MORNING

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JACK ASLEEP

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Jack thought he had gone back home to visit his family. Although his uncle had been dead for twenty years, and his aunt for twelve, and his sister was now an elderly married woman, with grown-up children of her own, who lived in Frankfort, and his mother was an old woman in the seventies, it seemed to Jack that they were all living in the old house in the Weinfass Gasse, and that none of them had grown any older. He was himself a spruce, smartly groomed, grey-haired man, but no one seemed to notice this. Everyone treated him as if he was a child, and as if he had been away from home for forty days, instead of forty years.

But now that he was back among them, he was haunted day and night by intolerable images of fear and pity. Nothing around him seemed to have changed one jot. The old house in the Wine-Cask Street looked just the same as it had always looked, and when he entered a room it leaped instantly into all its former life for him and he remembered the place of every minute object in it, even the place in an old wooden clock where the winding-key was kept, although these were things he had not thought of for many years. And the heavy deliberate tock of the old clock in the silent room suddenly awoke, with its own single character of time, the memory of a thousand winter evenings when he had bent above his book under the warm light of the table lamp, and had felt time slowly wear away around him, the grey ash of its slow intolerable fire.

These images of the past returned to him instantly, and they filled him with weariness and horror. Everything was as familiar as it was the day he left it, and yet it was stranger than a dream. He had returned to all that he had known and was part of, and yet it no longer seemed a part of him. It seemed incredible that it had ever been a part of him, and its very familiarity filled his soul with terror and unbelief. And this same doubt and terror chilled his heart when he thought of all the years since childhood that he had spent in America, and of the life he had lived there. The old life of his youth had instantly possessed him with all its terror of strangeness and familiarity and now it seemed impossible to believe that he had ever been away.

Then, Jack thought he went to bed in the little room of his childhood and that he dreamed he had gone to America, and that all his life there had been nothing but a dream. He thought he awoke suddenly at dawn to hear a cart rumbling on the narrow cobbled street below and to think for a moment that he was in New York. Then he would sweat with horror for it seemed that he belonged to nothing he had known, and could never tell whether his life had been a dream or a reality, or whether he had ever known a home or made a voyage. And it seemed to him that he was doomed forever to be a traveller upon the illimitable and protean ocean of time, borne constantly across its stormy seas upon a dark phantasmal ship that never reached a port, haunted forever by dreams of homes and cities he had never known. Grey horror gripped him. The snake of desolation ate his heart.

Yet, it seemed to Jack that his family saw nothing strange in his appearance or demeanour. He had returned to them, but he was still a boy of seventeen to them. He looked into the mirror in his little room, and he saw the grey hair and the worldly features of a man past fifty. This was the self he knew and saw, but his mother, his aunt, his uncle, his sister, his cousin, Karl, and the servant Anna, saw no change in him at all. And just as nothing in the street or house had changed a jot, so all of them looked just the same age as they had looked when he was seventeen.

Moreover when he tried to speak to them, he found he had forgotten his native German tongue. He understood every word they spoke to him, yet when he tried to answer a strange wordless jargon broke harshly from his lips, filling his heart with shame and terror. And yet they seemed to know just what he wished to say, and answered him without surprise.

Alone, with fear slow-feeding with its poisonous lip against his heart, he would try to speak to himself in English, but the words came rustily with a guttural outlandish accent, strange and difficult to his own ears and, he felt, incomprehensible to others. It seemed that he was tongueless, homeless, and a phantom, that he belonged to nothing, was sure of nothing, and that his whole life might be nothing but an image in the dream of time.

Jack thought he had returned to his own people for only a short visit and yet, at the very instant of returning, he was filled with horror and desolation to the roots of his soul, and with a desire to escape as soon as possible. But, escape where? He was no longer sure of his own life in America, or that he had ever been there, and the thought of his return there filled him with the same doubt, horror, and confusion. And his family treated him as if he had returned to live with them forever, and was still a child. They lavished upon him the kind of tenderness and affection that people lavish on a beloved child who has returned from a long journey, and their incessant kindness, their constant efforts to amuse, interest, and delight him choked him with a sense of furious exasperation and indignity, and at the same time with an unutterable rending pity. Their eager attentions, their constant solicitude, their gleeful certainty that the childish entertainment they had prepared for him was just the thing that would enrapture him rasped his nerves to a frenzied irritation. Hot and angry words rose to his lips, words of curt refusal, angry requests that he be given an hour’s peace and privacy alone, but when he tried to speak them he could not. They were themselves like children in their eager innocence, and to answer their tender love, to repay their pitiable preparations, with sharp and angry words would have been like meeting the love of children with a blow.

Yet, their well-intentioned kindliness was maddening. On his arrival, they had all insisted on panting up the steps behind him to his room. The little room beneath the gables that he had slept in as a child had been made ready for him, but now it seemed small and cramped. The same bed he had slept in as a boy was spread tightly with clean coarse linen sheets and pillows, and covered with the fat pleated yellow comforter beneath whose warmth he had lain snugly as a child but which would now only warm his feet and legs while his shoulders froze, or cover back and neck, while feet congealed. He wondered how he could ever fit into such a bed, or find repose on the granite hardness of its two thick mattresses, or wash himself out of the little half-pint bowl and pitcher which sat tidily upon its school boy’s washstand, or dry his face upon the scrap of towel, or crouch down low enough to see to shave himself in the little square of mirror in whose mottled surface the face blurred, swelled, or contracted with a mercurial uncertainty.

But they all stood around and beamed and winked at one another gleefully as if his heart must be simply bursting with speechless rapture in face of all this luxury. Anna,—Die Grosse Anna—the servant who had worked for his family as long as he could remember waddled heavily to the bed and pranced her stiffened fingers up and down on it a dozen times, turning to look at him triumphantly as if to say: “What do you think of that, hey?”

Then Anna and his mother had made him sit down upon the bed and bounce up and down on it in an experimental manner, while all the others stood and looked on admiringly. He had obliged them dutifully, but suddenly, as he was bouncing up and down there like a fool, he had looked straight into the little mirror and seen his image, bobbing clownishly, reflected there. He saw his face, the plump, ruddy face of a well-kept man of fifty-four, the neat grey moustache, crisply trimmed, and twisted at its ends into waxed points, the clipped grey hair, neatly parted in the middle, the straight square shoulders set-off trimly with a coat that fit him beautifully, the crisp business like style of the collar and the rich dull fabric of his necktie, with the white carnation in his buttonhole. It was the figure of a man of mark and dignity, but now he saw it disfigured by a foolish simpering leer, and prancing up and down upon a bed like an idiot. It was intolerable, intolerable, and suddenly Jack began to choke with speechless rage.

But everyone stood around him goggle eyed and gap-jawed with a look of rapture, and Anna said to him with exultant satisfaction: “Ah, I tell you what! It’s good to be back in your own bed again, isn’t it, Mr. Freddy? I’ll bet you thought of it many’s the time while you were gone. Hey? I thought so!” the old fool said triumphantly, although he had said nothing. “Sleeping among all those foreigners,” the ignorant woman cried contemptuously, “in beds you don’t know who’s been in the night before! Well, Mister Freddy,” she went on in a bantering tone, “home’s not such a bad place after all, is it?” She prodded him stiffly with her thick red fingers, chuckling craftily.

Jack stared at her with an expression of apoplectic horror. This, this, Great God, to a man who had gone out and conquered the great world and who had known all the luxury and wealth that world could offer. This to a man who lived only in the best hotels when he travelled anywhere, whose room at home was a chamber twenty feet each way,—yes, by God, a room twenty feet each way in a city where every foot of space was worth its weight in gold.

Then his cousin Karl, winking at him drolly, had opened the door of the little walnut cabinet beside the bed and sharply rapped a knuckle against the chamber-pot with a mellow echoing ping. All the others had screamed with laughter, coarsely, while he sat there foolishly with a burning face. Were they mad? Was it a clownish joke that they were playing on him? But when he looked into their faces and saw the depth of love and tenderness in them he knew that it was not and the words of hot anger were silenced on his lips.

In the morning, before he was up, he heard Anna toiling heavily up the ancient winding stairs. Broad and red of face and breathing stertorously, she entered, bearing a tray with a silver pot, an enormous cup and saucer of fine thin china, a crispy flaky roll and a pot of jam. Eagerly, Jack seized the handle of the silver pot, tilted the tall frail spout into the cup and then discovered that the pot contained hot thick chocolate instead of the strong black coffee which he had had for thirty years, and must have now. But when he demanded irritably of Anna if she had no coffee, and why she had not brought it to him, she looked at him first with an expression of stupefaction, and then with alarm and reproach.

“Why, Mister Freddy,” she said chidingly, “you’ve always had your chocolate every morning of your life. Surely you haven’t gone and started drinking coffee while you were away. Why, what would your mother say if she knew you’d gone and formed the coffee-habit? You know she’d never let you have it. Ach! That’s what comes of all this gadding about and going to America,” she muttered. “It’s Mister Max who got you into this—with all his crazy Yankee ways he’s picked up over there—oranges for breakfast, if you please!—Gott!—putting all that acid in your stomach before you’ve got any solid food in you—I told your mother when you left—I said that something of this sort would happen—‘He’s not to be trusted with that child!’ I said. ‘You mark my words, you let him go with Mr. Max and something will happen you’ll be sorry for!’ Come, now, Freddy” she said coaxingly and with a bantering jocosity that infuriated him, “Drink your nice chocolate that I made for you while it’s good and hot. It’s just the thing you need.” Then, seeing the angry protest in his face, she relented a little, saying: “Well, I’ll ask your mother if you can have a cup of coffee for your Second Breakfast. If she says it’s all right, I’ll make it for you.”

Zweite Frühstück! He had forgotten that abomination! At nine o’clock in the morning beer, sausages, sauerkraut, cold cut meats, and liverwurst, pumpernickel, butter, jam—and beer again! Bah! He started to tell her savagely that, so far as he was concerned, there would be no second breakfast; he’d have coffee, toast, two eggs and orange juice right now, or not at all. Yes, by God! And he’d put an end to this Mister Freddy business once for all. Did this old fool think he was a schoolboy that he should have to whine and wheedle like a ninny for a cup of coffee? Ask his mother!

The sense of injury and indignity rose up choking in his throat. Why, damn them all, he’d show them if he was to be treated like a child in arms. He’d show them that they had a grown man to deal with, who had gone out and faced the world alone, and made his own way in a foreign country while the rest of them stayed home and went to seed in a one horse town. Where would they all be now if it hadn’t been for him? Who had moved heaven and earth during the war to get food through to them? Who had smuggled, bribed, pulled wires, wrote letters, sweated blood, made use of every stratagem and exerted every influence, and spared no labor and expense to keep them all from starving? Whose money had kept them going in the years that followed the Armistice? Who was it? Oh, they knew, they knew well enough! Mister Freddy was the boy! And was the man who had done all this to ask permission of his mother to drink a cup of coffee? By God, he did not think so!

Yet, when he looked up with a tongue of fierce reproof, he saw Anna’s broad red face, which had in it all the love, the loyalty, the concern, and simple trust of those innocent and child-like people who spend their lives in serving others, and whose lives are lived only in the lives of those they serve and love. When Jack saw this, he could not speak the hot and angry words. Instead, his heart was twisted in him with wild nameless pity. It seemed to him that his life had been steeped in all the hard and iniquitous dyes of the great earth, that he could never recapture his lost innocence again, nor make these people understand the man be had become. To them he was still the child who had left them; to him they seemed themselves like children. The strange dark light of time fell over him, and he had no tongue to utter what he wished to say.

Then his mother came and sat beside him, her dark convulsive face marked deep with pride and tenderness. And one by one the others came and stood fondly around his bed; wild fury choked him, shame covered him, pain and pity stabbed his heart, but they stood round him while he dressed.

They were always with him. They were with him in the house and in the garden. They were with him when he went out in the street. They watched him eat, they came to watch him when he bathed. Each night they ushered him to bed, and every morning they were standing round him when he woke. He was never for a moment free of them, he had not a moment’s peace or privacy; horror, boredom, a feeling of loss and agony drowned his spirit. He turned on them to curse them with all the fury of his maddened and exasperated flesh, but when he looked into their faces alive with love and tenderness his heart was torn with wild pity, and he could not speak.

In the house it was always night or morning. In the street it was always morning, and under the lime trees in the garden behind the house where bright geraniums grew, it was always afternoon. And they were always with him. They prodded him with gleeful fingers, they winked at him with knowing and secretive winks, they rubbed their hands in exultant anticipation, as they hinted, darkly, at some new delight they had prepared for him. Sometimes it was Anna with something held behind her back: a plate covered with a napkin—“Guess what’s here?” He could not. It would be a heavy peach-cake, glutinous with its syrups, and covered with a luscious inch-thick coat of “schlagsahne.” And with beer! Great God! With beer! His stomach turned against this richness, his Yankee notions cautioned a trim girth for business men, and careful diets, and his man-like dignity cursed with rage because a mature and worldly man must grin and gloat like a boy over a cookie which a fool of an old woman had given him. Nevertheless, he took it smiling, trying to show the right degree of stupefied surprise and ecstasy the old woman expected him to feel.

Then the others rubbed their hands exultantly as they hinted at surprises, or told him of delights in store for him. On Monday they were invited out to Uncle Abe’s for dinner—his heart sank down with leaden weariness; on Wednesday Cousin Jake was coming with his wife for tea—his flesh turned grey with apathy; on Sunday—oh! he’d grin all over when he heard what they had planned for Sunday!—they were taking the Rhine-boat for a picnic in the woods across the river ten miles up, after which they would cross by ferry, and walk home again.

Desolation.

Jack thought that he endured it all—dinner at Uncle Abe’s together with young Abie’s stamp collections, and songs and selections at the piano by young Lena afterwards; tea with the family and Cousin Jake and his wife Sadie, and all that pompous fool’s smart-Aleck questions about America—which he had never visited but which he could talk about, of course, with all his customary conceit, assurance, and unfathomed ignorance.

Jack endured it all—food, weddings, the interminable family gatherings, and reunions, funerals, gossip, visits and receptions. He endured all the questions endlessly repeated and patiently answered to circles of dark oily faces, smiling with benignant and approving pride above fat paunches comfortably crossed by hands. He endured the picnics up the river and the long walks back, blistered feet and prehistoric plumbing, beer evenings of a sodden jollity in enormous and cavernous drinking halls, thick with a murk of smoke, glutinous with the warmth and odor of a thousand heavy bodies and roaring with the thick mixed tumults of guttural voices and Wagnerian music.

Jack endured it all, and fear ate like a vulture at his heart, desolation rested in his bowels, and his heart was torn with nameless horror and pity as he saw how like a ghost he had become to all that was a part of him, to everything with which his life was most familiar. And always time lay feeding at his heart. It crept along the channels of his blood, it grew within his flesh and flowered in his brain like a grey and cancerous plant. He lay tranced below its hypnotic pressure, like a rabbit caught and held under the baleful spell of a serpent’s eye, he was powerless to act or move, but always he was conscious of his life wasting and consuming fatally under the strange dark light of time. In his heart there dwelt forever the horror of a memory, almost captured, of a word almost spoken, of a decision almost understood and made. The knowledge of some great labor left undone, of a terrible duty unfulfilled, of the irrevocable years that had been passed and wasted and of friends and works forgot while he lay tranced and stricken by time’s sorcery, haunted him day and night, but what the goal, the labor, and the duty were, he could not say.

Smoke! His life was passing like a dream under the strange and terrible visages of time, and Jack sought for some door he could enter, and he found none open. He longed for some goal and home and harbor, and he had nowhere to go.

Then, out of the old house where all lay sleeping he crept one day into the high and ancient street where all the houses tottered and leaned together like conspiring crones and where bright sunlight cut cool depths of Gothic shadows and where it was always morning.

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Now Jack was walking in an ancient cobbled street, but not the one he lived in. The old gabled houses with their mellow timbers, their bright rich colors, and their high Gothic overhang seemed to bend and lean like old live things above the narrow cobbled ways, conferring quietly in all the attitudes of familiar personal intimacy. They had a look of old witch-haggery, crone-like, wise and ancient, and yet unmalign. They were like old benignant wives and gossips of the town huddled above some juicy morsel of town scandal, and yet they seemed innocent and familiar.

Although the street was hundreds of years old, it had a quality that was wonderfully fresh and living. The slow wear and waste of time, the rich alluvial deposits of centuries seemed only to have given to the street a richer and profounder sort of life. This life had not only entered or worked its way into the old houses, it had also got into the cobbles and the narrow pavements before the houses, giving a line of life, a rich and vital color to everything. The old timbers of the houses were seasoned in the hues of time, and even in the warp and wave of ancient walls, in the sag and bend of roofs and basements, there was a rich undulant vitality which only time could bring. Moreover, all harsh lines and angles seemed to have been rubbed and softened by this slow enormous chemistry of time. And this chemistry had given the street a warmth and life which seemed to Jack to make it not only richer in quality, but somehow more young and wholesome than the streets of home.

The street sprang instantly into living unity, with a tone and quality which was incomparable and unique, and yet the houses were richly varied by all the colors and designs of an elfin and capricious architecture. But in comparison to this street, a street at home with its jargon of ugly and meaningless styles, its harsh pale colors broken with gloomy interspersions of dingy grey and rusty brown, the prognathous rawness of apartment houses, lofts, and office buildings of new raw brick or glaring stone, that ranged from dreary shambles of two stories to forty glittering floors of arrogant steel and stone, the ragged confusion of height, and the beaten weariness of grey pavements bleakly worn by a million feet, seemed sterile, raw, and lifeless in its senseless and chaotic fury.

It was morning, the sun cut crisply and yet with an autumnal mellowness into the steep old shadows of the street. The sun felt warm and drowsy, but in the shadows of the houses Jack felt at once the premonitory breath of frost.

Before one of the old houses a woman with thick mottled arms and wide solid-looking hams was down upon her hands and knees, vigorously “going for” the stone step before a door. Jack noticed that the step was of old red stone, worn and hollowed deeply by the feet of four hundred years, and at the same time he noticed that the street and pavement was made of this same red stone, and had been worn, rounded, and enriched by time just as everything else had been. The woman who was scrubbing the stone finished, and got up like a strong clumsy animal. Her face was red, flushed triumphantly by her labor, and with a swift motion of her thick red hand she brushed back some strands of blown hair. Then she seized the bucket of grey sudsy water and dashed it out into the gutter. Finally she began to talk loudly and cheerfully to a woman who was passing along the other side of the street with an enormous market basket on her arm. And Jack felt that all of this was just as it had always been. All his former sensations of strangeness and phantasmal unreality had vanished. He felt secure and certain and exultant. He seemed always to have known this street, and all the people in it, and this knowledge gave him a feeling of the most extraordinary happiness he had ever known.

A man rode slowly by upon a bicycle. The man wore a flat cap, he had a straight stiff collar and wore a stringy necktie. He had on a belted coat, and he wore thick solid shoes and long black woollen stockings. He pedalled with deliberate care, pausing at the apex of his stroke, while his wheel wobbled perilously on the cobbles, and pedalling downward with a strong driving motion that sent him swiftly forward again. The man had a small lean face, a little bristly tuft of moustache, and hard muscular jaws that writhed unpleasantly. Jack was sure he knew this man. And all along the street there were small shops with panes of leaded glass and little bells that tinkled as one entered. Some had old wooden signs that hung out in the streets before them, and some had Gothic lettering of rich faded colors on the wall of the house above the shop. The windows were crammed to bursting with fat succulent looking sausages, rich pastries, chocolate, rolls and bread, flasks of wine or bundles of cigars made of strong coarse looking tobacco. And Jack knew that when one entered the shop the proprietor would greet him with a long, droll, gutturally friendly “Mo-o-o-rgen!”

Jack did not know why he was walking in this street, but he knew that a meeting with someone he had known was impending, and this certain knowledge increased the feeling of joy and security he had already. And suddenly he saw them all about him in the street—the friends and schoolmates of his youth—and he knew instantly why he was there among them.

And now another curious fact appeared. Here were the companions of his early years in the grammar school, and here were those he had known later in the gymnasium. He knew and recognized them instantly, and yet he saw with a sense of sorrow and without surprise that all of them had grown old. He had seen none of them since his childhood, and now the children he had known had grown into old men with worn eyes and wrinkled faces. Jack saw this instantly and yet it caused him no surprise; when he looked at them he could see they were old men but he seemed to look straight through their old faces into the faces of the children he had known. And the moment that he saw them they came to him and grasped him by the hand. They spoke to him with kindly friendship and with no surprise or questioning, and there was something infinitely sorrowful, weary, and resigned in their voices.

Then they were sitting all together at a pleasant table in an old beer house, looking with quiet eyes into the street. The waiter came to take their order, and they ordered beer. Jack saw that the waiter was a heavily built man of middle age who walked with a heavy limp. His head was shaven, he wore a long apron that went from neck to ankles and that had been woven out of a coarse blue thread. The man had a kindly brutal face, and the same quiet and sorrowful eyes the others had. He said “Was soll es sein?” in a gruff and friendly tone, taking their orders with a rough male friendliness and limping away to fill them.

They sat at a table of old dark wood, scored and carved with many deep initials and shining with the cleanliness of countless scrubbings. The place was vast and deep; it was full of old dark woods and cool depths, and the strong wet reek of beer came freshly on the air.

With Jack sitting at the table and looking out into the street were Walter Grauschmidt, Paul Heyst, and Ludwig Berniker. Ludwig had become a mountain of a man, with a bald, shining, completely hairless head and a swinish face. And yet the head and face had also a profound and massive strength, a curious and tragic mixture of swinish gluttony and lonely and sorrowful thought, as if the beast and the angel of the race had come together there. Jack had seen these faces in his youth ten thousand times, and they had haunted his memory with the enigma of their bestial and hateful swinishness and their massive and lonely power and dignity, but now he noticed also that Ludwig’s head was disfigured at the temple with a clean bullet hole, bluish and bloodless at the edges, and drilled cleanly through his brain. Then he remembered having heard that Ludwig who had served throughout the war as an officer of infantry had been killed, or it was thought, had killed himself, in the week before the Armistice. Yet neither this fact, nor the clean bullet hole in Ludwig’s temple, caused Jack any surprise whatever.

Instead, a quiet and certain knowledge, an old and sorrowful acceptation which had no need or words, seemed to bind them all together as they sat at their pleasant table, looking out into the street. Then, as they sat there at their beer, looking with quiet eyes into the street, Jack saw the figure of his once hated enemy Hartmann, stumping by. And Hartmann, too, had grown old and battered. He also walked with a heavy limp, which he had got in the war, he was poorly and shabbily dressed, and he wore the flat cap of a working man.

Yet Jack knew him instantly, and with the same strange recognition that had no surprise in it. He jumped to his feet crying sharply, “Albert, Albert!”, and Hartmann turned slowly, blinking and peering from right to left through small worn rheumy eyes like an old bewildered animal. Then Jack ran out into the street to greet him. But the sense of triumph, the moment of victory, which he thought would be the fruit of the encounter, had vanished. He was conscious only of a feeling of great warmth and affection for Hartmann, and of the sorrowful presence of time. Then Hartmann knew him, and to his horror he saw him make a movement towards his cap as if to take it off. But instead, he rubbed his hand clumsily and hesitantly upon his trousers leg before he grasped the hand that Jack held out to him. Then the two of them together went back into the beer hall and joined their friends where they all sat by the window. Hartmann greeted the rest of them shyly and awkwardly, and at first seemed ill at ease as if he thought this big cafe was much too fine for a working man. An immense weight of sorrow and dejection bowed him down and, at length, shaking his head slightly, he said quietly to Jack:

“Oh, Frederick, Frederick! I have known so much trouble in my life.”

For a space the others had said nothing. Then Ludwig took his pipe out of his mouth and held it in the great mutton of his hand upon the table. Then he said quietly, in confirmation, “Ja-a-a. Ich weiss.”

It was so quietly spoken that it seemed a whisper rather than a word, and suddenly it seemed to Jack that at the instant it was spoken all the others had confirmed it like an echo, and that in it was all the sorrowful and resigned wisdom of the earth. And yet he could not swear that anyone had spoken. They sat there quietly, in their strange communion of sorrow and kindliness, and resignation, they drew with slow meditation on their pipes and drank their beer.

It seemed to Jack now that all he had wanted to say to them need not be said. A thousand times he had looked forward to such a meeting. He had foreseen their wonderment and awe when they saw how fine a man he had become. It had thrilled him to think of the great figure he would cut among them when he returned and they would see him, not old and shabby and provincial as they were, but a man of urbane and distinguished manner, a man of high position in the great world, a man of power and quiet authority, who sat familiarly at dinner every day with famous people, and who dealt every day with sums of money which would have beggared their whole city. In years, they were no older than he was and yet their flesh was old and loose and sagging, while his was ruddy, plump and firm. Their teeth, clamped on their pipes, were old and blackened and decayed while his were still white and sound, cunningly braced and filled with gold and porcelain by the finest dentists, and everyone could see at once the difference between their cheap ill-fitting clothes and the expensive and “distinguished” garments which had been made for him by a London tailor. Here, for instance, was old Grauschmidt sitting at his side and wearing an incredible wing-collar, a stringy little necktie, a shoddy little suit of an outlandish cut, with a funny little hat of green that had a brush of horsehair at the side of it. If he wore that outfit in New York he would have a crowd of urchins howling at his heels within five minutes, and yet, Jack felt none of the triumph and superiority he had expected to feel.

He had been eager to tell them of his wealth, his great possessions, of the glittering life he lived, and of the fabulous world he lived in. He wanted to tell them of his three expensive motor cars, and of his chauffeur to whom he paid over seven hundred marks a month—yes! with fine food and lodging for his family thrown in!—which was more than most of them could earn in three. He wanted to tell them of the great house he was building in the country which would cost him more than five hundred thousand marks when it was finished, and of the apartment in the city to which he had recently moved, and for which he paid a rent of more than fifty thousand marks a year. And he wanted to tell them of the four maids who got three hundred fifty marks a month apiece, and of his cook—a German woman!—whom he paid five hundred marks a month, and of his offices, where he paid two hundred thousand marks a year in rent, and where even the humblest of his fifty employees—even the office boys—were paid four hundred marks a month.

He had licked his chops in triumph a thousand times as he foresaw the look of stupefaction on their faces when he told this tale of magic. He could see the pipe poised halfway to the gaping mouth, and hear their guttural fascinated grunts of disbelief and wonder as he went on from height to dizzy height, telling his story quietly and modestly, without vain boasting or affectations. He would laugh good-naturedly at their astonishment, and when they asked him if such marvels as he had described were not almost unheard of, even in the legendary country where he lived, he would assure them they were not—that he was nothing but a minnow in an enormous pond, and that he had many friends who considered him a poor man—Ja! who spent and earned more in a month than he did in a year!

With fast-gathering impulse, in a tidal sweep of strong desire thicker and faster than his power to utter them, the images of splendor swept up from his memory. He would tell them of great buildings soaring eighty floors into the sky, and of towns the size of Koblenz housed within a single building. He would tell them of a city built upon a rock, and of tunnels bored below the whole length of the city through which at every moment of the day nameless hordes of men were hurled to destinies in little cells.

Then he would tell them of the night-time world of wealth and art and fashion in which he cut a figure. He would tell them of the style and wit and beauty of his daughter, and of pearl necklaces he gave her, and of money spent upon her clothes in one year’s time that would keep a German family comfortably for ten. He would tell of the ability and shrewdness of his wife’s sister—as smart a woman as ever lived!—and of her great position as vice president of a fashionable woman’s store. He would speak casually of the four trips she made to Paris every year, and of the fortunes which the wives and mistresses of the millionaires spent every year for clothes. He would tell of the business ability of his only son, who was barely twenty-four, but who was prized and trusted like a man of forty by his employers, and who earned four hundred marks a week in a broker’s office.

Finally he would tell them of his beautiful and talented wife. He would tell them of the high place she had won for herself in the art-world of the city, and of the famous people who knew her and respected her, and how celebrated men and women came and sat around his table every night, and how they called him “Fritz” and how he called them by their first names, and knew all the ways and secrets of their lives.

Jack had thought and dreamed of this triumphant moment for thirty years, but now that it had come, he could not talk to them. All that he had to say stormed wildly at the gates of speech, but when he tried to speak he could not. Instead, a fast thick jargon broke harshly from his lips, filling his ears with terror, and stirring the air about him with its savage dissonance. He paused, stricken to silence by that unaccustomed sound. He tried again; a speech that was no speech, a sound more brutal than the jargon of a tongueless maniac smote terror to his heart.

Now madness seized him. The veins swelled upon his forehead, his face grew purple with his rage and bafflement, he beat the table and shouted into their faces, he cursed, snarled, and jeered at them, but nothing but a bestial and incoherent jargon came from him. Then he saw that they were all looking at him with quiet and sorrowful eyes, and their look told him that they knew all, understood all that he had wished to say. And at the same moment it seemed to Jack that he heard that strange whispering echo—that sound filled with acquiescence, with the resigned and final knowledge of men who had known all that any men on earth could know—and which seemed to say, although he could not be certain any words were spoken: “Yes. We know.”

He said no more. His friends were looking at him with their weary and sorrowful eyes in which there was neither any trace of envy or mockery, nor any of youth’s pride or pain or passion. There was only the agreement of an old and final wisdom, an immense and kindly understanding. Without speaking they seemed to say to him: “We know, we understand you, Frederick, because we have all been young and mad and innocent, and full of hope and anguish. We have seen the way the world goes, and we have seen we could not change it, and now we are old and have seen and known as much of it as men can know.”

Now Jack no longer wanted to tell them of his triumphs in the world. He no longer wanted to boast about his wealth, his power, his family, or his high position. Instead, it seemed to him that for the first time in his life, his heart had been cleansed of vanity and pretense. He had for these men a feeling of trust and affection such as he never before had for anyone. And suddenly he wanted to talk to them as he had never talked to anyone, to say and hear the things he had never said and heard.

Like the Mariner who found that he could speak again as soon as he had blessed the living creatures in the sea, so now it seemed to Jack that he could speak and be free again if in penitence and shame he could unpack the sorrowful and secret burden that lay heavy on his heart. He wanted to ask the old men what their own youth had been like and if any of them had known the bitter misery of loneliness and exile in a foreign land. He wanted to tell them the secret dreams and visions of his youth which he had never told to anyone and to hear what dreams and visions they had known. He wanted to tell them of the first years of his life in America, of his little room in a boarding-house, and of the little room he had lived in later in his uncle’s house, and how, forlorn, lonely, poor and wretched as his life had been, he had brought into these little rooms all the proud hope and ecstasy youth can know. He wanted to tell them how he had dreamed of growing rich and famous and of how for years a proud and secret image had sustained his spirit with its prophecy of love and triumph.

That image was this: in an ancient cobbled street like this one and in one of the old and elfin houses in this street a woman lived. The woman had the face and figure of a young woman he had seen in Bonn when he had stopped off there for a visit to a kinsman on his way to America. He had seen the woman seated at a table with two men in an old dark tavern such as this one where the students at the university went for beer. She was a great blonde creature, lavish of limb and full and deep of breast. She looked toward him once and smiled and he had seen that her eyes were grey and clear and fathomless. Jack had never forgotten her and in the dream which was to haunt and sustain his spirit during his first years in America he saw himself as a rich, famous, and distinguished man who had returned to find her. And although he had seen this woman just one time and only for a moment and knew nothing more about her he was certain that he would know where she was when he went to find her. He could see the street, the house, even the room where she would be. The street was like the picture of a destiny, and the old red light of fading day that lay quietly on the gables of the houses, resting there briefly without violence or heat, with a fading and unearthly glow, was like the phantasmal light of time and dreams. And Jack watched with prescient certitude to see himself, as he turned in from a corner to the street and approached the house where she was waiting for him. He heard her singing as she combed her long blonde hair and he knew the song and all the words she sang as well as all the words that she would speak to him.

Her lips were red and full, half-parted, living, warm and fragrant as her breath, her hair was like ripe wheat and spun as fine as smoky silk, her eyes as blue and depthless as unfathomed water, and her voice and the song she sang as rich, as strange and haunting as any songs that sirens sang from fabled rocks. Then she received him into her great embrace, he lay drowned in the torrent of her hair, cradled in the fathomless undulance of her great blonde thighs, borne upon the velvet cushion of her belly, engulfed in the lavish bounty of her breasts, and lost to time, to memory, to any other destiny save dark night and the everlasting love of her great flesh to which, a wisp of man, he surrendered blindly with a passionate and willing annihilation.

This was the dream as it had come to him a thousand times in the first years of poverty and exile to fortify his soul with its triumphant music of love and victory and now he wanted to tell his friends about it and ask them if they too had known such dreams as this in youth. He wanted to tell them how he had gained the power and wealth his heart had visioned and how he had lost the dream and he wanted to ask them if they had also known such loss. He wanted to tell them how the loss had not come bitterly and suddenly but how it came insensibly day by day so that man’s youth and visions slip away from him without his knowing it and time wears slowly at his life as a drop of water wears at rock. He wanted to ask them if they had learned as he had learned the hard knowledge which the world can give a man and which he must get and live by if he is to draw his breath calmly without pain and not to die maddened, snarling, beaten, full of hate, like a wild beast in a snare.

Jack wanted to ask the old men if they too had found that a boy’s dreams and visions passed like smoke and were like sand that slid and vanished through his fingers for all the good that they might do him. He wanted to ask them if they had learned that a suave and kindly cynicism was better than all the tortured protest in the painful and indignant soul of man and a wise and graceful acquiescence to the way of the world more sensible than all the anguish and madness youth can know. He wanted to ask them if they too had found there is no shame too great to be endured but thinking makes it so and that the wise men of the world have eyes to see with when they need them, ears to hear with when they want to use them for that purpose, but neither eyes, ears, tongues or words for what had better not be seen or known or spoken.

He wanted to ask them if they too had found that a hard word breaks no bones, that envy, venom, hatred, lies and slander are poisons to which man’s hardy flesh may grow immune and the falseness of one’s wife or mistress is an injury less harmful to sound sleep than an ill-cooked meal or a lumpy mattress—yes! far less harmful to the healthy slumber of a man of great affairs than the ravings of a drunken boy upon the telephone in the middle of the night. Such injuries as this were real and not to be endured. But cuckoldry! Why, cuckoldry was nothing, a joke, a thing to be made light of or ignored by people of experience, something sophisticated people laugh about, a subject for light comedy in the theatre, an evil only to some yokel who would not take the world as it was made.

Had they not found it so? Was a serious man to lose his own good sleep because his wife had gone to bed with other men? Was it a matter of moment that a woman gave her body for an hour or so to a lover? What did it matter so long as she behaved herself discreetly and got home in time for dinner. Cuckoldry! Why, a man might even take some pride in it, a kind of secret and illicit joy, if his wife had only made him cuckold with a celebrated man—a famous painter, say, or a distinguished lawyer—yes, even if the lover was only a nameless and infatuated fool of a boy, a man might feel a cynical and urbane amusement, an almost paternal and friendly interest. But to lose sleep, to writhe with jealousy or grow sick with shame, to be tortured by a thousand doubts and fears, to waste in flesh and lose all interest in one’s business, to strangle with hatred and choke with murderous fury for revenge, because of the illicit rhythms of a woman’s hams, the infidelities of a few inches of hair and gristle—it was a grotesque idiocy, a childish and provincial superstition, and not to be thought of by a grown man. Jack wanted to ask his friends if they had not found it so.

Jack also wanted to know if his friends had steeped and stained their souls in the hard dyes of the earth’s iniquity. He wanted to know if they were crusted hide and heart with the hard varnish of complaisance. He wanted to know if they had seen the good man drown and the mad boy perish, if they had held their peace and saved their lives by losing them, buying success at the price of one man’s failure or another’s folly, paying for position as they went, and sure of nothing except that prizes go to men who yield consent.

The words of shame and penitence rushed to his lips in a hot and choking flood releasing the foul packed burden of his heart of a weight it had not known it bore. Yet when he tried to speak, he could not, no more than when vain boasting filled his mouth. But suddenly he saw their quiet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him, he heard again a strange and wordless whisper full with its weary final knowledge and he knew that they had known all this too and had for him neither reproach nor loathing because of it.

The old men sat there looking with their quiet eyes into the street where it was always morning. Bright sunlight, ancient, sorrowful, and autumnal sunlight, cut into the cool steep shadows of the street and the sunlight was like wine. Between the terraces of October hills, he knew, the Rhine was flowing. Bathed in the sorrowful harvest of that light, premonitory with its sense of death and parting, the wine hills rose steeply from the edges of a fabled river and the river was itself a tide of golden wine.

Then Jack bought the old men wine.

He shouted loudly to the waiter with the brutal and friendly face, and the man came quickly towards the table with his heavy limp. Jack flung great sums of money on the table, and he bought the old men wine. He bought frantically, lavishly, as if he could somehow consummate the only act and answer that was left for him. He bought until the old carved table was covered with tall slender bottles of the golden wine. The old men poured the potent wine into their throats. Again and again they filled their glasses with wild golden wine and drank it down. Then the old men lifted up their lined and worn faces and, looking out into the street with their quiet and sorrowful eyes, which never changed or faltered in their expression of a single and final knowledge, they sang out strongly in the hoarse, worn voices of old men such songs as young men sing, which they had sung themselves in youth. They sang again the songs of love and hope and wandering, of drunkenness and glee, and of wild and strange adventure.

Jack turned his face away into his hand and wept bitterly.

*   *   *   *   *

Now Jack thought he was standing with his mother on the Rhine-boat landing. Bright October sunlight lay upon the terraced hills and filled the river with its light. It was morning, the landing place was swarming with an immense energy of arrival and departure, but the breath of autumn, sorrowful and foreboding, was in the air. Jack felt an immense and nameless excitement stirring in him, and also a sense of incommunicable sadness. The Rhine boat had just come in, people were streaming up the landing from the boat, and other people were streaming into the boat. The porters were diving feverishly among the crowd, loading, unloading, stockily bowed with people’s baggage, uttering sharp cries of warning as they rushed on and off the boat. In the crowd Jack saw many people that he knew.

He spoke to his mother, but she did not hear him or answer him. Instead, she stood motionless, looking with a fixed stare at someone who was standing on the top deck of the crowded boat, as if she wanted to fix his image in her mind forever. Jack followed his mother’s glance, and he saw that she was looking at a plump fresh skinned boy of seventeen. The boy was neatly dressed in a somewhat comical and countrified fashion, and he was wearing a flat student’s cap. He stood looking back at Jack’s mother, with the same fixed voracious stare, as if he too was trying to fix forever in his memory this final picture of her. The boy was also trying to smile, but his eyes were glazed and wet with tears and from time to time he turned his plump ruddy face away and wiped furtively at his eyes with the sleeve of his coat. Then he would begin to look at Jack’s mother again with the same fixed and ridiculous effort at a smile.

Jack saw that the boy was himself and he began to shout to him in an excited voice. But the boy paid no attention to him and did not seem to hear him. Then the porters pulled the landing bridge back on the landing stage, the whistle sounded sharply twice, the great paddle wheels began to churn, and the white Rhine-boat moved out swiftly into the river. On the top deck the boy stood, a small, plump, forlorn figure, waving frantically with his handkerchief as the boat receded. Jack’s mother kept her eyes fixed on that small receding figure until she could see it no more, and the boat had dwindled to a white dot in the distance. Then she turned and began to walk away blindly, with tears streaming down her cheeks and her powerful dark face twisted and contorted in the convulsive mask of sorrow of the Jew. Jack ran after her shouting frantically: “Mother, mother! Here! Look at me! I am here! It is Frederick.” But she neither turned nor glanced at him, no more than if he had been a viewless ghost. He shouted to the people around him at the top of his voice. No one heard him. No one looked at him. No one saw him.

*   *   *   *   *

The Rhine-boat was a miracle of shining white and polished brass and glittering glass. All day in the rich fading sunlight of October its dove white breast was feathering the surface of the golden river. The boat was loaded with a crowd of people who sang and drank and ate and shouted constantly. All day long the waiters rushed back and forth across the decks bearing steins of foaming beer, bottles of wine, and trays filled with food and sandwiches. All day long the white Rhine-boats passed along the river, and as they passed the powerful voices of the young men singing rolled across the water and echoed in the hills. And all day long they passed the great Rhine barges churning swiftly down the river towards the sea and Holland, or up the river towards Mainz.

On the ship there were two brothers whose faces were to haunt his dreams forever. They were enormous men of middle age; they were expensively dressed and they drank wine all day long. Their ponderous jowls hung down from their great red faces comically, they had large flowing moustaches, and their eyes were large and brown and gentle as a cow’s. They held long folding maps in the great muttons of their hands, and all day long, as the ship went down the river, they looked from time to time at their maps, grunting with a guttural satisfaction of discovery: “Ach—die Lorelei! Ach—das Rheinpfalz!” Then they would return solemnly to their eating and drinking. They were comical in the solemn intentness of their glutting, and yet in their great size, their huge red glowing faces, their thick brown moustaches and their great gentle brown eyes, there was a profound and impressive nobility, such as great well kept bulls might have.

Then day faded on the ancient hills, the ruined turrets melted into dusk, and night came on.

Jack stood alone in darkness watching as the dim white breast of the boat feathered against dark flowing waters, and Jack could hear dark hoofs rushing on the land, and he thought he heard the mermaids singing.

*   *   *   *   *

Then, out of the dream of time into the dream of time, Mr. Frederick Jack awoke with sad defunctive music in his brain, and instantly he knew that it was morning, May the second, nineteen hundred twenty-eight. A fine bright day and spring at last, he thought, with golfer’s relish. April’s ended.