Читать книгу A voyage to Pagany - William Carlos Williams - Страница 4

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At once the great sea, never calmed by divine feet, came from astern, a northwest gale that caught the old Rochambeau on her starboard afterquarter in sleet and rain. The wind shrieked as the whipping spray struck the ship’s cabins momently all day long for three days; while from the sheltered foredeck the clouds and stars—for the middle sky remained often clear in spite of the storm—could be seen to circle and zigzag overhead. Evans, standing in whatever shelter he could find, was thrilled by that ferocious might of Nature, the ancient antagonist and begetter, green, protean, slippery, yet pointed and personal as a god, while he thought, watching—lace white, spinning among the waves—of white flowers, bunches of them, yarrow, boneset and of the epithet “privet white.”—How apt that is for seafoam.

Leaving New York harbor, January 18th, 1924, during a month known for heavy storms at sea, Dr. Evans had acted fairly upon his wish to see the ocean once again, not as a placid millpond, but as he felt it still to be, home of the wild gods in exile.

Nothing so delightful to Evans as to be immersed in the feelings bred by a ship’s strong run against the seas. He gave himself completely to the ship’s contesting motions. Wildly at peace, after America, laying himself down in his salt bath the first in the morning, waiting for the steward’s tap each day, each gesture of the voyage during the storm or after it quieted his solitary mood the more. The gulls paralleling the ship’s course without a move close by the rail held him at stance, a deep peace washing away the strains of his immediate past. At sea he felt secure, nothing more solid than that turmoil. A great shout of exultation was often at his lips—making them smile alone, with a kindly indulgence.

It was, in effect, to him each day as it had happened to the ship one night, a ten foot section of the handrail forward had been torn off and was gone, only the twisted iron stanchions remained; with him the same, each day something of his immediate past the sea struck at and carried away—to his everlasting relief. Some day, my God, let the whole works go. I should never think of the practice of medicine again. Never! And, in all probability, this was so. Evans had practiced medicine all his adult life, so far, up to his present fortieth year, in a continuously surly mood at the overbearing necessity for it—wanting always to do something else: to write! Why? Because then only, when he was stealing time for his machine and paper, did he live. Why? One thing about the man, he never argued with his instincts. Temporize with them he would, saying secretly to them: Wait. Some day I will give myself to you, you whom I love. I should only lose you, myself and the world if I went faster. Meanwhile, he had gone back from college to practice medicine in the New Jersey town of P. where he was born.

But he really loved the irregularity of a suburban practice, rushing out into the weather at any hour; in the spring stopping his car at four a.m. to hear the hylas waken, watching the snow figures on the windswept roadways at night in a blizzard, plunging in his car through impromptu lakes of rainwater with lightning flashing all around him and thunder splitting the sky, dust and mysterious fog banks at sundown, the stars peppering the sky, the new moon coming—and thoughts flinging up words to that accompaniment, words that occasionally would have a bewildering freshness upon them as they rose to his sight, it seemed, from somewhere in the center of his brain. And yet he was a good first line doctor. But at the next breath he was off. Let the sea carry it away, all of it, he should never think of it again. And at that moment, if he had been certain that he was bound for the sea’s bottom, nothing could have stopped his enjoyment. A dark, medium-sized, impressionable fellow in very ordinary clothes, he looked at the sea.

In the cabin opposite his own was that excellent young American violinist, Marjorie Kent, about to undertake her first European tour under the chaperonage of her devoted mother. In that heated young imagination Evans found some confirmation for his joy. Marjorie played. He had not yet seen her; it was the music which first came to him. He listened a long time. In the first place, it was extraordinary for any one to want to play hard exercises, scales, arpeggios, and passages of difficult bowing during a storm at sea. Yet there was the music. Its insistence struck him with delight. Once he heard a boyish voice admonishing her.—You’ll never be a world beater, why don’t you shut up once in a while and give us a rest?—But then came the question. Is this it? Is this the real thing? What is this? He listened fascinated by the problem for two days without seeing the girl. There were moments—yes, there were moments. So he could accept and let the player speak. He let her speak. By moments it was the exultation he felt in the ship’s solid pitch and roll, of the determination the Rochambeau was offering to the sea, a naked offering, naïve as a ship at sea, the sweetness of sailing through dark and light.

But when in the night of the third day the storm grew heavier he smiled like a baby. With some pains, but resulting in exquisite comfort, he wedged himself into his bunk and listened to the creaking and groaning of the ship while outside the waves brushed or pounded against the heavy glass of his cabin porthole—so near almost one could touch the gods.

An old woman had fallen during the day and broken her arm. Few were at the tables. Thank God it was not a larger ship! One could still feel the sea. The ship was rolling heavily with a steady list to port from the force of the wind which carried her lower to that side on which his cabin lay. Down, down she went without a great amount of pitching, but down, down, down till the trunk near the door squeaked in its lashings and loose objects in the cabin shuttled and slid about the floor. Then with a slight shudder she rose slowly, leaning again for a brief moment to windward—and with this motion and joy in his heart—such a peace as there is not elsewhere in the world—he slept.

His own parents had come to America in ships. His uncle, the doctor, had died in a ship and been buried at sea. To him the sea was the grave of all his cares, the one power hopelessly subtle and uncontrolled, unbridged, unbeaten.

“I am beginning to think we should have no mercy for anyone—unless we love him. Get all you can out of the other fellow before he takes it out of you.” Curious bits of conversation he picked up going about from one deck to the other. “J’étais un homme très vulgair—j’étais un voleur”—“the twist of years”—“Truth and Beauty married and the child was love.” “Deux cognacs s’il vous plait. Je suis polis, moi.” French once more! His ear drank it in with avidity. Benedictine 10¢. Fine 10¢. That’s something!

Then the wet and cold of the storm passed but the great waves continued, causing the ship from time to time to give three or four lurches deeper than the rest. The sky was blue overhead, the decks sanded. Evans stood by the weather rail watching the seagulls flying near the ship’s side, especially one, a beautifully marked Mackerel gull, larger than the rest, which with motionless wings was gliding, keeping pace with the ship not ten feet from his hand resting on the rail. He watched its eye watching him—and its head shifting slightly from time to time.

There was a hailstorm that afternoon. The wind was now due north, the weather cold and squally.

Then swiftly, the sea, limitless, filling the imagination roundly on all sides, supporting, buoyant, satisfying—was damaged. Forward, to the left, a section of it had changed, the whole mind was changed along with it. As if the work of birds flying out from beyond the horizon, the thought of land! land! The seahold upon the imaginations of the ship’s company had been broken.

England was there, little as a boat. One felt all England, all one had ever heard or felt of England, from Old Mother Cobb to the last pantings of discomfort in the daily press. There it was, pathetic, an island in the sea, powerless and naïve as the small strength of a lion, or the boom of a big cannon. From the sea one could come to hold it as a god might hold an infant on his arm, for a moment. Later, the twin lights of the Scilly Islands gave an inkling, the only inkling, of the world beyond them, silent under the night sky.

At one a.m. the last night the men in the smoking room went wild, threw bottles, glasses. Captain G. had to summon sailors to put them out.

Sleep. Then, early in the morning Evans was standing once more by the rail watching, eager for the arrival. He went forward and forced his body into the very angle of the ship’s prow so that the ship thus, behind him, remained invisible. The mechanism that propelled him was annihilated by his concentrated mood. And now he felt himself advancing over the sea, alone and unaccompanied, from a height. To the south a long, low, smoky strip of land was slipping slowly back. A narrow steam trawler wallowed in the dirty swell; the tricolor was at a masthead. So this is France.

Land!

Fickle, by nature, Evans longed now to be again on shore. In this desire, everything else melted and was lost. Time too went by the board.—On such a day, on such a day in early spring, on such a sloppy, dirty-yellow sea, the first coracles put out from the bottom of the red cliff there (they were now close in to Le Havre)—and the wind blew them over to England. I am among them.—He could feel the anxiety and strain of that adventure. There we go by the prow of this mythical ship, invisible to us just as to them we, too, are invisible. For there is the land and here is the sea, exactly as then; and this is I, the same. Now am I come home to old Pagany.

In this mood as the ship was drawing closer to the houses and he could see people moving about in the grayish sunlight, standing uncertain along the edge of the dock and waving a scarf sometimes uncertainly, he was interrupted by the deck-steward who presented him with a wireless.

Greetings. Have reserved room Beausoir. See you later.

Jack.

Fine. How in hell did he time that so nicely?

The train for Paris started gently, to a birdlike whistle from the facteur, passing slowly through the back streets of Le Havre. Like a child, he seated himself at the window and began to drink in the scene. Everything seemed afire in that soft-gray morning sun. He was looking, watching. For what?

Of what importance this small garden of some switchman, a row of sprouts, a cabbage growing almost in the cinders? Poor, insufficient, it seemed. Along the track little boys ran barefooted shrieking for pennies. They looked sick, poverty-stricken, lost. The whole city was as if pillaged.—Where la France? he cried within himself, as if expecting to see some symbolic image of joy rise from the ground and stride forward carrying flowers in her hand triumphantly beside the train.

Unhappy beggars! He longed to give them—what? What had he to give? What could anybody give them? This is France, that’s all. But then a remembrance of the old gods came upon him as the train gained headway and between high embankments started into the country; and this poverty, this loss, he began to blame on the death of the gods.—And they starve, they starve, not because there is no food but because there is no one to give it to them any more.

Then he remembered what Kay had been saying: These people are clean, hard-working, traditional in thrift, fixed as the months in the year and the hours in the day.

The train was moving rapidly now between farms.

He looked and he began in his mind to see how they are waiting, these people. Waiting. Wise and lost. Lost. Lost—just as he was lost. Foreign. Inaccessible. Nothings. Just cut-outs from a paper unfurling itself from rolls turning outside the car windows. Paper people forever inaccessible. Never to be known.

And now of all times he wanted them, while the train mechanically ticked off the miles. At a bridged street crossing there was a boy in a blue jumper looking up. He was holding a bicycle and turning half around to look at the train. A fat gendarme was standing by as if he had just been talking to the boy. Gone.

Gone! Whither? Everything went just like that. Living and dead. Turn the corner and it is gone.

But to his wonder, it being January, the banks of this winter landscape began to burst into yellow bloom, flaming yellow to the tick of the train. Whoo! Whoo! and with a crash the train kept on—to Paris. À Paris, à Paris, à Paris—as he heard the comedian imitate the train’s talk at the “Olympia” when he had gone there as a boy with his mother and Trufley, in ’98.

Magpies were flying, black and white among the bare trees.

And now sober France began to ply out, field after field of winter wheat, neat, regular; fine farms. Cattle turned and looked at the intruder or browsed on indifferent. The walls of the gardens and houses were covered with bare fruit trees, carefully pruned—neat as a hat.—The French are careful, dextrous, they love to arrange petals and twigs.—Sometimes farmyards were hedged with fences, a moat, a ditch, cutting them out from the fields.

And then at Mobray when they were beginning to slow up near the station, he saw a deserted garden, all brown and weather-beaten. It was the garden of an old square brown house which stood in the background. No one was in sight. The ruined flower patches were covered with winter débris; the garden was close to the track, so close that the railroad seemed to desecrate its graceful humor. But in the corner of it by great trees that looked like elms, Evans saw a small mound. All on it were shrubs, leafless but marking the spiral of a path that wound around three times before the summit of the miniature mountain was reached and there there was a tree and under it a stone bench, perfect. All was ruin, there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere, but the little mound seemed to Evans too willing sense an altar to some forgotten household god.

And again the country seemed ravaged, beaten. Each man looked to be feeling his destiny there. Waiting. Encitadeled, waiting. Meanwhile, a garden.

And so going on to Paris, growing night, the train came to the hollow of Rouen with its great gloomy cathedral filling the bottom of the bowl: a great pile of stone, full of death. Evans looked and was chilled as if it had been the angry center of all this country which it was depriving silently, sordidly, of its life; as if it were drawing the life in; stone sitting in state over the green.

But he laughed away his mood, calling himself Antichrist and a fool. He remembered Sister Julien, the Mother Superior, at the French Hospital in 34th Street, with her sly pride and great vigor—and how, as a young man, he had loved her.

Oh yes, this is where Pichat was born. And he wondered what effect all this had had upon the mind of that modern French genius of whom New York had been ecstatically talking just at the outbreak of the war; that fine painter whose pictures had been so admired and ridiculed—and whose influence on several of Evans’ painter friends had been so great. Pichat was born in Rouen, so Evans had heard.

What should this produce?—And as the train went on and began to cut the windings of the Seine along its way, he began to propose what this would produce: or what it had produced perhaps in the case of Pichat.—What light does this landscape give upon Pichat? His character? A land, caged, hemmed, embittered—wanting to—a land to which nothing has happened in a long time. A small wet land. Industrious—with the shadow of a great medieval dragon in the center—as in a pit.

“Oh, let’s go to Paris. Paris is where one forgets and works and loves.”

What does this land produce? What does any land produce?

Jeanne d’Arc—everyone thinks of her—as if expecting something; just because she was a girl. What of it? Jeanne did something in Rouen. Got killed here, I think. English had it in hand then. England over there, still further out, still more needful. Everybody cut off there. Makes them hard, fearful. No use to go in coracles. Jeanne did it her way. Get out. Take a chance. What good? Had to get out. Wanted to get out. Do anything to get out, and by accident do something great, get crowned for it. Crowned is right. Did the thing that happened to be handy. But we can’t get to it. Can’t get to IT—it wants to get out. That’s why I’m here.

The train had slowed up almost to a stop. Three girls, crowded into a factory window close to the track, waved quietly and smiled at the “rich” foreigners in the special train, the finest on the Havre-to-Paris line, the boat train. Deep-chested, buxom—naïve, they seemed—with faces of Oreads or field nymphs; one imagined their flesh would smell of hay and animals, sweet. Evans smiled to think what it would really smell like, however.

“You know, dear, all good Americans go to Paris when they die, and we are dead, as far as they over there are concerned.”

“Yes, but are we good?”

Every now and again someone bursts out like Pichat with design. And takes the shape of the moment. But America is off the track completely. But here they are resistant, fastened down by a stone—waiting—as if some power had cast a great spell over the land out of which the people look without means to recall the past or to escape. And this power is beneficent, while it holds them, soothing the irremediable hurt. White sisters are running sterilely about stone corridors; pure, arduous in their devotion, gone in spirit; little plowgirls, diverted; girls from near the sea diverted from looking out at the water.

Time will tell, maybe. And art; maybe.

Or is it alive? It is. My stretching mood is all I am thinking of. America. Here is. Here is. Here is. Dressed in a church.

Paris ahead!

Rouen, past now, he still thought of it—the first of those great medieval fortresses of the gospel of which he would see more—built of stone and pageantry, flowers—in stone. All in a spell.

What kind of people? Something somber, profound, resistant, dextrous.—Swiftly the train swept it up at a pace and crashed by it all. A few carts and autos going forward went backward on the road while peasants walking slowly moved their legs as if on a cord while they were whirled behind in the dark sunlight.