by Thomas Wolfe
Plemmons led the way; they went along the deck and turned in at a door that entered into another world of silence, a tremendous cor ridor of polished wood. Here the experienced guide quickly found another flight of stairs that led up to an upper deck, and now again they stepped out upon another tremendous promenade, a promenade even more astounding in its atmosphere of space, of width, of vista, and of luxury than the one below. This promenade was glass enclosed, which added to the impression of its wealth. More people were to be seen here, pacing, the white shirt-fronts and evening black of men, the pearl-hued nakedness of women's shoulders. And yet there were not many people--a few couples making the great prome nade around the deck, a few more stretched out in their steamer chairs. Broad windows flanked beside, and through these windows one could see the interiors of tremendous rooms--great lounges and salons, and cafïs as large as those one would see in a great hotel, as solid-seeming also, as luxurious. Plemmons led the way quickly and confidently back along this deck in the direction of the stern, and finding here another flight of stairs, he mounted swiftly, and presently led the way around into a small verandah-like cafï, covered on top but open at the end, so that one had a clear view backward out across the broad wake of the ship. Here they seated themselves at a table and ordered a drink.
In response to Plemmons' inquiry, the steward replied that most of the passengers were still at dinner. Plemmons scrawled a note and dispatched it by a page. Presently the boy returned with a message that the ladies had not yet got up from dinner, but would join them presently.
The young men sat and drank their drinks. Shortly before nine o'clock they heard steps approaching along the passageway that led to the cafi. Plemmons looked around quickly, then got up.
"Oh, hello, Lily," he said. "Where is Mrs. Jack?"
Then he made introductions. The young woman whom he had just greeted turned and shook hands with Monk coldly, then turned again to Plemmons. She was a woman of thirty years or more, of sensational and even formidable appearance. Perhaps not many people would have called her beautiful, but everybody certainly would have admitted that she was astoundingly handsome. She was quite tall for a woman, with big limbs and large proportions. In fact, she just escaped massiveness, but her bigness was curiously mingled with an almost fragile delicacy.
Monk noticed when he shook hands with her that her hand was almost as small and slender as a little girl's, and in her manner also, which was almost repellantly sullen and aloof, he noticed something timid, almost shrinking and afraid. She had a dark and Slavic face, and a mane of dark black hair which somehow contrived to give a cloudlike, wild, and stormy look to her whole head. Her voice was fruity, and had in it also a note of protest, as if she was impatient with nearly everything--with being bored by the people she met and by the things they said to her, of being weary and impatient with almost everyone and everything. It was quite a mannered voice, as well, and by its accents suggested the mannerisms of a person who had lived in England and had aped their way of speech.
While the young woman stood there talking to Plemmons in her fruity, mannered, and half-sullen voice, they heard steps again along the passageway, this time brisker, shorter, and half running. They turned, the young woman said, "Here's Esther now," and another woman now came in.
Monk's first impression of her was of a woman of middle age, of small but energetic figure and with a very fresh, ruddy, and healthy face. If his own mental phrase at the moment could ever have been recaptured or defined, he would probably have described her simply as "a nice-looking woman," and let it go at that. And this is probably the way she would have impressed most people who saw her for the first time or who passed her on the street. Her small but business like figure, her brisk steps, the general impression she conveyed of a healthy and energetic vitality, and her small, rosy, and good-humored face would have given anyone who saw her a pleasant feeling, a feeling of affectionate regard and interest--and nothing more. Most people would have felt pleasantly warmed by the sight of her if they had passed her on the street, but few people would have paused to look back at her a second time.
At the moment when she entered the verandah cafï, although she had been looking for them and knew that they had been waiting for her, her manner at seeing them was surprised and even a little be wildered. She stopped and then cried: "Oh, hello, Mr. Plemmons, there you are. Did I keep you waiting--hah?"
This was spoken in a rapid and even excited tone. It was evident that the words required no answer, but were rather a kind of in voluntary expletive of the excitement and surprise which were apparently qualities of her personality.
Plemmons now made introductions. The woman turned to Monk and shook hands with a brief, firm grasp and a friendly look. Then she turned immediately to Plemmons with a brightly inquiring and hopeful smile, "Well, are you going to take us down to see the show--hah?"
Plemmons was a little flushed from drink and in good spirits. Banteringly, he said: "So you really think you want to see how the other half lives, do you?"--and, looking at her for a moment, laughed.
Apparently she did not understand him at first, and said "Hah?" again.
"I say," he said somewhat more pointedly, "do you think you can stand it down there with all us immigrants?"
Her response to this was very quick, spontaneous, and charming.
She shrugged her shoulders, and raised her hands in a gesture of comical protest, at the same time saying with a droll solemnity: "Vell, vy nod? Am I nod mine-self an immi-grunt?"
The words were not themselves very funny or witty, but her improvisation was so quick and natural that the effect of them was irresistible. She conceived the part so instantly, and threw herself into it at once with so much earnestness, like a child absorbed in its own play-acting, and finally her own delight in her performance--for immediately she was shaken by a gale of laughter, she put her hand kerchief to her mouth and shrieked faintly, as if in answer to some unspoken protest--"I know but it was funny, wasn't it?"--and then set off again in hysterical tremors--all this was so engaging in its whole-hearted appreciation of itself that the two young men grinned, and even the sullen and smoldering face of the tall, sensational-looking woman was lighted by an unwilling laugh and she said protestingly, "Oh, Esther, honestly, you are the most--" and then broke off with a helpless shrug of defeat.
As for Plemmons, he too laughed, and then said concedingly, "Well, after that I think we had all better have a drink."
And, pleasantly warmed and drawn together by the woman's quick and natural display of spontaneous humor, they all sat down at one of the tables.
From that night on, Monk was never able again to see that woman as perhaps she really was, as she must have looked to many other people, as she had even looked to him the first moment that he saw her. He was never able thereafter to see her as a matronly figure of middle age, a creature with a warm and jolly little face, a wholesome and indomitable energy for every day, a shrewd, able, and immensely talented creature of action, able to hold her own in a man's world.
These things he knew or found out about her later, but this picture of her, which was perhaps the one by which the world best knew her, was gone forever.
She became the most beautiful woman that ever lived--and not in any symbolic or idealistic sense--but with all the blazing, literal, and mad concreteness of his imagination. She became the creature of incomparable loveliness to whom all the other women in the world must be compared, the creature with whose image he would for years walk the city's swarming streets, looking into the faces of every woman he passed with a feeling of disgust, muttering: "No--no good. Bad... coarse... meager... thin... sterile.
There's no one like her--no one in the whole world who can touch her!"
So did the great ship come to port at last, and there four hundred people who had been caught up in the lonely immensity of the sea for seven days left her, and were joined to the earth and men again.
The familiar noises of life rang in their ears again;
the great roar of the city, and of its mighty machines, by which man has striven to forget that he is brief and lost, rose comfortingly around them.
Thus they were mixed and scattered in the crowd. Their lives began their myriad weavings. Through a million dots of men and masses they were woven--some to their dwellings in the city, some on vast nets of rails and by great engines through the land.
All went their ways and met their destinies. All were lost upon the enormous land again.
But whether any found joy or wisdom there, what man knows?
18
The Letter
AMONG THE WHOLE COMPLEX OF REASONS THAT HAD BROUGHT MONK back to America was one of the most distressing practicality. He had spent all his money, and now would have to earn his living. This problem had caused him much anxiety during his year abroad. He did not know what he was fitted for, unless it was some kind of academic post, and he wanted, if possible, to stay in New York. So he had made application and submitted his qualifications to one of the large educational factories in the city. There had been much correspondence, and a few friends had also been active in his behalf, and, shortly before he sailed from Europe, word had come that the job was his. The School for Utility Cultures, Inc., was downtown, and when Monk got off the boat he engaged a room at a small hotel near by that would be convenient to his work. Then, with the good feeling that he was at last established and "on his own," he took the train for Libya Hill to pay his duties to Aunt Maw and Uncle Mark in the brief interim before school opened.
When he returned to New York after this short visit, the city seemed deserted. He saw no one he knew, and almost immediately the great exhilaration of return was succeeded by the old feeling of haunting homelessness, of looking for something that was not there.
Everyone who has ever returned to New York after an absence must have had this feeling; it is so overwhelming and characteristic of the city's life that people feel it even when they have been away only for a month or two.
And in a way it is this very quality that makes the life of the city so wonderful and so terrible. It is the most homeless home in all the world. It is the gigantic tenement of Here Comes Everybody. And that is what makes it so strange, so cruel, so tender, and so beautiful.
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years, and he who owns the swarming rock is not he who died on Wednesday--for he, alas, is already forgotten--but he who came to town last night.
It is such a cruel, such a loving friend. It has given to many people fleeing from the little towns, from the bigotry and meanness of a constricted life, the bounty of its flashing and passionate life, the mercy of its refuge, the hope, the thrilling inspiration of all its million promises. And it gives them its oblivion, too. It says to them: "Here I am, and I am yours; take me, use me as you will; be young and proud and beautiful here in your young might." And at the same time it tells them that they will be nothing here, no more than a grain of dust; that they can come and sweat and swink and pour into the vortex of the city's life all of the hope, the grief, the pain, the passion, and the ecstasy that youth can know, or that a single life can hold, and, so living, die here and be charioted to swift burials and at once forgot, and leave not even a print of a heel upon these swarming pavements as a sign that a blazing meteor has come to naught.
And herein lies the magic and the mystery and the wonder of the immortal city. It offers all, and yet it offers nothing. It gives to every man a home, and it is the great No Home of the earth. It invites all human drops of water to the grand oblivion of its ceaseless tides, and yet it gives to every mother's son the promise of the sea.
All this returned to Monk at once, and so possessed him with terror and fascination. Save for casual nods, a word or two now spoken in half-friendly greeting, a face or two that he had seen before, it was all as if he had never been here, never lived here, never spent two whole years of his youth, his ardor, passion, and devotion within the laneways of this monstrous honeycomb. His stunned mind praised it, and words made echoes in his ears: "I've--I've been away--and now I'm home again."
During the two weeks that he had remained in Libya Hill he found himself thinking of Esther a great deal--far more than he was willing to admit. When he had returned to New York and asked for mail at the hotel desk, he was aware of a crushing feeling of disappointment when the clerk told him there was none, and this feeling, so over whelming that for an hour or so it left him with a sick heart, was succeeded quickly by one of fierce contempt and hard impermeability -the natural and instinctive response of youth to the disappointment into which its own romantic hope and lacerated pride have betrayed it. He told himself savagely that it did not matter. Deliberately, he now tried to take the most cynical view of the whole thing: the experience, he told himself, was nothing but the familiar one of a wealthy woman toying with a lover during the secure isolation of a voyage.
Now that she was back home again, she had resumed her former life of unchallenged respectability with her family, her husband, and her friends, and now butter wouldn't melt in her mouth for quite another year until she got away upon another trip. Then, of course, there would be more romance, more promises, a whole succession of new lovers.
He was so fiercely and grievously hurt that he now told himself that he had known this all along, that this was just what he had expected.
Because he felt such a rankling sense of wounded pride and personal humiliation at the knowledge of how deeply his own feelings had been involved, and of how much he had hoped and looked forward to a different sort of consummation, he now tried to convince himself that he had been completely, toughly detached from the whole thing from the beginning--that he had had his fun as she had hers and that now it was all over, it had all turned out according to prophecy, and he had nothing to regret.
With this hard resolution, he plunged into his work and tried to forget about it. For a few days, almost he succeeded. It was the beginning of the term, there were classes to meet, new names to know, new faces to learn, the whole program of new work to lay out, and for a while this kept her buried in his thoughts.
But she came back. He kept putting her away, but he found he could no more banish her out of his life than he could banish memory out of his blood. She kept coming back incessantly--the memory of her flower face, her jolly look, her voice, her laugh, the brisk move ment of her small but energetic figure, the whole memory of their last night together on the ship with the promise of its half-realized embrace -all this came back to haunt his mind, to burn there in his memory with the intolerable brightness of a vision. What made the memory of all this even harder to endure was a sense of its overwhelming reality, together with the maddening sense that all of it had happened in another world--a world now lost and unapproachable forevermore.
It had all happened in that haunting other world 'twixt land and land, in that strange and fated cosmos of a ship. And now he was baffled and maddened by the sense that this world with all its beauty, loveliness, and impossible reality was lost to him forever, had been fractured like a bubble at the moment of its contact with the land; and that now--with its huge cargo of longing and unrealized desire, for all its reality, now stranger, more insubstantial than a dream--it must live forever now uncaptured, to burn, to sear, to hackle in his heart.
Well, then, he must forget it. But he could not. It kept coming back to haunt him all the time, together with that flower of a face.
The upshot of it all was that he sat down one night and wrote her a letter. It was one of those pompous, foolish, vainglorious letters that young men write, that seem so fine when they write them, and that they writhe over when they recall them later. Instead of telling the woman the truth, which was that he had missed her and thought about her and wanted earnestly to see her again, he struck a very high and mighty attitude, cleared his epistolary throat, and let the periods roll.
"Dear Mrs. Jack," he began--he all but started it "Dear Madam"-
"I do
not know if you remember me or not"--although he knew she would. "It has been my experience along life's way"--he liked the sound of "it has been my experience," it had a ring of mature authority and casual knowingness that he thought was quite impressive, but he went back and crossed out "along life's way" as being trite and probably sentimental. "I believe you spoke of seeing me again. If by chance you should remember me, and should ever feel inclined to see me, my address is here at this hotel." He thought this part was pretty neat: it salved his pride a bit, since it put him in the position of graciously conferring a privilege on someone who was fairly clamor ing to meet him again. "However, if you do not feel inclined, it does not matter; after all, ours was a chance acquaintance of the voyage- and these things pass.... In a life which for the most part has been lived alone, I have learned to expect or ask for nothing.... What ever else the world may say of me, I have never truckled to the mob, nor for a moment bent the pregnant hinges of the knee to flatter the vanity of the idle rich." It is hard to say just what this had to do with his desire to see this woman again, but he thought it had a fine, ringing note of proud independence--particularly the part about not truck ling to the mob--so he let this stay. However, upon reexamination, the part about bending the pregnant hinges of the knee to flatter the vanity of the idle rich seemed to him a little too harsh and pointed, so he modified this somewhat to read, "to flatter the vanity of the individual."
