute stood looking at the familiar old table with its sheathing of ragged battered zinc, and at the ironing board with its great stack of freshly ironed and neatly folded linen; and he knew that she had worked there late.

Suddenly, a desperate urge, an overmastering desire to see her, speak to her, awoke in him. He thought that if he could only see her now he could reveal himself to her, explain the purpose of his failure, the certainty of his success. He was sure that now, if ever, he could speak to her and say the things he had always wished to say but never said—speak the unspeakable, find a tongue for the unspoken language, make her understand his life, his purpose, and his heart’s desire, as he had never done before. And filled with this wild hope, this impossible conviction, he strode towards the closed door of her little room to arouse her.

Then, abruptly, he paused. Upon an old cupboard, in a glass half- filled with water, he saw, as he had seen a thousand times, grinning at him with a prognathous, a strangely human bleakness, the false teeth she had put there when she went to bed. And suddenly he knew he could not speak to her. For grotesque, ugly, and absurd as they were, those grinning teeth evolved for him, somehow, as nothing else on earth could do, the whole image of his mother’s life of grief and toil and labour—the intolerable memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And he knew then that he could not speak, that there was nothing he could say to her.

He rapped gently at the door and in a moment heard her voice, quick, sharp, and startled, roused from sleep, saying: “Hah? . . . what say? . . . who’s there?”

He answered: in a moment she opened the door and stood there, her face startled, curiously small and white and sunken, somehow like a child’s. When he spoke to her she answered incoherently: and then she smiled in an apologetic and embarrassed manner, and covered her mouth shyly with one hand, while she extended her other for the glass that held her teeth. He turned his head away: when he looked again her face had taken on its familiar contour, and she was saying in her usual tone: “Hah? . . . What is it, son?”

“Nothing, Mama,” he said awkwardly. “I—I didn’t know you were asleep . . . I—I--just came in to say good night, Mama.”

“Good night, son,” she said, and turned her white cheek up to him. He kissed it briefly.

“Now go and get some sleep,” she said. “It’s late and you’ve all your packing to do yet when you get up tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “. . . I guess you’re right. . . . Well, good night.” And he kissed her again.

“Good night,” she said. “Turn out the lights, won’t you, before you go to bed.”

And as he turned the kitchen light out he heard her door close quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old house was all around him as he went down the hall. And a thousand voices—his father’s, his brothers’, and of the child that he himself had been, and all the lives and voices of the hundred others, the lost, the vanished people—were whispering to him as he went down the old dark hall there in his mother’s house. And the remote demented wind was howling in the barren trees, as he had heard it do so many times in childhood, and far off, far-faint and broken by the wind he heard the wailing cry of the great train, bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and darkness, new lands, and a shining city. And there was something wild and dark and secret in him that he could never utter. The strange and bitter miracle of life had filled him and he could not speak, and all he knew was that he was leaving home for ever, that the world, the future of dark time and of man’s destiny lay before him, and that he would never live here in his mother’s house again.

BOOK IV

PROTEUS: THE CITY

XLVI

As the train was pounding north across New Jersey another train upon the inside track began to race with it, and for a distance of ten miles the two trains thundered down the tracks in an even, thrilling, and tremendous contest of steel and smoke and pistoned wheel that blotted out everything, the vision of the earth, the thought of the journey, the memory of the city, for all who saw it.

The other train, which was bound from Philadelphia, appeared so calmly and naturally that at first no one suspected that a race was on. It came banging up slowly, its big black snout swaying and bucking with a clumsy movement as it came on, its shining pistons swinging free and loose, and with short intermittent blasts of smoke from its squat funnel. It came up so slowly and naturally, past their windows, that at first it was hard to understand at what terrific speed the train was running, until one looked out of the windows on the other side and saw the flat, formless and uncharactered earth of New Jersey whipping by like pickets on a fence.

The other train came slowly on with that huge banging movement of the terrific locomotive, eating its way up past the windows, until the engine cab was level with Eugene and he could look across two or three scant feet of space and see the engineer. He was a young man cleanly jacketed in striped blue and wearing goggles. He had a ruddy colour and his strong pleasant face, which bore on it the character of courage, dignity, and the immense and expert knowledge these men have, was set in a good-natured and determined grin, as with one gloved hand held steady on the throttle he leaned upon his sill, with every energy and perception in him fixed with a focal concentration on the rails. Behind him his fireman, balanced on the swaying floor, his face black and grinning, his eyes goggled like a demon, and lit by the savage flare of his terrific furnace, was shovelling coal with all his might. Meanwhile, the train came on, came on, eating its way past, foot by foot, until the engine cab had disappeared from sight and the first coaches of the train drew by.

And now a wonderful thing occurred. As the heavy rust-red coaches of the other train came up and began to pass them, the passengers of both trains suddenly became aware that a race between the trains was taking place. A tremendous excitement surged up in them, working its instant magic upon all these travellers, with their grey hats, their grey, worn city faces, and their dull tired eyes, which just the moment before had been fastened wearily on the pages of a newspaper, as if, having been hurled along this way beneath the lonely skies so many times, the desolate face of the earth had long since grown too familiar to them, and they never looked out of windows any more.

But now the faces that had been so grey and dead were flushed with colour, the dull and lustreless eyes had begun to burn with joy and interest. The passengers of both trains crowded to the windows, grinning like children for delight and jubilation.

Eugene’s train, which for a space had been holding its rival even, now began to fall behind. The other train began to slide past the windows with increasing speed, and when this happened the joy and triumph of its passengers were almost unbelievable. Meanwhile their own faces had turned black and bitter with defeat. They cursed, they muttered, they scowled malevolently, they turned away with an appearance of indifference, as if they had no further interest in the thing, only to come back again with a fascinated and bitter look as their accursed windows slid by them with the inevitability of death and destiny.

Throughout, the crews of the two trains had shown as keen and passionate an interest, as intense a rivalry, as had the passengers. The guards and porters were clustered at the windows or against the door in the car-ends, and they grinned and jeered just as the rest of them had done; but their interest was more professional, their knowledge more intimate and exact. The guard on the train would say to the porter—“Whose train is that? Did you see John McIntyre aboard?” And the negro would answer positively, “No, sah! Dat ain’t Cap’n McIntyre. Ole man Rigsby’s got her. Dere he is now!” he cried, as another coach moved past and the grizzled and grinning face of an old guard came in sight.

Then the guard would go away, shaking his head, and the negro would mutter and chuckle to himself by turns. He was a fat enormous darkey, with an ink-black skin, a huge broad bottom, teeth of solid grinning white, and with a big fatty growth on the back of his thick neck. He shook like jelly when he laughed. Eugene had known him for years, because he came from his native town, and the Pullman car in which he rode, which was known as K 19, was the car that always made the journey of 700 miles between his home town and the city. Now the negro sprawled upon the green upholstery of the end seat in the Pullman and grinned and muttered at his fellows in the other train.

“All right, boy. All right, you ole slew-footed niggah!” he would growl at a grinning darkey in the other train. “Uh! Uh!” he would grunt ironically. “Don’t you think you’s somp’n, dough! You’s pullin’ dat train yo’self, you is!” he would laugh sarcastically, and then sullenly and impatiently conclude, “Go on, boy! Go on! I sees you! I don’t care how soon I loses you! Go on, niggah! Go on! Git dat ugly ole livah-lipped face o’ yo’n out o’ my way!”

And that grinning and derisive face would also vanish and be gone, until the whole train had passed them, pulled ahead of them, and vanished from their sight. And their porter sat there staring out of the window, chuckling and shaking his head from time to time, as he said to himself, with a tone of reproof and disbelief:

“Dey ain’t got no right to do dat! Dey ain’t go no right to run right by us like we wasn’t here!” he chuckled. “Dey ain’t nothin’ but a little ole Philadelphia local! Dey’re not supposed to make de time we is! We’s de Limited! We got de outside rail!” he bragged, but immediately, shaking his head, he said: “But Lawd, Lawd! Dat didn’t help us none today. Dey’ve gone right on by us! We’ll never ketch dem now!” he said mournfully, and it seemed that he was right.