“You’re sure you’re not too tired, Noni?”
“No, Blom, I want to go. I want to put my hands in it.”
“Well, you two are certainly romantic!”
Gil was peevish; Gil disliked the wind and dust, the long walk, proceeded with lowered head, his felt hat pulled down on his forehead. But the slum streets, the decrepit old buildings on the dingy slope to the river, broken windows, crumbling walls, old gray stone and brick, shutters hanging awry, cheap lodgings — ten cents a night, five cents a night — in houses which a century since had been the city’s best — this was extraordinary, deeply exciting. Here the past became vivid, became rank and real; like a conch shell held to the ear these ruins gave off an echo of the south and the sea: deep south, deep sea. And inland two thousand miles! The south had crept up the river, that was it, there was a foreign feeling here, and something mortuary too: it was like a dead seaport of the south, maritime but defunct. And sinister, also; a gangsters’ paradise, smelling of beer and brothels. The sloping streets of cobbles were almost covered with tin beer-bottle tops. Here and there, an old ruin which had once been a thriving river hotel, full of violent life, the life of the Mississippi. Here Mark Twain had walked.
And under the iron-dark structure of the elevated railroad, the very viaduct over which they had themselves slowly entered the city, they came to the wide granite-paved beach of the majestic river, walked slowly down to it. Like tide marks left by the sea, lines of gray and withered flotsam — driftwood, barrel staves, empty bottles, tin cans, slivers of wood silvered with age, peeled branches polished like horn, eggshells, orange peels — marked the many levels at which during the winter the great river had stood. An enormous beach; against which the dark water slid with sleepy power, the brown eddies moving swiftly downstream as they coiled sparkling in the sunlight. A little way upstream, two river boats rotted at a landing stage, twin-smokestacked — the smokestacks with coronetted tops. Noni dipped her hand in the water.
“It’s the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee,” she said.
“0l’ man river,” said Gil.
“Now I’m baptized, Blom, in this continent. Now I’ve got Indian blood.”
“And in the old days they used to say that some of those boats drew so little water that in a heavy dew they could sail right across the point of land between one bend of the river and the next!”
“Mark Twain. Mark two!”
“I wouldn’t mind taking a boat all the way down—”
Gil was peevish; perhaps he was tired, but indeed all three of them were tired; a curious feeling of unreality was beginning to affect them, like a mild fever. He said:
“Well, it looks just like a river to me! But I admit it’s a kind of a big one.”
“Now, Gil, you stop worrying about your affairs in Boston! I’ve told you they’ll be all right.”
“Oh yes, they’ll all run themselves.”
“Probably much better.”
“I’m not complaining, Noni—”
“I know, dear. It’s all right. Life gets very sudden, sometimes, but isn’t it fun! Isn’t it, Blom?”
“It’s a three-ringed circus, Noni, and I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. My God, Gil, look about you. You never saw anything like this in your life. It’s crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“Sure, crazy. Look at these people, with their withered faces and scrawny necks, their dead eyes and dead souls—”
“Oh come, Blom dear. It’s not as bad as all that!”
“Damn near. They’ve gone to seed. There’s nothing left. No juice in them, not a particle: this infernal vampire continent has sucked them dry. They’ll blow away like tumbleweed. I’ve never been so impressed — and depressed — in my life: it’s given me a new and not so very attractive, I’m bound to say, picture of America. Think of those pathetic Hoosiers on the train — those bleached and weather-worn countryfolk, animated scraps of skin and leather — good God, their eyes were a quarter of an inch apart, they’d never felt anything or seen anything in their lives. Why, you could as soon expect understanding—understanding, illumination, awareness, call it what you want — of an ox or goat. No mind, no spirit, not a spark …”
Gil was amused. He said slowly:
“Blom, you sometimes become really biblical. By the waters of Mississippi we sat down and wept; yea, we wept, when we remembered Boston!”
“Oh no, we laughed!”
The profound river, the strange sad city — what a pair these made, with their so casual conjunction of the magnificent and the trivial, the fecund and the sterile! A whole continent pouring itself out lavishly to the sea, in superb everlasting waste, an immense creative giving, power that could afford to be careless both of means and end — and mankind beside it become as spiritually empty as the locust, and as parasitic. Surely the Indians had been better than this, and the Frenchmen, too, who had first explored these savage waters: in either had been a dignity, a virtue, now lost. And the Mexican Indians, to whom they were going — what of those? Lawrence said — and all the psychoanalysts said — and the guidebooks said—
It was as if he had heard a bell, suddenly, from a deep valley, a jungle valley, inviting to the sacrifice, whether pagan or Christian: there, there were still gods. But here, in this melancholy wreckage of a meager past, in this sloven street, spangled with tin beer caps, which they were climbing slowly again, past stinking cellars and boarded windows, here there was no longer even a true love of earth. This people was lost.…
“It’s ommernous,” he said aloud, grimly; “every bit of it is ommernous.”
“Blom’s saying it’s ommernous again, Noni!”
“I guess we all need another drink. Is it Friday or Tuesday? And after that, Gil dear, I’m going back to the station for a good wash.”
The Opera House, closed and boarded up, ancient home of burlesque, the silver gilt peeling from its baroque façade of garlands and bosomy nymphs and cracked cornucopias, and a little farther on a café. Gil led the way in, past the bar, at which one man and four waitresses lolled, to a small table at the back. Beyond this a large room, or rather a Cimmerian gloom, unlighted, in which gilded columns were barely visible. Into this, and out of it, mysterious figures went and came, some male, some female. One of the waitresses half lay across a table, in a dark corner, at which a man was sitting. Another led a newcomer into the back, somewhere, and disappeared entirely. Noni said:
“If I weren’t tired, I would say we had picked out a very peculiar place!”
“See no evil, speak no evil, drink your beer!”
Palm trees and silver spittoons. A radio, muted, crooned from a corner of the front window. Noni was looking really tired: she ought to lie down. He could tell by the way she tried, without attracting attention, to rest first one shoulder, then the other, and without success, against the uncomfortably small chairback; crossed her knees and then uncrossed them; leaned her elbows on the table, her fists against her cheekbones, the blue eyes bright with sleepiness. He said: