by Thomas Wolfe
The two men turned away, and Else put her arms round him. He felt her shoulders shake. She was weeping, and he heard her say: "Be good man. Be great one that I know. Be religious man." And as her embrace tightened, she half-gasped, half-whispered: "Promise." He nodded. Then they came together: her thighs widened, dosed about his leg, her voluptuous figure yielded, grew into him, their mouths clung fiercely, and for the last time they were united in the embrace of love.
Then he climbed into the train. The guard slammed the door. Even as he made his way down the narrow corridor towards his compartment, the train started. These forms, these faces, and these lives all began to slide away.
Heilig kept walking forward, waving his hat, his face still contorted with the grimace of his sorrow. Behind him, Else walked along beside the train, her face stern and lonely, her arm lifted in farewell. Lewald whipped off his hat and waved it, his fair hair in disarray above his flushed and vinous face. The last thing George heard was his exuberant voice raised in a shout of farewell. "Old Chorge, auf wiedersehen!" And then he cupped his hands round his mouth and yelled: "Lecke du----!" George saw his shoulders heave with laughter.
Then the train swept out around the curve. And they were lost.
* * *
41. Five Passengers for Paris
The train gathered speed. The streets and buildings in the western I part of the city slipped past--those solid, ugly streets, those massive, ugly buildings in the Victorian German style, which yet, with all the pleasant green of trees, the window-boxes bright with red geraniums, the air of order, of substance, and of comfort, had always seemed as familiar and as pleasant to George as the quiet streets and houses of a little town. Already they were sweeping through Charlottenburg. They passed the station without halting, and on the platforms George saw, with the old and poignant feeling of regret and loss, the people waiting for the Stadtbahn trains. Upon its elevated track the great train swept on smoothly towards the west, gathering momentum steadily. They passed the Funkturma. Almost before he knew it they were rushing through the outskirts of the city towards the open country. They passed an aviation field. He saw the hangars and a flock of shining 'planes. And as he looked, a great silver-bodied 'plane moved out, sped along the runway, lofted its tail, broke slowly from the earth, and vanished.
And now the city was left behind. Those familiar faces, forms, and voices of just six minutes past now seemed as remote as dreams, imprisoned there as in another world--a world of massive brick and stone and pavements, a world hived of four million lives, of hope and fear and hatred, of anguish and despair, of love, of cruelty and devotion, that was called Berlin.
And now the land was stroking past, the level land of Brandenburg, the lonely flatland of the north which he had always heard was so ugly, and which he had found so strange, so haunting, and so beautiful. The dark solitude of the forest was around them now, the loneliness of the kiefern-trees, tall, slender, towering, and as straight as sailing masts, bearing upon their tops the slender burden of their needled and eternal green. Their naked poles shone with that lovely gold-bronze colour which is like the material substance of a magic light. And all between was magic, too. The forest dusk beneath the kieferntrees was gold-brown also, the earth gold-brown and barren, and the trees themselves stood alone and separate, a polelike forest filled with haunting light.
Now and then the light would open and the woods be gone, and they would sweep through the level cultivated earth, tilled thriftily to the very edges of the track. He could see the clusters of farm buildings, the red-tiled roofs, the cross-quarterings of barns and houses. Then they would find the haunting magic of the woods again.
George opened the door of his compartment and went in and took a seat beside the door. On the other side, in the corner by the window, a young man sat and read a book. He was an elegant young man and dressed most fashionably. He wore a sporting kind of coat with a small and fancy check, a wonderful vest of some expensive doelike grey material, cream-grey trousers pleated at the waist, also of a rich, expensive weave, and grey suede gloves. He did not look American or English. There was a foppish, almost sugared elegance about his costume that one felt, somehow, was Continental. Therefore it struck George with a sense of shock to see that he was reading an American book, a popular work in history which had the title, The Saga of Democracy, and bore the imprint of a well-known firm. But while he pondered on this puzzling combination of the familiar and the strange there were steps outside along the corridor, voices, the door was opened, and a woman and a man came in.
They were Germans. The woman was small and no longer young, but she was plump, warm, seductive-looking, with hair so light it was the colour of bleached straw, and eyes as blue as sapphires. She spoke rapidly and excitedly to the man who accompanied her, then turned to George and asked if the other places were unoccupied. He replied that he thought so, and looked questioningly at the dapper young man in the corner. This young man now spoke up in somewhat broken German, saying that he believed the other seats were free, and adding that he had got on the train at the Friedrich-strasse station and had seen no one else in the compartment. The woman immediately and vigorously nodded her head in satisfaction and spoke with rapid authority to her companion, who went out and presently returned with their baggage--two valises, which he arranged upon the rack above their heads.
They were a strangely assorted pair. The woman, although most attractive, was obviously much the older of the two. She appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties. There were traces of fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her face gave an impression of physical maturity and warmth, together with the wisdom that comes from experience, but it was also apparent that some of the freshness and resilience of youth had gone out of it. Her figure had an almost shameless sexual attraction, the kind of naked allure that one often sees in people of the theatre--in a chorus girl or in the strip-tease woman of a burlesque show. Her whole personality bore a vague suggestion of the theatrical stamp. In everything about her there was that element of heightened vividness which seems to set off and define people who follow the stage.
Beside her assurance, her air of practice and authority, her sharply vivid stamp, the man who accompanied her was made to seem even younger than he was. He was probably twenty-six or thereabouts, but he looked a mere stripling. He was a tall, blond, fresh-complexioned, and rather handsome young German who conveyed an indefinable impression of countrified and slightly bewildered innocence. He appeared nervous, uneasy, and inexperienced in the art of travel. He kept his head down or averted most of the time, and did not speak unless the woman spoke to him. Then he would flush crimson with embarrassment, the two flags of colour in his fresh, pink face deepening to beetlike red.
George wondered who they were, why they were going to Paris, and what the relation between them could be. He felt, without exactly knowing why, that there was no family connection between them. The young man could not be the woman's brother, and it was also evident that they were not man and wife. It was hard not to fall back upon an ancient parable and see in them the village hayseed in the toils of the city siren--to assume that she had duped him into taking her to Paris, and that the fool and his money would soon be parted. Yet there was certainly nothing repulsive about the woman to substantiate this conjecture. She was decidedly a most attractive and engaging creature. Even her astonishing quality of sexual magnetism, which was displayed with a naked and almost uncomfortable openness, so that one felt it the moment she entered the compartment, had nothing vicious in it. She seemed, indeed, to be completely unconscious of it, and simply expressed herself sensually and naturally with the innocent warmth of a child.
While George was busy with these speculations the door of the compartment opened again and a stuffy-looking little man with a long nose looked in, peered about truculently, and rather suspiciously, George thought, and then demanded to know if there was a free seat in the compartment. They all told him that they thought so. Upon receiving this info
rmation, he, too, without another word, disappeared down the corridor, to reappear again with a large valise. George helped him to stow it away upon the rack. It was so heavy that the little man could probably not have managed it by himself, yet he accepted this service sourly and without a word of thanks, hung up his overcoat, and fidgeted and worried around, took a newspaper from his pocket, sat down opposite George and opened it, banged the compartment door shut rather viciously, and, after peering round mistrustfully at all the other people, rattled his paper and began to read.
While he read his paper George had a chance to observe this sour-looking customer from time to time. Not that there was anything sinister about the man--decidedly there was not. He was just a drab, stuffy, irascible little fellow of the type that one sees a thousand times a day upon the streets, muttering at taxi-cabs or snapping at imprudent drivers--the type that one is always afraid he is going to encounter on a trip but hopes fervently he won't. He looked like the kind of fellow who would always be slamming the door of the compartment to, always going over and banging down the window without asking anyone else about it, always fidgeting and fuming about and trying by every crusty, crotchety, cranky, and ill-tempered method in his equipment to make himself as unpleasant, and his travelling companions as uncomfortable, as possible.
Yes, he was certainly a well-known type, but aside from this he was wholly unremarkable. If one had passed him in the streets of the city, one would never have taken a second look at him or remembered him afterwards. It was only when he intruded himself into the intimacy of a long journey and began immediately to buzz and worry around like a troublesome hornet that he became memorable.
It was not long, in fact, before the elegant young gentleman in the corner by the window almost ran afoul of him. The young fellow took out an expensive-looking cigarette-case, extracted a cigarette, and then, smiling engagingly, asked the lady if she objected to his smoking. She immediately answered, with great warmth and friendliness, that she minded not at all. George received this information with considerable relief, and took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and was on the point of joining his unknown companion in the luxury of a smoke when old Fuss-and-Fidget rattled his paper viciously, glared sourly at the elegant young man and then at George, and, pointing to a sign upon the wall of the compartment, croaked dismally:
"Nicht Raucher."
Well, all of them had known that at the beginning, but they had not supposed that Fuss-and-Fidget would make an issue of it. The young fellow and George glanced at each other with a slightly startled look, grinned a little, caught the lady's eye, which was twinkling with the comedy of the occasion, and were obediently about to put their cigarettes away unsmoked when old Fuss-and-Fidget rattled his paper, looked sourly round at them a second time, and then said bleakly that as far as he was concerned it was all right--he didn't personally mind their smoking--he just wanted to point out that they were in a non-smoking compartment. The implication plainly was that from this time on the crime was on their own heads, that he had done what he could as a good citizen to warn them, but that if they proceeded with their guilty plot against the laws of the land, it was no further concern of his. Being thus reassured, they produced their cigarettes again and lighted up.
Now while George smoked, and while old Fuss-and-Fidget read his paper, George had further opportunity to observe this unpleasant companion of the voyage. And his observations, intensified as they were by subsequent events, became fixed as an imperishable image in his mind. The image which occurred to him as he sat there watching the man was that of a sour-tempered Mr. Punch. If you can imagine Mr. Punch without his genial spirits, without his quick wit, without his shrewd but kind intelligence, if you can imagine a crotchety and cranky Mr. Punch going about angrily banging doors and windows shut, glaring round at his fellow-travellers, and sticking his long nose into everybody's business, then you will get some picture of this fellow. Not that he was hunchbacked and dwarfed like Mr. Punch. He was certainly small, he was certainly a drab, unlovely little figure of a man, but he was not dwarfed. But his face had the ruddy glow that one associates with Mr. Punch, and its contour, like that of Mr. Punch, was almost cherubic, except that the cherub had gone sour. The nose also was somewhat Punchian. It was not grotesquely hooked and beaked, but it was a long nose, and its fleshy tip drooped over as if it were fairly sniffing with suspicion, fairly stretching with eagerness to pry around and stick itself into things that did not concern it.
George fell asleep presently, leaning against the side of the door. It was a fitful and uneasy coma of half-sleep, the product of excitement and fatigue--never comfortable, never whole--a dozing sleep from which he would start up from time to time to look about him, then doze again. Time after time he came sharply awake to find old Fussand-Fidget's eyes fixed on him in a look of such suspicion and ill-temper that it barely escaped malevolence. He woke up once to find the man's gaze fastened on him in a stare that was so protracted, so unfriendly, that he felt anger boiling up in him. It was on the tip of his tongue to speak hotly to the fellow, but he, as if sensing George's intent, ducked his head quickly and busied himself again with his newspaper.
The man was so fidgety and nervous that it was impossible to sleep longer than a few minutes at a time. He was always crossing and uncrossing his legs, always rattling his newspaper, always fooling with the handle of the door, doing something to it, jerking and pulling it, half opening the door and banging it to again, as if he were afraid it was not securely closed. He was always jumping up, opening the door, and going out into the corridor, where he would pace up and down for several minutes, turn and look out of the windows at the speeding landscape, then fidget back and forth in the corridor again, sour-faced and distempered-looking, holding his hands behind him and twiddling his fingers nervously and impatiently as he walked.
All this while, the train was advancing across the country at terrific speed. Forest and field, village and farm, tilled land and pasture stroked past with the deliberate but devouring movement of high velocity. The train slackened a little as it crossed the Elbe, but there was no halt. Two hours after its departure from Berlin it was sweeping in beneath the arched, enormous roof of the Hanover station. There was to be a stop of ten minutes. As the train slowed down, George awoke from his doze. But fatigue still held him, and he did not get up.
Old Fuss-and-Fidget arose, however, and, followed by the woman and her companion, went out on the platform for a little fresh air and exercise.
George and the dapper young man in the corner were now left alone together. The latter had put down his book and was looking out of the window, but after a minute or two he turned to George and said in English, marked by a slight accent:
"Where are we now?"
George told him they were at Hanover.
"I'm tired of travelling," the young man said with a sigh. "I shall be glad when I get home."
"And where is home for you?" George asked.
"New York," he said, and, seeing a look of slight surprise on George's face, he added quickly: "Of course I am not American by birth, as you can see from the way I talk. But I am a naturalised American, and my home is in New York."
George told him that he lived there, too. Then the young man asked if George had been long in Germany.
"All summer," George replied. "I arrived in May."
"And you have been here ever since--in Germany?"
"Yes," said George, "except for ten days in the Tyrol."
"When you came in this morning I thought at first that you were German. I believe I saw you on the platform with some German people."
"Yes, they were friends of mine."
"But then when you spoke I saw you could not be a German from your accent. When I saw you reading the Paris Herald I concluded that you were English or American.
"I am American, of course."
"Yes, I can see that now. I," he said, "am Polish by birth. I went to America when I was fifteen years old, but my family still lives
in Poland."
"And you have been to see them, naturally?"
"Yes. I have made a practice of coming over every year or so to visit them. I have two brothers living in the country." It was evident that he came from landed people. "I am returning from there now," he said. He was silent for a moment, and then said with some emphasis: "But not again! Not for a long time will I visit them. I have told them that it is enough--if they want to see me now, they must come to New York. I am sick of Europe," he went on. "Every time I come I am fed up. I am tired of all this foolish business, these politics, this hate, these armies, and this talk of war--the whole damned stuffy atmosphere here!" he cried indignantly and impatiently, and, thrusting his hand into his breast pocket, he pulled out a paper--"Will you look at this?"
"What is it?" George said.
"A paper--a permit--the damn thing stamped and signed which allows me to take twenty-three marks out of Germany. Twenty-three marks!" he repeated scornfully--"as if I want their God-damn money!"
"I know," George said. "You've got to get a paper every time you turn round. You have to declare your money when you come in, you have to declare it when you go out. If you send home for money, you have to get a paper for that, too. I made a little trip to Austria as I told you. It took three days to get the papers that would allow me to take my own money out. Look here!" he cried, and reached in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of papers. "I got all of these in one summer."
The ice was broken now. Upon a mutual grievance they began to warm up to each other. It quickly became evident to George that his new acquaintance, with the patriotic fervour of his race, was passionately American. He had married an American girl, he said. New York, he asserted, was the most magnificent city on earth, the only place he cared to live, the place he never wished to leave again, the place to which he was aching to return.
