East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  “Poor Mr. Han! You were trying to stop him, weren’t you? Wasn’t it awful?”

  Senzar, for want of tact, was never invited by Miss Churchill again. I became a regular guest now, for dinner and the evening, every Wednesday.

  BOOK TWO

  1

  THE HIGH-LIGHT OF MY WEEK was Wednesday night, when all was as far as possible removed from Boshnack Brothers’, the world of dollars and of daily bread. The two gentle old ladies, Miss Churchill and Mrs. Hopkins, had sharp, youthful minds. They were interested in the latest books, plays, politics, current events. But my real pleasure on Wednesday nights came from the companionship of Laura, a Western girl of my own age. Laura was a good talker and a good listener. She was gay and always had a fund of small adventures to relate. We got on so well together, that Mrs. Hopkins of the saucy chin, and quiet Miss Churchill with the hands like Whistler’s mother’s, often withdrew to write letters, leaving Laura and me to sit by the fire and talk. The polished floors gleamed around us, the brass answered back, the high old ceilings receded overhead, and to the faint clicking of Laura’s knitting needles—she was always making a sweater from balls of soft wooly yarn—we exchanged reminiscences of college and our student days in Boston. Laura had been graduated from a woman’s college not far from there. It had a beautiful lake and wide grounds, very different from the dust and clangor of Cambridge. I had always looked on it with interest as being just like the world of Tennyson’s Princess.

  I found myself being introduced by way of Laura’s memories into these magic scenes, which were peopled, to my great surprise, with Bobbies and Timmies and Tommies and Vans and Jims. Each name brought a nostalgic light to Laura’s eyes, and when she continued with “she,” I might have thought she didn’t know her English grammar, just like Miyamori sometimes, except that I was aware no boys could graduate from there. Sometimes on lonely walks in that vicinity, I had dreamed of disguising myself as a girl student and getting smuggled in, but fear of detection had prevented that. So I had to wait for this—for Wednesday nights and cozy chats with Laura, who was not loath to take me by way of talk in there. Aside from their names—which were like boys’ or puppies’—everything seemed in order and just as I had imagined to myself. Like the sexless beings of Hudson’s Crystal Age they had lived a utopian life (far from anything so gross as department stores or hotels), roaming over green fields, breakfasting on sunny slopes, reading, writing, discussing, curtailed only when it came to moonlight by fast dormitory laws. Everything took place to the accompaniment of Keats and Swinburne—whether they canoed through realms of gold upon the lake, or leaped the boulder by the pine-forest stream (a peak in Darien) or rolled in long grasses to the rhythm of Hertha (varied with much giggling over bits of college gossip or tales of eccentricity about their women professors, whom, unlike the students in men’s colleges and their queer professors, they usually adored). As Socrates discussed philosophy informally walking barefoot up an Athens street, so their green and juicy minds caught tenuously at this and that, while they rambled through wildwood, until all the poetic landscape beyond the campus held emotional memories of new thought-horizons, and New England nature, like nature in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, became a ballet in which the feminine personalities of Laura and her young friends blended.

  Just like their eccentric professors, some girls lent themselves more than others to Laura’s tongue, which relished eccentricities. Two I soon picked out as constantly recurring, Van and Trip. Van was short for Evangeline, but Trip had tripped at the wrong moment and fallen down. So much I gathered. Trip, I declared, was a name that sounded like dancing. Laura laughingly disagreed. Trip trotted, Van lolloped. Both were crazy girls—absolutely mad! They were direct opposites and inseparable friends. Van, it seemed, was tall and blonde. Trip was short and dark. Van was the soul of neatness. Trip was a legend of untidiness. Van was scientific, competent, and practical. Trip was impractical, not competent, and in college wrote poetry. This year they were living together in New York, while Van studied medicine.

  Another Wednesday night when Trip and Van as usual joined us, as shadows out of Laura’s college years, I recognized them and was glad. Laura had some of Trip’s poems in college magazines, and in manuscript. She brought these out. As Laura explained, Trip was exceedingly serious. The only thing light about her was her nickname. One of the typical poems ran:

  There are some thoughts with an eternal face

  Bright with a light outshining earthly sun,

  True with more truth than anything in space,

  Sure, and by such all surety is won.

  When the white blazing thought approaches near

  It strikes an anguish all the mortal heart.

  It comes as earthly love and doubly dear

  Now since immortal. But it may depart

  Not finding us formed perfectly to serve,

  Too dull, too coarsely made, too slow, too blind,

  Not fine enough, in hand or heart or nerve,

  May leave us aching in an empty mind.

  Thoughts of eternal light, wearing like love

  Immortal raiment, swiftly then remove.

  Every Wednesday night now they appeared, that couple Van and Trip, writing gay letters from New York, about funny adventures, mad alluring encounters with people and streets, such as two girls from apartments in downtown New York always find—and two emotions stood out in me all of a sudden, my longing, my nostalgia for the magical city, and my lunatic desire to meet this Trip, the poetic and impractical one so different from Miss Stein in Boshnack Brothers’. Laura fed my flame unconsciously, as she rambled whimsically on. “Sometimes, I’m afraid I am not serious. Serious, you know, with the big S. It’s a great handicap in art. Seriousness always scares me a little. And I can’t see it as worth-while. Not but that I admire those people who are, even when they give to the saner ones hysterics. Now, you, Mr. Han, are very serious. Aren’t you? You would like Trip.” Laura counted stitches and purled once. And did not know what she was knitting into her pattern.

  Anybody with this kind of obsession sooner or later reveals it to the world. Nor is there anything inconsistent with Western emotion in falling in love with a shadow. As Kim had quoted, Don Quixote is a classic example. I had never been in love before. (Except with Katharine Mansfield.) All day I was moving mechanically, passing through that great luxurious department store with everything to sell that was a thing and nothing intangible. Thank God there were nights, long lonely hours to think, to become me again, to try to recapture the magic and mystery with which I had first dreamed America. I could find it no longer in books, the books I had brought from college (which were mostly English literature), though I read them again and again. How often I had swum into the depths of Browning’s spiritual sea, resting myself under Tennysonian sunsets, diving in again, through frothy Swinburnian waves, sitting on the Rossetti borderland of this seen bank and the unseen yonder horizon, meditating in Arnold’s academic cloister, finding relaxation in Morris’ earthy paradise and utopian vision! I had not so much tasted critically as gesmäckt. But somehow I could not recite Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin with quite the old satisfaction in my drab little room in the Quaker House Hotel, several floors above the Boshnack Brothers’ Men’s Club. “Work, work, work, there is a perennial nobleness, even sacredness in work. . . . Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness . . .” How did that fit in with selling cherrywood for teakwood stands? As for Ruskin, “Magnanimous, magnanimous, magnanimous is life.” . . . I had always liked that adjective magnanimous, but Ruskin now sickened me. And Tennyson, whom I had never had so much use for as the ones with great pomp and thunder . . . I read once more about Maude and Madelaine, then threw the book from one end of the room to the other. Even Browning was English fog in the lungs. And when I came to

  How the world is made for each of us!

  How all we p
erceive and know in it

  Tends to some moment’s product thus,

  When a soul declares itself—to wit,

  By its fruit—the thing it does!

  I wanted to say, “Well, prove it.”

  2

  I suggested to Laura James that I must go to New York on business soon . . . business as to which I was a little vague. I couldn’t just say New York was calling, nor that I had a date with my ideal. I asked her if there was any message she would like me to leave with her friends, Van and Trip. And Laura was surprised and said it wasn’t necessary. But I kept up, until finally Laura said, well, she would write and tell them I was coming. As a matter of fact Laura was a good friend to me here. Having got used to the idea of my looking up Van and Trip, and at the same time fearing I might receive an ambiguous or a mocking welcome, she had championed me in her letter with some heat. “I am sending you a true gentleman,” she wrote. “Be nice to him.” Van and Trip had their little joke about what Mr. Han, true gentleman, could possibly be like, then forgot all about him. But it gave me an excuse for calling. It was spring when I bought my ticket to New York—about the middle of May. O that suave urbane spring! It was Sunday, for Boshnack occupied my time on Saturdays. The train was singing to me the American gypsy message, time, time to wander again, time to be starting, to be shaking off the past, beginning to start out to go and find something. (Just what it is nobody quite knows, but something. . . . Oh, yes, something big!) Miles are so easy to cover, mileage is short. But it’s long to find the something all want to find. Spring . . . and the porters standing by Pullman cars, the porters like Wagstaff . . . while all the network of rails, the shiny new rails sprawled out on a vast continent, and all the succulent greased cogs and unaccountable wheels seemed built only to accommodate man’s free lurching spirit, as he rides, rides at time in swift flight, into the unknown future over insignificant space, still seeking that something he doesn’t know, but has to find.

  The ease of Sunday was upon Manhattan. How luxuriously, riotously swift the taxis ran! No trucks, no furniture vans to swipe against or avoid. The people trotted leisurely. There was a holiday mood. New Yorkers never get tired of seeking enjoyment, but now they were fresher than usual, for it was spring. Daffodils were being sold on the street and fair gasping roses. The sparkling dust added to all its other ingredients somehow the ashes of city-soiled flowers, the adulterated pollen that had brought forth so short a time before the small, thin, smart leaves.

  I walked downtown toward East 30th Street, nearing the address of Van and Trip. The curtains in the big department store windows were drawn secretly over delicate wealth, the novelties and flimsy veils and stylized garments of the American woman at a time of boomtide years. All the annoying world of dollars and cents seemed to have been halted for my Sunday afternoon. But my feet still kept time on the pavements to the rhythm of the els. Yes, the wheels of vast American machinery at last for me were coming alive, they accompanied me downtown with their gay giants’ noise, urging me faster and faster to deposit me at the feet of Miss Trip, with roars of mechanical cheer and don’t-care laughter.

  I felt I knew Trip already. I had only to offer a few side-glimpses of my personality, and probably she would recognize me at once as a kindred spirit. “As star meets star across the ethereal sea, so soul greets soul to all eternity.” That would be enough, but so that she could not mistake me I began in my mind a summary of all my satisfactions and dissatisfactions with life up to date, my tastes in literature and poetry, how far I had come up to the present mentally and philosophically, something of my Oriental and Occidental adventures, etc.—all of which I planned to disclose at once on that afternoon.

  The girls lived in one of those old, rather short houses below 34th Street and off Lexington Avenue. Their names in actual print, the names of Van and Trip, made me feel I was walking in a dream. Would they be expecting me? This was the Sunday I was to come. I got in, by a faint, rather unfriendly click of the automatic opener, operated from above. And standing at the head of the stairs, peering down on me with faint reproof, was unmistakably Van. (Imagine Lysistrata as played by Blanche Yurka, a tall, broad, young Lysistrata—and you will have Van.) She was dressed—superficially at least—in a blue silk smock of a style usually reserved for small girls between four and fourteen. Underneath, one tell-tale leg of a pajama came tumbling down, a long striped pajama which looked very masculine. It was apparent they had been rolled up to answer the doorbell; one came down after the other, and Van had to bend down constantly to adjust them, after which she always towered back with flushed indignation. Aside from her size, she looked exceedingly ungrown-up. Her blond hair was bobbed and cut straight across like a medieval page’s. Her skin, a nordic lily and rose of miraculously childlike texture, shone in the gloom from a tall height. Indeed, Van was a woman for a poster, a symbolic poster about America. She was Norwegian, from the Middle West, and of a Viking build.

  The stage was all set, and I was ready to be a great actor. But Trip wasn’t there. I could not believe it. I said I would wait, if Van didn’t mind. Van hesitated, but I followed her into a large, darkened room made cool by the drawn shades. I still thought I must be expected. And Trip would come home soon. Against three of the walls were couches. One had the covers but newly drawn up. Except for that all was neat. Van sat down on the edge of a straight chair and waited, as if unhappily, holding her head. In fact she explained that she had an awful headache, and soon must begin studying for exams besides. But she knew who I was. That was something. (O, yes, Mr. Han.) Well, there was no help for it. Van said, firmly, she didn’t know when Trip would be home. So I started to say it all to Van. (I thought she could report me to Trip, if I had to go off and wait a while, before coming again.) I told her of my student life in Boston, and gave, as I remember, some of my reasons for discarding medicine for poetry, asking, wasn’t I right? Van looked at me so hard, I wondered if she went in for vivisection. Then I thought she would at least be interested in Laura, so I told her with serious manner how much Miss James had meant to me on Wednesday nights. It was very lonely in Philadelphia, I mentioned. I think I hinted that our wistful thoughts often sped toward New York, and Miss Van looked puzzled. “Laura lonely?” she exclaimed incredulously. “But she likes Philadelphia. Much better than New York.”

  “Oh, but she misses you both very much. She has told me. She so seldom gets any news of you. Especially from Miss Trip. It’s very long since Miss Trip has written. She told me.”

  “No one ever expects Trip to write,” said Van, with an obvious scepticism for the depths of Laura’s longing about her friend. “She’s too lazy and careless.” As I looked pained at this, I felt, unfair characterization, Van bored me with round blue eyes queerly.

  “Still, you see, I can’t go back to Philadelphia without telling Miss Laura how Miss Trip is,” I murmured politely. And Miss Van looked as if she were about to say, “Trip be damned!” She held her head again, shaking it from side to side on her long swanlike neck, like a person in some extremity. Instead she said, “Oh, Trip is fine, fine, Mr. Han. She’s out somewhere with my roommate and a boy, having a grand time.” And she hitched up her pajama leg viciously. “I wrote to Laura myself just the other evening telling all our little ways and doings. I guess she’ll be passing through New York herself on her way home. . . . So, Mr. Han,” added Van with a mirthless laugh, and with almost the haste of Miss Stein when she saw Mr. Boshnack above on the balcony, “you’ll have to take my word for it, Trip is all right! But I’m sorry she didn’t stay herself this afternoon to receive you.”

  “Yes, I was to meet Miss Trip!” I cried in dismay. “That’s what Miss Laura said.”

  “Well, well,” Van rose brusquely. She pulled down the shade again, and turned back the cover of the bed. Her pajama leg came down and she made no attempt to repair it. “If you and Laura have made up your minds about that, why don’t you come tomorrow when I’m not at home? Wh
ile I’m at school, Trip’s here by herself all day. And tomorrow you know I’ll be taking perfectly beastly exams.” Van stood by the door, with fallen pajama legs.

  My relief and anticipation came flooding back. I felt warm gratitude toward Miss Van after all. Tomorrow was Monday. I was due at the store. I had that daily date of mine with Miss Stein. But I hesitated only a moment. I would cut it this time. I could not leave New York without what I came to find.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Han.” And Van’s voice now held grace and penitence, with a good-humored friendliness creeping in. “Sorry—this frightful headache!”

  3

  Miss Van had told me succinctly that she would be out of the apartment by nine o’clock. But I waited until ten to be polite. I rang, and this time there was no click at all. I stood with sinking heart. (But it was only that Trip was one of those persons for whom clickers often didn’t work. She had tried it impatiently, then had come down herself.) Another moment and we stood at the threshold of her house face to face. Without jolt, with suavest gliding motion, my dream took on its disguise of reality. I loved her. I loved Trip. I entered her house with confidence in God. And going before me, the smiling face, looking back over her shoulder with recognition, with merriment, seemed the mystic link to all the new life I had been seeking forever.