You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  She would turn away, laughing. Then, for a moment, with her childlike fascination for words and rhythms, she gravely meditated their strange beat, silently framing and pronouncing with her lips a series of meaningless sounds--"Corp-Borp-Forp-Dorp-Torp"--and at length singing out in a gleeful chant, and with an air of triumphant discovery:

  "The Distributing Corp, the Distributing Corp,

  He sits all day and he does no Worp!"

  George protested that her rhyme made no sense, but she threw back her encrimsoned face and screamed with laughter.

  But after a while they stopped laughing about the man. For, obscure as his employment seemed, incredible and comical as his indolence had been when they first noticed it, there came to be something impressive, immense, and formidable in the quality of that fixed stare. Day by day, a thronging traffic of life and business passed before him in the street; day by day, the great vans came, the drivers, handlers, and packers swarmed before his eyes, filling, the air with their oaths and cries, irritably intent upon their labour but the man in the window never looked at them, never gave any, sign that he heard them, never seemed to be aware of their existence--he just sat there and looked out, his eyes fixed in an abstracted stare.

  In the course of George Webber's life, many things of no great importance in themselves had become deeply embedded in his memory, stuck there like burs in a scottie's tail; and always they were little things which, in an instant of clear perception, had riven his heart with some poignant flash of meaning. Thus he remembered, and would remember for ever, the sight of Esther's radiant, earnest face when, unexpectedly one night, he caught sight of it as it flamed and 'vanished in a crowd of grey, faceless faces in Times Square. So, too, he remembered two deaf mutes he had seen talking on their fingers in a subway train; and a ringing peal of children's laughter in a desolate street at sunset; and the waitresses in their dingy little rooms across the backyard, washing, ironing, and rewashing day after day the few adornments of their shabby finery, in endless preparations for a visitor who never came.

  And now, to his store of treasured trivia was added the memory of this man's face--thick, white, expressionless, set in its stolid and sorrowful stare. Immutable, calm, impassive, it became for him the symbol of a kind of permanence in the rush and sweep of chaos in the city, where all things come and go and pass and are so soon forgotten. For, day after day, as he watched the man and tried to penetrate his mystery, at last it seemed to him that he had found the answer.

  And after that, in later years, whenever he remembered the man's face, the time was fixed at the end of a day in late summer. Without-violence or heat, the last rays of the sun fell on the warm brick of the building and painted it with a sad, unearthly light. In the window the man sat, always looking out. He never wavered in his gaze, his eyes were calm and sorrowful, and on his face was legible the exile of an imprisoned spirit.

  That man's face became for him the face of. Darkness and of Time. It never spoke, and yet it had a voice--a voice that seemed to have the whole earth in it. It was the voice of evening and of night, and in it were the blended tongues of all those men who have passed through the heat and fury of the day, and who now lean quietly upon the sills of evening. In it was the whole vast hush and weariness that comes upon the city at the hour of dusk, when the chaos of another day is ended, and when everything--streets, buildings, and eight million people--breathe slowly, with a tired and sorrowful joy. And in that single tongueless voice was the knowledge of all their tongues.

  "Child, child," it said, "have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul--but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them--but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way--but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savoured all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us--we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

  "We have outlived the shift and glitter of so many fashions, we have seen so many things that come and go, so many words forgotten, so many flames that flared and were destroyed; yet we know now we are strangers whose footfalls have not left a print upon the endless streets of life. We shall not go into the dark again, nor suffer madness, nor admit despair: we have built a wall about us now. We shall not hear the docks of time strike out on foreign air, nor wake at morning in some alien land to think of home: our wandering is over, and our hunger fed. 0 brother, son, and comrade, because we have lived so long and seen so much, we are content to make our own a few things now, letting millions pass.

  "Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.

  "The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

  "The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbours, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

  "All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts for ever. Only the earth endures, but it endures for ever.

  "The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, for ever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April."

  * * *

  5. The Hidden Terror

  Hand looked at the yellow envelope curiously and turned it over and over in his hand. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness and suppressed excitement to see his name through the transparent front. He was not used to receiving telegrams. Instinctively he delayed opening it because he dreaded what it might contain. Some forgotten incident in his childhood made him associate telegrams with bad news. Who could have sent it? And what could it be about? Well, open it, you fool, and find out!

  He ripped off the flap and took out the message. He read it quickly, first glancing at the signature. It was from his Uncle Mark Joyner:

  "YOUR AUNT MAW DIED LAST NIGHT STOP FUNERAL THURSDAY IN LIBYA HILL STOP COME HOME IF YOU CAN."

  That was all. No explanation of what she had died of. Old age, most likely. Nothing else could have killed her. She hadn't been sick or' they would have let him know before this.

  The news shook him profoundly. But it was not grief he felt so much as a deep sense of loss, almost impersonal in its quality--a sense of loss and unbelief such as one might feel to discover suddenly that some great force 'in nature had ceased to operate. He couldn't take it in. Ever since his mother had died when he was only eight ye
ars old, Aunt Maw had been the most solid and permanent fixture in his boy's universe. She was a spinster, the older sister of his mother and of his Uncle Mark, and she had taken charge of him and brought him up with all the inflexible zeal of her puritanical nature. She had done her best to make a Joyner of him and a credit to the narrow, provincial, mountain clan to which she belonged.-In this she had failed, and his defection from the ways of Joyner righteousness had caused her deep pain. He had known this for a long time; but now he realised, too, more clearly than he had, ever done before, that she had never faltered in her duty to him as she saw it. As he thought about her life the felt an inexpressible pity for her, and a surge of tenderness and affection almost choked him.

  As far back as he could remember, Aunt Maw had seemed to him an ageless crone, as old as God. He could still hear her voice--that croaking monotone which had gone on and on in endless stories of her past, peopling his childhood world with the whole host of Joyners dead and buried in the hills of Zebulon in ancient days before the Civil War. And almost every tale she had told him was a chronicle of sickness, death, and sorrow. She had known about all the Joyners for the last hundred years, and whether they had died of consumption, typhoid fever, pneumonia, meningitis, or pellagra, and she had relived each incident in their lives with an air of croaking relish. From her he had got a picture of his mountain kinsmen that was constantly dark with the terrors of misery and sudden death, a picture made ghostly at frequent intervals by supernatural revelations. The Joyners, so she thought, had been endowed with occult powers by the Almighty, and weft for ever popping up on country roads and speaking to people as they passed, only to have it turn out later that they had been fifty miles away at the time. They were for ever hearing voices and receiving premonitions. If a neighbour died suddenly, the Joyners would flock from miles around 'to sit up with the corpse, and in the flickering light of pine logs on the hearth they would talk unceasingly through the night, their droning voices punctuated by the crumbling of the ash as they told how they had received intimations of the impending death a week before it happened.

  This was the image of the Joyner world which Aunt Maw's tireless memories had built up in the mind and spirit of the boy. And he had felt somehow that although other men would live their day and die, the Joyners were a race apart, not subject to this law. They fed on death and were triumphant over it, and the Joyners would go on for ever. But now Aunt Maw the oldest and most death-triumphant Joyner of them all, was dead...

  The funeral was to be on Thursday. This was Tuesday. If he took the train to-day, he would arrive to-morrow. He knew that all the Joyners from the hills of Zebulon County in Old Catawba would be gathering even now to hold their tribal rites of death and sorrow, and if he got there so soon he would not be able to escape the horror of their brooding talk. It would be better to wait a day and turn up just before the funeral.

  It was now early September. The new term at the School for Utility Cultures would not begin until after the middle of the month, George had not been back to Libya Hill in several years, and he thought he might remain a week or so to see the town again. But he dreaded the prospect of staying with his Joyner relatives, especially at a time like this. Then he remembered Randy Shepperton, who lived next door. Mr. and Mrs. Shepperton were both dead now, and the older girl had married and moved away. Randy had a good job in the town and lived on in the family place with his sister Margaret, who kept house for him. Perhaps they could put him up. They would understand his feelings. So he sent a telegram to Randy, asking for his hospitality, and telling what train he would arrive on.

  By the next afternoon, when George went to Pennsylvania Station to catch his train, he had recovered from the first shock of Aunt Maw's death. The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, "Well, where do I go from here?" So it was with George. The prospect of the funeral filled him with dread, but that was still a day off; meanwhile he had a long train ride ahead of him, and he pushed his sombre feelings into the background and allowed himself to savour freely the eager excitement which any journey by train always gave him.

  The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great; slant beams of mottled light fell ponderously athwart the station's floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men. They contributed to it as drops of rain contribute to a river that draws its flood and movement majestically from great depths, out of purple hills at evening.

  Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railway station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time--but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.

  Each man and woman was full of his own journey. He had one way' to go, one end to reach, through all the shifting complexities of the crowd. For each it was his journey, and he cared nothing about the journeys of the others. Here, as George waited, was a traveller who was afraid that he would miss his train. He was excited, his movements were feverish and abrupt, he shouted to his porter, he went to the window to buy his ticket, he had to wait in line, he fairly pranced with nervousness and kept looking at the clock. Then his wife came quickly towards him over the polished floor. When she was still some distance off, she shouted:

  "Have you got the tickets? We haven't much time! We'll miss the train!"

  "Don't I know it?" he shouted back in an annoyed tone. "I'm doing the best I can!"' Then he added bitterly and loudly: "We may make it if this man in front of me ever gets done buying his ticket!"

  The man in front turned on him menacingly. "Now wait a minute, wait a minute!" he said. "You're not the only one who has to make a train, you know! I was here before you were! You'll have to wait your tarn like everybody else!"

  A quarrel now developed between them. The other travellers who were waiting for their tickets grew angry and began to mutter. The ticket agent drummed impatiently on his window and peered out at them with a sour visage. Finally some young tough down the line called out in tones of whining irritation:

  "Aw, take it outside f' Chris' sake! Give the rest of us a chance! You guys are holdin' up the line!"

  At last the man got his tickets and rushed towards his porter, hot and excited. The negro waited suave and smiling, full of easy reassurance:

  "You folks don't need to hurry now. You got lotsa time to make that train. It ain't goin' away without you."

  Who were these travellers for whom time lay coiled in delicate twists of blue steel wire in each man's pocket? Here were a few of them: a homesick nigger going back to Georgia; a rich young man from an estate on the Hudson who was going to visit his mother in Washington; a district superintendent, and three of his agents, of a farm machinery company, who had been attending a convention of district leaders in the city; the president of a bank in an Old Catawba town which was tottering on the edge of ruin, who had come desperately, accompanied by two local politicians, to petition New York bankers fo
r a loan; a Greek with tan shoes, a cardboard valise; a swarthy face, and eyes glittering with mistrust, who had peered in through the ticket seller's window, saying: "How mucha you want to go to Pittsburgh, eh?"; an effeminate young man from one of the city universities who was going to make his weekly lecture on the arts of the theatre to a dub of ladies in Trenton, New Jersey; a lady poetess from a town in Indiana who had been to New York for her yearly spree of "bohemianism"; a prize-fighter and his manager on their way to a fight in St. Louis; some Princeton boys just back from a summer in Europe, on their way home for a short visit before returning to college; a private soldier in the United States army, with the cheap, tough, and slovenly appearance of a private soldier in the United States army; the president of a state university in the Middle West who had just made an eloquent appeal for funds to the New York alumni; a young married couple from Mississippi, with everything new--new clothes, new baggage--and a shy, hostile, and bewildered look; two little Filipinos, brown as berries and with the delicate bones of birds, dressed with the foppish perfection of manikins; women from the suburban towns of New Jersey who had come to the city to shop; women and girls from small towns in the South and West, who had come for holidays, sprees, or visits; the managers and agents of clothing stores in little towns all over the country who had come to the city to buy new styles and fashions; New Yorkers of a certain class, flashily dressed, sensual, and with a high, hard finish, knowing and assured, on their way to vacations in Atlantic City; jaded, faded, bedraggled women, scolding and jerking viciously at the puny arms of dirty children; swarthy, scowling, and dominant-looking Italian men with their dark, greasy, and flabby-looking women, sullen but submissive both to lust and beatings; and smartly-dressed American women, obedient to neither bed nor whip, who had assertive, harsh voices, bold glances, and the good figures but not the living curves, either of body or of spirit, of love, lust, tenderness, or any female fullness of the earth whatever.