You Can't Go Home Again (20 page)

Then they got in the car and drove rapidly away from the great hill of the dead, the woman towards the certitude of lights, the people, and the town; the man towards the train, the city, and the unknown future.

BOOK II

The World that Jack Built

_Back in New York the autumn term at the School for Utility cultures had begun, and George Webber took up again the old routine of academic chores. He hated teaching worse than ever, and found that even in his classes he was thinking about his new book and looking forward eagerly to his free hours when he could work upon it. It was hardly more than just begun, but for some reason the writing was going well, and George knew from past experience that he’d better take advantage of every moment while the frenzy of creation was upon him. He felt, too, almost desperately, that he ought to get as much of the new book written as he could before the first was published. That event, at once so desired and dreaded, now loomed before him imminently. He hoped the critics would be kind, or at least would treat his novel with respect. Fox Edwards said it ought to have a good critical reception, but that you couldn’t tell anything about sales: better not think too much about it.

George was seeing Esther Jack every day, just as always, but in his excitement over the approaching publication of Home to Our Mountains and his feverish absorption in the new writing he was doing, she no longer occupied the forefront of his thoughts and feelings. She was aware of this and resented it, as women always do. Perhaps that’s why she invited him to the party, believing that in such a setting she would seem more desirable to him and that thus she could recapture the major share of his attention. At any rate, she did invite him. It was to be an elaborate affair. Her family and all her richest and most brilliant friends were to be there, and she begged him to come.

He refused. He told her he had his work to do. He said he had his world and she had hers, and the two could never be the same. He reminded her of their compromise. He repeated that he did not want to belong to her world, that he had seen enough of it already, and that if she insisted on trying to absorb him in her life she was going to destroy the foundation on which their whole relationship had rested since he had come back to her.

But she kept after him and brushed his arguments aside. “Sometimes you sound just like a fool, George!” she said impatiently. “Once you get an idea in your head, you cling to it in the face of reason itself Really, you ought to go out more. You spend too much time cooped up here in your rooms,” she said. “It’s unhealthy! And how can you expect to be a writer if you don’t take part in the life round you? I know what I’m talking about,” she said, her face flushed with eager seriousness. “And, besides, what has all this nonsense about your world and my world got to do with us? Words, words, words! Stop being silly, and listen to me. I don’t ask much of you. Do as I say this once, just to please me.”

In the end she beat him down and he yielded. “All right,” he muttered at last, defeated, without enthusiasm. “I’ll go.”

So September slid into October, and now the day of the great party had dawned. Later, as George looked back upon it, the date took on an ominous significance, for the brilliant party was staged exactly a week before the thunderous crash in the Stock Market which marked the end of an era._

10. Jack at Morn

At seven twenty-eight Mr. Frederic Jack awoke and began to come alive with all his might. He sat up and yawned strongly, stretching his arms and at the same time bending his slumber-swollen face into the plump muscle-hammock of his right shoulder, a movement coy and cuddlesome. “Eee-a-a-a-ach!” He stretched deliciously out of thick, rubbery sleep, and for a moment he sat heavily upright rubbing at his eyes with the clenched backs of his fingers. Then he flung off the covers with one determined motion and swung to the floor. His toes groped blindly in soft grey carpet stuff, smooth as felt, for his heelless slippers of red Russian leather. These found and slipped into, he padded noiselessly across the carpet to the window and stood, yawning and stretching again, as he looked out with sleepy satisfaction at a fine, crisp morning. Instantly he knew that it was October 17th, 1929, and the day of the party. Mr. Jack liked parties. Nine floors below him the cross street lay gulched in steep morning shadow, bluish, barren, cleanly ready for the day. A truck roared past with a solid rattling heaviness. An ash-can was banged on the pavement with an abrupt slamming racket. Upon the pavement a little figure of a man, foreshortened from above and covered by its drab cone of grey, bobbed swiftly along, turned the corner into Park Avenue, and was gone, heading southward towards work.

Below Mr. Frederick Jack the cross street was a narrow bluish lane between sheer cliffs of solid masonry, but to the west the morning sunlight, golden, young, immensely strong and delicate, cut with sculptured sharpness at the walls of towering buildings. It shone with an unearthly rose-golden glow upon the upper tiers and summits of soaring structures whose lower depths were still sunk in shadow. It rested without violence or heat upon retreating pyramids of steel and stone, fumed at their peaks with fading wisps of smoke. It was reflected with dazzling brilliance from the panes of innumerable lofty windows, and it made the wall surfaces of harsh white-yellow brick look soft and warm, the colour of rose petals.

Among the man-made peaks that stood silhouetted against the sky in this early sun were great hotels and clubs and office buildings bare of life. Mr. Jack could look straight into high office suites ready for their work: the morning light shaped patterns out of pale-hued desks and swivel-chairs of maple, and it burnished flimsy partition woods and thick glazed doors. The offices stood silent, empty, sterile, but they also seemed to have a kind of lonely expectation of the life that soon would well up swiftly from the streets to fill and use them. In the eerie light, with the cross street still bare of traffic and the office buildings empty, suddenly it seemed to Mr. Jack as if all life had been driven or extinguished from the city and as if those soaring obelisks were all that remained of a civilization that had been fabulous and legendary.

With a shrug of impatience he shook off the moment’s aberration and peered down into the street again. It was empty as before, but already along Park Avenue the bright-hued cabs were drilling past the intersection like beetles in flight, most of them headed downtown in the direction of Grand Central Station. And everywhere, through that shining, living light, he could sense the slow-mounting roar of another furious day beginning. He stood there by his window, a man-mite poised high in the air upon a shelf of masonry, the miracle of God, a plump atom of triumphant man’s flesh, founded upon a rock of luxury at the centre of the earth’s densest web—but it was as the Prince of Atoms that he stood there and surveyed the scene, for he had bought the privileges of space, silence, light, and steel-walled security out of chaos with the ransom of an emperor, and he exulted in the price he paid for them. This grain of living dust had seen the countless insane accidents of shape and movement that daily passed the little window of his eye, but he felt no doubt or fear. He was not appalled.

Another man, looking out upon the city in its early-morning nakedness, might have thought its forms inhuman, monstrous, and Assyrian in their insolence. But not Mr. Frederick Jack. Indeed, if all those towers had been the monuments of his own special triumph, his pride and confidence and sense of ownership could hardly have been greater than they were. “My city,” he thought. “Mine.” It filled his heart with certitude and joy because he had learned, like many other men, to see, to marvel, to accept, and not to ask disturbing questions. In that arrogant boast of steel and stone he saw a permanence surviving every danger, an answer, crushing and conclusive, to every doubt.

He liked what was solid, rich, and spacious, made to last. He liked the feeling of security and power that great buildings gave him. He liked especially the thick walls and floors of this apartment house. The boards neither creaked nor sagged when he walked across them; they were as solid as if they had been hewn in one single block from the heart of a gigantic oak. All this, he felt, was as it should be.

He was a man who liked order in everything. The rising tide of traffic which now began to stream below him in the streets was therefore pleasing to him. Even in the thrust and jostle of the crowd his soul rejoiced, for he saw order everywhere. It was order that made the millions swarm at morning to their work in little cells, and swarm again at evening from their work to other little cells. It was an order as inevitable as the seasons, and in it Mr. Jack read the same harmony and permanence which he saw in the entire visible universe round him.

Mr. Jack turned and glanced about his room. It was a spacious chamber, twenty feet each way and twelve feet high, and in these noble proportions was written quietly a message of luxurious wellbeing and assurance. In the exact centre of the wall that faced the door stood his bed, a chaste four-poster of the Revolutionary period, and beside it a little table holding a small clock, a few books, and a lamp. In the centre of another wall was an antique chest of drawers, and tastefully arranged about the room were a gate-legged table, with a row of books and the latest magazines upon it, two fine old Windsor chairs, and a comfortable, well-padded east chair. Several charming French prints hung on the walls. On the floor was a thick and heavy carpet of dull grey. These were all the furnishings. The total effect was one of modest and almost austere simplicity, subtly combined with a sense of spaciousness, wealth, and power.

The owner of this room read its message with pleasure, and turned once more to the open window. With fingers pressed against his swelling breast, he breathed in a deep draught of the fresh, living air of morning. It was laden with the thrilling compost of the city, a fragrance delicately blended of many things. There was, strangely, the smell of earth, moist and somehow flowerful, tinged faintly with the salt reek of tidal waters and the fresh river smell, rank and a little rotten, and spiced among these odours was the sultry aroma of strong boiling coffee. This incense-laden air carried a tonic threat of conflict and of danger, and a leaping, winelike prophecy of power, wealth, and love. Mr. Jack breathed in this vital ether slowly, with heady joy, sensing again the unknown menace and delight it always brought to him.

All at once a trembling, faint and instant, passed in the earth below him. He paused, frowning, and an old unquiet feeling to which he could not give a name stirred in his heart. He did not like things to shake and tremble. When he had first come here to live and had awaked at morning thinking he felt a slight vibration in the massive walls around him, a tremor so brief and distant that he could not be certain of it, he had asked a few questions of the doorman who stood at the Park Avenue entrance of the building. The man told him that the great apartment house had been built across two depths of railway tunnels, and that all Mr. Jack had felt was the vibration that came from the passing of a train deep in the bowels of the earth. The man assured him that it was all quite safe, that the very trembling in the walls, in fact, was just another proof of safety.

Still, Mr. Jack did not like it. The news disturbed him vaguely. He would have liked it better if the building had been anchored upon the solid rock. So now, as he felt the slight tremor in the walls once more, he paused, frowned, and waited till it stopped. Then he smiled.

“Great trains pass under me,” he thought. “Morning, bright morning, and still they come—all the boys who have dreamed dreams in the little towns. They come for ever to the city. Yes, even now they pass below me, wild with joy, mad with hope, drunk with their thoughts of victory. For what? For what? Glory, huge profits, and a girl! All of them come looking for the same magic wand. Power. Power. Power.”

Thoroughly awake now, Mr. Jack closed the window and moved briskly across his chamber to the bathroom.’ He liked lavish plumbing, thick with creamy porcelain and polished silver fixtures. For a moment he stood before the deep wash-basin with bared lips, looking at himself in the mirror, and regarding with considerable satisfaction the health and soundness of his strong front teeth. Then he brushed them earnestly with stiff, hard bristles and two inches of firm, thick paste, turning his head from side to side round the brush and glaring at his image in the glass until he foamed agreeably at the mouth with a lather that tasted of fresh mint. This done, he spat it out and let running water wash it down the drain, and then he rinsed his mouth and throat with gently biting antiseptic.

He liked the tidy, crowded array of lotions, cream, unguents, bottles, tubes, jars, brushes, and shaving implements that covered the shelf of thick blue glass above the basin. He lathered his face heavily with a large silver-handled shaving-brush, rubbing the lather in with firm finger-tips, brushing and stroking till his jaws were covered with a smooth, thick layer of warm shaving cream. Then he took the razor in his hand and opened it. He used a straight razor, and he always kept it in excellent condition. At the crucial moment, just before the first long downward stroke, he flourished slightly forward with his plump arms and shoulders, raising the glittering blade aloft in one firm hand, his legs widened stockily, crouching gently at the knees, his lathered face craned carefully to one side and upwards, and his eyes rolled towards the ceiling, as if he were getting braced and ready beneath a heavy burden. Then, holding one cheek delicately between two arched fingers, he advanced deliberately upon it with the gleaming blade. He grunted gently, with satisfaction, at the termination of the stroke. The blade had mown smoothly, leaving a perfect swath of pink, clean flesh across his face from cheek to jowl. He exulted in the slight tug and rasping pull of wiry stubble against the deadly sharpness of the razor, and in the relentless sweep and triumph of the steel.

And while he shaved Mr. Jack occupied his mind with pleasant thoughts of all the good things in his life.