The Crack-Up Read online

  The nineteen wild green eyes of a bus were coming up to them through the dark.

  The mingling and contrast of the silver lines of car track and the gold of the lamps, the streams of light rippling on the old road and the lamps on the bridge, and then when the rain had stopped, the shadows of the maple leaves on the picket fence.

  The train gave out a gurgle and a forlorn burst of false noise, and with a clicking strain of couplers pulled forward a few hundred yards.

  When the freight stopped next the stars were out, so sudden that Chris was dazzled. The train was on a rise. About three miles ahead he saw a cluster of lights fainter and more yellow than the stars, that he figured would be Dallas.

  The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.

  There were only the colleges and the country clubs. The parks were cheerless, without beer and mostly without music. They ended at the monkey house or at some imitation French vista. They were for children—for adults there was nothing.

  A half-displayed packet of innocuous post cards warranted to be very dirty indeed.

  Against the bar a group of ushers was being photographed, and the flash-light surged through the room in a stifling cloud.

  In one corner of the ballroom an arrangement of screens like a moving-picture stage had been set up and photographers were taking official pictures of the bridal party. The bridal party, still as death and pale as wax under the bright lights, appeared, to the dancers circling the modulated semi-darkness of the ballroom, like those jovial or sinister groups that one comes upon in The Old Mill at an amusement park.

  Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.

  A sound of clinking waiters.

  The music started again. Under the trees the wooden floor was red in the sun.

  Phonograph roared new German tangoes into the smoke and clatter.

  Cannes in the season—he was filling the café, the light which blazed against the white poplar bark and green leaves, with sprightlier motes of his own creation—he saw it vivid with dresses just down from Paris and giving off a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes, and mingled with these another scent, the mysterious thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jewelled hands over the white tables; the vivid gowns and the shirt fronts swayed together and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow-lighting cigarettes.

  Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.

  The battered hacks waiting at the station; the snow-covered campus, the big open fires in the club houses.

  Not long after noon—he could tell by the thin shadow of the shutter.

  Duty, Honor, Country, West Point—the faded banners on the chapel walls.

  No one has ever seen Richerees, near Asheville, because the windows fog with smoke just before you get there.

  But while the crowd surged into the bright stadium like lava coming down a volcano from the craters of the runways—

  The * * * * Hotel was planned to give rest and quiet to tired and overworked business men and overwrought and over-societied women.

  When opened up, the fish smelled like a very stuffy room.

  Trolley running on the crack of dawn.

  An old-style flivver crushed the obliterated borders of the path.

  It was not at all the remodelled type of farmhouse favored by the wealthy; it was pristine. No wires, and one was sure no pipes, led to it.

  Occasionally two yellow disks would top a rise ahead of them and take shape as a late-returning automobile. Except for that, they were alone in a continual rushing dark. The moon had gone down.

  The decks were bright and restless, but bow and stern were in darkness, so the boat had no more outline than an accidental cluster of stars. Francis took the trip one lonely evening.

  One of those places they used to call somebody’s “Folly.” All ready for a whole slew of people who weren’t there— hopeful little shops built into the hotel, some open and some closed.

  There was rosy light still on that big mountain, the Pic de Something or the Dent de Something, because the world was round or for some such reason. Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity. Down in the valley there were already bright windows and misty glows from the houses and hotels of the town.

  The sun was already waving gold, green and white flags on the Wildstrubel.

  Its familiar light and books and last night’s games always pushed just out of sight under something, the piano with last night’s songs still open on it.

  A toiling sweating sun stoked the sky overhead.

  It was nice out—still as still.

  Green jars and white magnolias.

  Clairmont Avenue.

  Shallows in the lake of day.

  Colors at Oregon: gold, dark green, little white buoys on safety rope, background white figures, grey underpinnings—all seen through foliage dark and light green.

  Bird call: Weecha, weecha, weecha, weecha eat?

  Suddenly the room rang like a diamond in all four corners.

  Josephine picked them out presently below a fringe by their well-known feet—Travis de Coppet’s deft, dramatic feet; Ed Bement’s stern and uncompromising feet; the high, button shoes of some impossible girl.

  He passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten.

  The two orchestras moaned in pergolas lit with fireflies, and many-colored spotlights swept the floor, touching a buffet where dark bottles gleamed.

  Abruptly it became full summer. After the last April storm someone came along the street one night, blew up the trees like balloons, scattered bulbs and shrubs like confetti, opened a cage full of robins, and, after a quick look around, signaled up the curtain upon a new backdrop of summer sky.

  White chestnut blossoms slanted down across the tables and dropped impudently into the butter and the wine. Julia Ross ate a few with her bread.

  The stench of cigars in small houses. (Remember it with Old Mill.)

  Zelda’s worn places in yard and hammock.

  The river flowed in a thin scarlet gleam between the public baths and the massed tracks upon the other side. Booming, whistling, far-away railroad sounds reached them from down there; the voices of children playing tennis in Prospect Park sailed frailly overhead.

  Out the window the snow on the pine trees had turned rosy and lilac in the early dusk and bundled up children were splattering back to their hotels to tea.

  God’s whitest whiskers dissolved before a roaring plane bound for Corsica.

  The corpses of a million blue fish.

  Bryn Mawr coverlet.

  Her face flushed with cold, etc. (more to this.)

  It was a crisp cold night with frost shooting along the grass.

  The familiar, unforgotten atmosphere of many Negroes and voices pleasing-calm and girls painted bright as savages to stand out against the tropical summer.

  The Grand Due had just begun its slow rattling gasp for life in the inertness of the weakest hour.

  The lights of many battleships drifting like water jewels upon the dark Hudson.

  We looked out at the port where the rocking masts of boats pointed at the multitudinous stars.

  The wind searched the walls for old dust.

  Cluster of murky brown doors so alike that to be identified it seemed that her’s must be counted off from the abut
ting blackness of an alley.

  Listless disorder.

  On the sky-blue sky, the clouds low above the prairie, the grand canyonesque architecture of the cliffs, the cactus penguins extending conciliatory arms.

  The new trees, the new quivering life, the new shadows that designed new terrain on the old.

  The main room, for which no adequate name has yet been found in the Republic.

  Hot Springs. In a Spring vacation hotel the rain is bad news indeed. The hundred French windows of the great galleries led the eye out to ink-and-water pines snivelling listlessly on to raw brown tennis courts, to desolate hills against soiled white sky. There was “nothing to do,” for hotel and resort were one and the same, and no indoor activity was promised on the bulletin-board until the concert of the Princeton Glee Club Easter Monday. Women who had come to breakfast in riding clothes rushed to the hairdresser instead; at eleven the tap-k’tap of ping-pong balls was the only sound of life in the enormous half-empty hotel.

  The girl was one of a pair in white skirts and yellow sweaters who walked down the long gallery after breakfast. Her face reflected the discontent of the weather, reflected it darkly and resentfully. Looking at her, De Forest Colman thought: “Bored and fierce,” and then as his eyes continued to follow her: “No, proud and impatient. Not that either, but what a face—vitality and hand-cuffs—where’s this getting me?—liver and bacon, Damon and Pythias, Laurel and Hardy.”

  The gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.

  Save for two Russian priests playing chess, their party was alone in the smoking room.

  Everybody in the room was hot. There was a faint flavor of starch on the air that leaked out to the lovely garden.

  One of those huge spreading hotels of the capital, built to shelter politicians, retired officers suddenly discovering themselves without a native town, foreigners with axes to grind, legation staffs, and women fascinated by one of the outer rings of officialdom—everyone could have their Congressman or Minister, if not their Senator or Ambassador—

  The terrible way the train had seemed to foreshorten and hurry as it got into motion.

  It was already eight o’clock when they drove off into a windy twilight. The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torre Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine. Above them loomed Vesuvius and from its crater a small persistent fountain of smoke contributed darkness to the gathering night.

  “We ought to reach our destination about twelve,” said Nosby. No one answered. The city had disappeared behind a rise of ground and now they were alone, where the Maffia sprang out of rank human weeds and the Black Hand rose to throw its ominous shadow across two continents. There was something eerie in the sound of the wind over these gray mountains, crowned with decayed castles. Hallie suddenly shivered.

  Motor boat like a clock tick.

  The sky that looks like smoke on Charles Street.

  He heard them singing and looked down toward the lights. There was a trembling of the leaves before they passed.

  Night at Fair: Eyes awakening.

  March: The crêpe myrtle was under corn stalks.

  “I’m glad I’m American,” she said. “Here in Italy I feel that everybody’s dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings.”

  The solemn gloom of the countryside communicated itself to all of them.

  The wind had come up stronger and was groaning through the dark-massed trees along the way.

  White and inky night.

  A soft bell hummed midnight.

  In children’s books forests are sometimes made out of allday suckers, boulders out of peppermints and rivers out of gently flowing, rippling molasses taffy. Such books are less fantastic than they sound, for such localities exist, and one day a girl, herself little more than a child, sat dejected in the middle of one. It was all hers, she owned it; she owned Candy Town.

  The red dusk was nearly gone, but she had advanced into the last patch of it.

  Yellow and lavender filled her eyes, yellow for the sun through lavender shades and lavender for the quilt, swollen as a cloud and drifting in soft billows over the bed. Suddenly she remembered her appointment, and, uncovering her arms, she squirmed into a violet negligee, flipped back her hair with a circular movement of her head, and melted into the color of the room.

  Lying awake in bed that night, he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another. When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking.

  The road was lined sparsely with a row of battered houses, some of them repainted a pale unhealthy blue and all of them situated far back in large plots of shaggy and unkempt land.

  It was a collapsed house, a retired house, set far back from the road and sunned and washed to the dull color of old wood.

  One glance told him it was no longer a dwelling. The shutters that remained were closed tight, and from the tangled vines arose, as a single chord, a rich shrill sound of a hundred birds. John Jackson left the road and stalked across the yard, knee-deep in abandoned grass.

  Stifling as curtain dust.

  The pavements grew sloppier and the snow in the gutters melted into dirty sherbet.

  The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.

  It was the Europa—a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail, and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.

  “Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried.

  She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York.

  The hammock was of the particularly hideous yellow peculiar to hammocks.

  Adorned in front by an enormous but defunct motometer and behind by a mangy pennant bearing the legend “Tarletón, Ga.”

  In the dim past someone had begun to paint the hood yellow but unfortunately had been called away when but half through the task.

  On all sides faintly irregular fields stretched away to a faintly irregular unpopulated horizon.

  In the light of four strong pocket flashlights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror, which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional menservants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt, whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razor along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.

  But here beside the warm friendly rain that tumbled from his eaves onto the familiar lawn—

  Next morning, walking with Knowleton under starry frosted bushes in one of the bare gardens, she grew quite light-hearted.

  “Ballroom,” for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated by the phrase, “Let’s go in and dance.” It was referred to as “inside” or “downstairs.” It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America.

  They were there. The Cherbourg breakwater, a white stone snake, glittered along the sea at dawn; behind it red roofs and steeples, and then small, neat hills traced with a warm orderly pattern of toy farms. “Do you like this French arrangement?” it seemed to say. “It’s considered very charming, but if you don’t agree just shift it about—se
t this road here, this steeple there. It’s been done before, and it always comes out lovely in the end.”

  It was Sunday morning, and Cherbourg was in flaring collars and high lace hats. Donkey carts and diminutive automobiles moved to the sound of incessant bells.

  Those were the dog days. Out at the lake there was a thin green scum upon the water and in the city a last battering exhausting heat wave softened the asphalt till it retained the ghastly prints of human feet. In those days there was one auto for every 200 inhabitants, so in the evening—

  A large but quick restaurant.

  Aeolian or Wind-built Islands.

  They all went to the porch, where the children silhouetted themselves in silent balance on the railing and unrecognizable people called greetings as they passed along the dark dusty street.

  The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence.

  At three o’clock in the morning, grey broken old women scrub the floors of the great New York Hotels.

  Great flatness of American life when everything had the same value.

  The run to the purple mountains and back.

  Spring had come early to the Eastern seaboard—thousands of tiny black surprise berries on every tree were shining with anticipation and a fresh breeze wafted them south all day.

  Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?

  A mid-Victorian wind.

  This restaurant with a haunted corner.

  Lunar Rainbow.

  New Jersey villages where even Sunday is only a restless lull between the crash of trains.

  Elevators look like two big filing cabinets.

  Out in the suburbs, chalk white windows looked down indifferently at them in sleeping roads.