OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  And outside there was the raw and desolate-looking country, there were the great steel coaches, the terrific locomotives, the shining rails, the sweep of the tracks, the vast indifferent dinginess and rust of colours, the powerful mechanical expertness, and the huge indifference to suave finish. And inside there were the opulent green and luxury of the Pullman cars, the soft glow of the lights, and people fixed there for an instant in incomparably rich and vivid little pictures of their life and destiny, as they were all hurled onward, a thousand atoms, to their journey's end somewhere upon the mighty continent, across the immense and lonely visage of the everlasting earth.

  And they looked at one another for a moment, they passed and vanished and were gone for ever, yet it seemed to him that he had known these people, that he knew them better than the people in his own train, and that, having met them for an instant under immense and timeless skies, as they were hurled across the continent to a thousand destinations, they had met, passed, vanished, yet would remember this for ever. And he thought the people in the two trains felt this, also: slowly they passed each other now, and their mouths smiled and their eyes grew friendly, but he thought there was some sorrow and regret in what they felt. For, having lived together as strangers in the immense and swarming city, they now had met upon the everlasting earth, hurled past each other for a moment between two points in time upon the shining rails, never to meet, to speak, to know each other any more, and the briefness of their days, the destiny of man, was in that instant greeting and farewell.

  Therefore, in this way, they passed and vanished, the coaches slipped away from them until again they came up level with the cab of the other locomotive. And now the young engineer no longer sat in his high window with a determined grin, and with his hard blue eyes fixed on the rail. Rather, he stood now in the door, his engine banging away deliberately, slowed down, bucking and rocking loosely as they passed. His attitude was that of a man who has just given up a race. He had turned to shout something at his fireman who stood there balanced, arms akimbo, black and grinning, as they moved up by them. The engineer had one gloved hand thrust out against the cab to support him, he held the other on his hip and he was grinning broadly at them, with solid teeth edged with one molar of bright gold--a fine, free, generous, and good-humoured smile, which said more plainly than any words could do: "Well, it's over, now! You fellows win! But you'll have to admit we gave you a run for your money while it lasted!"

  Then they drew away and lost the train for ever. And presently their own train came in to Newark, where it stopped. And suddenly, as Eugene was looking at some negroes working there with picks and shovels on the track beside the train, one looked up and spoke quietly to the fat porter, without surprise or any greeting, as casually and naturally as a man could speak to someone who has been in the same room with him for hours.

  "When you comin' back dis way, boy?" he said.

  "I'll be comin' back again on Tuesday," said the porter.

  "Did you see dat ole long gal yet? Did you tell huh what I said?"

  "Not yet," the porter said, "but I'll be seein' huh fo' long! I'll tell yo' what she says."

  "I'll be lookin' fo' you," said the other negro.

  "Don't fo'git now," said the fat black porter, chuckling; and the train started, the man calmly returned to work again; and this was all. What that astounding meeting of two black atoms underneath the skies, that casual incredible conversation meant, he never knew; but he did not forget it.

  And the whole memory of this journey, of this race between the trains, of the negroes, of the passengers who came to life like magic, crowding and laughing at the windows, and particularly of the girl and of the vein upon the old man's hand, was fixed in Eugene's brain for ever. And like everything he did or saw that year, like every journey that he made, it became a part of his whole memory of the city.

  And the city would always be the same when he came back. He would rush through the immense and glorious stations, murmurous with their million destinies and the everlasting sound of time, that was caught up for ever in their roof--he would rush out into the street, and instantly it would be the same as it had always been, and yet for ever strange and new.

  He felt as if by being gone from it an instant he had missed something priceless and irrecoverable. He felt instantly that nothing had changed a bit, and yet it was changing furiously, unbelievably, every second before his eyes. It seemed stranger than a dream, and more familiar than his mother's face. He could not believe in it--and he could not believe in anything else on earth. He hated it, he loved it, he was instantly engulfed and overwhelmed by it.

  He brought to it the whole packed glory of the earth--the splendour, power, and beauty of the nation. He brought back to it a tremendous memory of space, and power, and of exultant distances; a vision of trains that smashed and pounded at the rails, a memory of people hurled past the window of his vision in another train, of people eating sumptuously from gleaming silver in the dining cars, of cities waking in the first light of the morning, and of a thousand little sleeping towns built across the land, lonely and small and silent in the night, huddled below the desolation of immense and cruel skies.

  He brought to it a memory of the loaded box-cars slatting past at fifty miles an hour, of swift breaks like openings in a wall when coal cars came between, and the sudden feeling of release and freedom when the last caboose whipped past. He remembered the dull rusty red, like dried blood, of the freight cars, the lettering on them, and their huge gaping emptiness and joy as they curved in among raw piny land upon a rusty track, waiting for great destinies in the old red light of evening upon the lonely, savage, and indifferent earth; and he remembered the cindery look of road-beds and the raw and barren spaces in the land that ended nowhere; the red clay of railway cuts, and the small hard lights of semaphores--green, red, and yellow--as in the heart of the enormous dark they shone, for great trains smashing at the rails, their small and passionate assurances.

  He brought to it the heart, the eye, the vision of the everlasting stranger, who had walked its stones, and breathed its air, and, as a stranger, looked into its million dark and driven faces, and who could never make the city's life his own.

  And finally he brought to it the million memories of his fathers who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities: three hundred of his blood and bone, who sowed their blood and sperm across the continent, walked beneath its broad and lonely lights, were frozen by its bitter cold, burned by the heat of its fierce suns, withered, gnarled, and broken by its savage weathers, and who fought like lions with its gigantic strength, its wildness, its limitless savagery and beauty, until with one stroke of its paw it broke their backs and killed them.

  He brought to it the memory and inheritance of all these men and women who had worked, fought, drunk, loved, whored, striven, lived and died, letting their blood soak down like silence in the earth again, letting their flesh rot quietly away into the stern, the beautiful, the limitless substance of the everlasting earth from which they came, from which they were compacted, on which they worked and wrought and moved, and in whose immense and lonely breast their bones were buried and now lay, pointing eighty ways across the continent.

  Above the pounding of the mighty wheels their voices had seemed to well out of the everlasting earth, giving to him, the son whom they had never seen, the dark inheritance of the earth and the centuries, which was his, even as his blood and bone were his, but which he could not fathom. "Whoever builds a bridge across this earth," they cried, "whoever lays a rail across this mouth, whoever stirs the dust where these bones lie, let him go dig them up, and say his Hamlet to the engineers. Son, son," their voices said, "is the earth richer where our own earth lay? Must you untwist the vine-root from the buried heart? Have you unrooted mandrake from our brains? Or the rich flowers, the big rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers?

  "You must admit the grass is thicker here. Hair grew like April on our buried flesh. These men
were full of juice, you'll grow good corn here, golden wheat. The men are dead, you say? They may be dead, but you'll grow trees here; you'll grow an oak, but we were richer than an oak: you'll grow a plum tree here that's bigger than an oak, it will be all filled with plums as big as little apples.

  "We were great men and mean men hated us," they said. "We were all men who cried out when we were hurt, wept when we were sad, drank, ate, were strong, weak, full of fear, were loud and full of clamour, yet grew quiet when dark came. Fools laughed at us and witlings sneered at us: how could they know our brains were subtler than a snake's? Because they were more small, were they more delicate? Did their pale sapless flesh sense things too fine for our imagining? How can you think it, child? Our hearts were wrought more strangely than a cat's, full of deep twistings, woven sinews, flushing with dull and brilliant fires; and our marvellous nerves, flame-tipped, crossed wires too intricate for their fathoming.

  "What could they see," the voices rose above the sound of the wheels with their triumphant boast, "what could they know of men like us, whose fathers hewed the stone above their graves, and now lie under mountains, plains, and forests, hills of granite, drowned by a flooding river, killed by the stroke of the everlasting earth? Now only look where these men have been buried: they've heaved their graves up in great laughing lights of flowers--do you see other flowers so rich on other graves?

  "Who sows the barren earth?" their voices cried. "We sowed the wilderness with blood and sperm. Three hundred of your blood and bone are recompacted with the native earth: we gave a tongue to solitude, a pulse to the desert, the barren earth received us and gave back our agony: we made the earth cry out. One lies in Oregon, and one, by a broken wheel and horse's skull, still grips a gunstock on the Western trail. Another one has helped to make Virginia richer. One died at Chancellorsville in Union blue, and one at Shiloh walled with Yankee dead. Another was ripped open in a bar-room brawl and walked three blocks to find a doctor, holding his entrails thoughtfully in his hands.

  "One died in Pennsylvania reaching for a fork: her reach was greater than her grasp; she fell, breaking her hip, cut off from red rare beef and roasting-ears at ninety-six. Another whored and preached his way from Hatteras to the Golden Gate: he preached milk and honey for the kidneys, sassafras for jaundice, sulphur for uric acid, slippery-ellum for decaying gums, spinach for the goitre, rhubarb for gnarled joints and all the twistings of rheumatism, and pure spring water mixed with vinegar for that great ailment dear to Venus, that makes the world and Frenchmen kin. He preached the brotherhood and love of man, the coming of Christ and Armageddon by the end of 1886, and he founded the Sons of Abel, the Daughters of Ruth, the Children of The Pentateuch, as well as twenty other sects; and finally he died at eight-four, a son of the Lord, a prophet, and a saint.

  "Two hundred more are buried in the hills of home: these men got land, fenced it, owned it, tilled it; they traded in wood, stone, cotton, corn, tobacco; they built houses, roads, grew trees and orchards. Wherever these men went, they got land and worked it, built upon it, farmed it, sold it, added to it. These men were hill-born and hill-haunted: all knew the mountains, but few knew the sea.

  "So there we are, child, lacking our thousand years and ruined walls, perhaps, but with a glory of our own, laid out across three thousand miles of earth. There have been bird-calls for our flesh within the wilderness. So call, please, call! Call the robin red-breast and the wren, who in dark woods discover the friendless bodies of unburied men!

  "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 tro
d, 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.