Of Time and the River (69 page)

“Immortal land, cruel and immense as God,” they cried, “we shall go wandering on your breast for ever! Wherever great wheels carry us is home—home for our hunger, home for all things except the heart’s small fence and dwelling-place of love.

“Who sows the barren earth?” they said. “Who needs the land? You’ll make great engines yet, and taller towers. And what’s a trough of bone against a tower? You need the earth? Whoever needs the earth may have the earth. Our dust, wrought in this land, stirred by its million sounds, will stir and tremble to the passing wheel. Whoever needs the earth may use the earth. Go dig us up and there begin your bridge. But whoever builds a bridge across this earth, whoever lays a rail across this mouth, whoever needs the trench where these bones lie, let him go dig them up and say his Hamlet to the engineers.”

So had their hundred voices welled up from the earth and called to him, their son and brother, above the pounding of the mighty wheels that roared above them. And the memory of their words, their triumphant tongue of deathless silence, and the full weight of the inheritance they had given him, he brought back again out of the earth into the swarming canyons and the million tongues of the unceasing, the fabulous, the million-footed city.

And all that he had seen, all that he remembered of this earth he brought to the city, and it seemed to be the city’s complement—to feed it, to sustain it, to belong to it. And the image of the city, written in his heart, was so unbelievable that it seemed to be a fiction, a fable, some huge dream of his own dreaming, so unbelievable that he did not think that he should find it when he returned; yet it was just the same as he had remembered it. He found it, the instant he came out of the station: the tidal swarm of faces, the brutal stupefaction of the street, the immense and arrogant blaze and sweep of the great buildings.

It was fabulous and incredible, but there it was. He saw again the million faces—the faces dark, dingy, driven, harried, and corrupt, the faces stamped with all the familiar markings of suspicion and mistrust, cunning, contriving, and a hard and stupid cynicism. There were the faces, thin and febrile, of the taxi-drivers, the faces cunning, sly, and furtive, the hard twisted mouths and rasping voices, the eyes glittering and toxic with unnatural fires. And there were the faces, cruel, arrogant and knowing of the beak- nosed Jews, the brutal heavy figures of the Irish cops, and their red beefy faces, filled with the stupid, swift, and choleric menaces of privilege and power, shining forth terribly with an almost perverse and sanguinary vitality and strength among the swarming tides of the grey-faced people. They were all there as he remembered them—a race mongrel, dark, and feverish, swarming along for ever on the pavements, moving in tune to that vast central energy, filled with the city’s life, as with a general and dynamic fluid.

And, incredibly, incredibly! these common, weary, driven, brutal faces, these faces he had seen a million times, even the sterile scrabble of harsh words they uttered, now seemed to be touched by this magic of now and forever, this strange and legendary quality that the city had, and to belong themselves to something fabulous and enchanted. The people, common, dull, cruel, and familiar- looking as they were, seemed to be a part, to comprise, to be fixed in something classic, and eternal, in the everlasting variousness and fixity of time, in all the fabulous reality of the city’s life: they formed it, they were part of it, and they could have belonged to nothing else on earth.

And as he saw them, as he heard them, as he listened to their words again, as they streamed past, their stony gravel of harsh oaths and rasping cries, the huge single anathema of their bitter and strident tongues dedicated so completely, so constantly, to the baseness, folly, or treachery of their fellows that it seemed that speech had been given to them by some demon of everlasting hatred only in order that they might express the infamy and vileness of men, or the falseness of women—as he listened to this huge and single tongue of hatred, evil, and of folly, it seemed incredible that they could breathe the shining air without weariness, agony, and labour—that they could live, breathe, move at all among the huge encrusted taint, the poisonous congestion of their lives.

And yet live, breathe, and move they did with a savage and indubitable violence, an unfathomed energy. Hard-mouthed, hard- eyed, and strident-tongued, with their million hard grey faces, they streamed past upon the streets for ever, like a single animal, with the sinuous and baleful convolutions of an enormous reptile. And the magical and shining air—the strange, subtle and enchanted weather, was above them, and the buried men were strewn through the earth on which they trod, and a bracelet of great tides was flashing round them, and the enfabled rock on which they swarmed swung eastward in the marches of the sun into eternity, and was masted like a ship with its terrific towers, and was flung with a lion’s port between its tides into the very maw of the infinite, all-taking ocean. And exultancy and joy rose with a cry of triumph in his throat, because he found it wonderful.

Their voices seemed to form one general City-Voice, one strident snarl, one twisted mouth of outrage and of slander bared for ever to the imperturbable and immortal skies of time, one jeering tongue and rumour of man’s baseness, fixed on the visage of the earth, and turned incredibly, and with an evil fortitude, toward depthless and indifferent space against the calm and silence of eternity.

Filled with pugnacious recollection that Voice said, “‘Dis guy,’ I says, ‘dis friend of yoehs,’” it said, “‘dis bastad who owes me fawty bucks—dat yuh introduced me to—when’s he goin’ t’ giv’it to me?’ I says.” And derisive, scornful, knowing, it would snarl: “W’ICH guy? W’ICH guy do yuh mean? Duh guy dat used to come in Louie’s place?” And bullying and harsh it would reply: “YUH don’t know? Watcha mean yuh don’t know!” . . . Defiant, “WHO don’t know? . . . WHO says so? . . . WHO told yuh so?” And jeering, “Oh DAT guy! . . . Is DAT duh guy yuh mean? An’ wat t’ hell do
I
care wat he t’inks, f’r Chris’ sake! . . . To hell wit’ him!” it said.

Recounting past triumphs with an epic brag, it said: “‘You’re comin’ out of dere!’ I said. ‘Wat do you t’ink of dat?’ . . . ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, ‘who’s goin’ t’ make me?’ So I says, ‘You hoid me—yeah! . . . You’re goin’ to take dat little tin crate of yoehs right out of deh! You’ll take yoeh chance right on duh line wit’ all duh rest of us!’ . . . ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says. . . . ‘You hoid me, misteh’—an’ he went!” In tones of ladylike refinement, it recounted romance into ravished ears as follows: “‘Lissen,’ I says, ‘as far as my boss is consoined it’s bizness only. . . . An’ as far as Mr. Ball is consoined it’s my own bizness’ (hah! hah! hah! Y’know that’s wat I tol’ him. . . . Jeez: it handed him a laugh, y’know!)—‘An afteh five o’clock,’ I says, ‘I’m my own boss. . . . At duh same time,’ I says, ‘deh’s duh psychological side to be considehed.’”

And with the sweet accent of maternal tribulation, it admitted, “Sure! I hit her! I did! Oh, I hit her very hahd! Jeez! It was an awful crack I gave her, honestleh! My hand was boinin’ f’r a half-oueh aftehwads! . . . I just blow up, y’know! . . . Dat’s my on’y reason f’r dat! I jus’ blow up! Dis fellah’s in duh bathroom callin’ f’r his eggs, duh baby’s yellin’ f’r his bottle, an’ I jus’ blow up! . . . Dat’s my on’y reason f’r DAT! Dat’s duh on’y reason dat I hit her, see! I’m afraid she’ll hoit duh baby, see? She bends its fingehs back. So I says, ‘F’r God’s sake, please, don’t do dat! . . . I gotta headache’ . . . an’ then, I jus’ blow up! Sure! I hit her hahd! . . . Duh trouble is I can’t stop wit’ one slap, see! . . . Jeez! I hit her! My hand was boining f’r a half-oueh aftehwads!”

Hot with its sense of outraged decency, it said, “I went upstairs an’ pounded on dat doeh! . . . ‘Come out of dere, you s. of a b.,’ I says—Sure, I’m tellin’ yuh! Dat’s what I said to her, y’know! . . . ‘Come out of dere,’ I says, ‘before I t’row you out,’” and regretfully it added, “Sure! I hate to do dese t’ings— it makes me feel bad lateh—but I won’t have dem in my place. Dat’s duh one t’ing I refuse t’do,” it said. And with a passionate emotion, it asserted, “Sure! . . . Dat’s what I’m tellin’ yuh! . . . Yuh know how dat was, don’t cha? Duh foist guy—her husban’—was passin’ out duh sugah an’ duh otheh guy—duh boy- friend—was layin’ her. Can yuh ima-a-gine it?” it said.

Amazed, in tones of stupefaction, it would say “No kiddin’! NO!” And with solemn reprehension it would add, “Oh, yuh know I think that’s te-e-ri-bul! I think that’s aw-w-ful!”—the voice of unbelieving horror would reply.

Finally, friendly and familiar, the great Voice of the city said, “Well, so long, Eddy. I’m goin’ t’ ketch some sleep,” it said, and answered, “Well, so long, Joe, I’ll be seem’ yuh.” “So long, Grace,” it added with an accent of soft tenderness and love, and the huge Voice of the city murmured, “O.K. kid! Eight o’clock—no kiddin’—I’ll be deh!”

Such were some of the million tongues of that huge single Voice, as he had heard them speak a thousand times, and as now instantly, incredibly, as soon as he came back to them, they spoke again.

And as he listened, as he heard them, their speech could not have been more strange to him had they been people from the planet Mars. He stared gape-mouthed, he listened, he saw the whole thing blazing in his face again to the tone and movement of its own central, unique, and incomparable energy. It was so real that it was magical, so real that all that men had always known was discovered to them instantly, so real he felt as if he had known it for ever, yet must be dreaming as he looked at it; therefore he looked at it and his spirit cried:

“Incredible! Oh, incredible! It moves, it pulses like a single living thing! It lives, it lives, with all its million faces”—and this is the way he always knew it was.

XLVII

That year—the first year that he lived there in the city—he was twenty-three years old. After these months of frenzy, drunkenness, and arrest, he was at the last gasp of his resources, and the eighteen hundred dollars a year, which was his salary at the university that had employed him as an instructor, seemed to him a wage of princely munificence—a stroke of incredible good fortune.

And although his position as instructor had been given to him in one of the usual ways, through the recommendation of the teachers’ bureau at Harvard University, and the letters of some of the professors there, he was tortured constantly by the thought of his inadequacy and ignorance, and by the horrible fear that his incompetence would be discovered and that one day he would be suddenly, peremptorily, ruinously, and disgracefully discharged.

At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels with cold poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold to the class-room at the university a few hundred yards away—from cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside, thence to the brawling and ugly corridors of the university, which drowned one, body and soul, with their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides of dark amber Jewish flesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the class-room with its smaller horde of thirty or forty Jews and Jewesses all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick with their hot and swarthy body-smells, their strong female odours of rut and crotch and arm-pit and cheap perfume, and their hard male smells that were rancid, stale, and sour—the successive stages of this journey were filled with such dazed numbness, horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: the world swarmed blindly, nauseously, drunkenly about him. He looked at the faces in the hotel lobby, the brawling, furious, and chaotic street, and the swarming and rancid corridors, with dizzy swimming eyes and a constricted heart; a thousand unutterable and horrible premonitions and imaginings of ruin and shame swarmed through his mind—every day he felt the impending menace of some new and fatal catastrophe, some indefinable and crushing disgrace with which each hour was ominously, murderously pregnant.

What these fears and forebodings were he could not have told, but they occasionally found articulate expression in some scene of frightful insubordination and rebellion, in which he found himself faced with forty brawling, mocking, swarthily jeering faces who, like savage and untamed horses that have sensed the fear and incompetence of their driver, have now broken the last feeble thread of restraint and are running free and wild before him. The terror and menace of such a disgrace were heightened by the intrusion into the scene at the apex of such a moment of riot and rebellion of one of his employers, the Dean, the head of the department, or a creature with a wry lean face, a convulsive Adam’s apple, a habit of writhing his lean belly and loins erotically as he spoke, and a mind of the most obscene Puritanism, who was employed to oversee the work and methods of the instructors: he could visualize the moment of their fatal entrance into the class- room, and hear their words of stern, curt and immediate dismissal as they drove him out and gathered the reins strongly into their own parched and freckled hands.

A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which pressed upon him from the sky, which hovered in the vast unrest and dissonance of the air he breathed, and which at length crept poisonously through all the rivers of life, corrupting the healthy music of the blood, the sweet exultant music of the heart, curdling men’s bowels with fear and withering their loins with sterile impotence. What was this grey lipless shape of fear that stalked their lives incessantly—that was everywhere, legible in the faces, the movements, and the driven frenzied glances of the people who swarmed on the streets? What was this thing that duped men out of joy, tricked them out of all the exultant and triumphant music of the world, drove them at length into the dusty earth, cheated, defrauded, tricked out of life by a nameless phantom, with all their glory wasted?