“Gil’s here now.”
“Oh!”
“He’s downstairs.”
“Oh! Then I suggest we meet at the train, South Station, or rather at the platform entrance—the entrance, mind you — at twelve-thirty. O.K.?”
“O.K. And listen, Blom—”
“Listening, Noni.”
“This is important, Blom, dear—”
“Shoot.”
“I said it before, you remember, but I’ll say it again—”
“Speak, my lamb.”
“We must keep the whole thing just as cheerful, and normal, as we can. There mustn’t be the slightest sign — on either your part or mine — to make Gil uneasy. I think we can do that, don’t you? As a matter of fact, it’s going to be rather a lark!”
“Of course, Noni. Word of honor, and cross my heart, and hope I die.…”
Die: he bit his tongue. Damnation! But the clear silver of the reply came without hesitation, and with a little laugh:
“Faux pas number one!”
“Yeah, kick me.”
“I guess that’s all, then. You’ve got the tourist cards—”
“I have, and I’ll have the tickets, and I’ll have my little bag, and I’ll try to pick up a guidebook.”
“Bless you, Blom dear — so we’re off to Clixl Claxl — and a new world!”
“A new world.”
“Good night!”
“Good night.”
He heard the click with which she had hung up the receiver, the little sound of cessation itself, and suddenly a feeling of anguish possessed him; a powerful cramp of pain, shutting about his heart, his vitals, his whole body. It was with just so slight a gesture, at last, that she would finally have taken her leave of them, hung up her receiver on the world. The wire was dead, he listened in vain, then he hung up his own receiver and strode forth into the station again. He smiled grimly, and whistled a ghost of a Bach tune, and thought of the walls of Elsinore, and Key, and Gil; and once more the sound and swiftness of the journey came around him, palpable almost as a stream of light or water. The wheels, the bells, the whistles, the sliding and whirling land, the centripetal and tumultuous descent into the Inferno, the descent into Mexico — Oh God, how were they ever going to endure it? It was as cruel as forgetting, or like throwing flowers into the sea. Flowers into the sea.
II
Boston and Albany — Boston and Albany — Boston and Albany — Boston — Springfield — Westfield — Pittsfield—
Everything had dissolved in time and sound, everything was dissolving and in solution, the only remaining reality was the train. The earth was a dream, the past was a dream — that they had met, the three of them, on the platform of the South Station, Noni in blue, with a blue-winged Viking hat, and the shiny black hatbox, and gladstone bag, laughing, and Gil in a shabby brown tweed suit with a broken suitcase, looking a little solemn and strained through the thick spectacles, and Gil’s flat-chested little sister bringing a book, and himself standing tall and a little embarrassed among them, — Blomberg the crane, Blom the steam shovel — all this was nothing but a kind of vision, a fragment of ether-dream, a little picture seen in a picture book, brightly colored but unreal. It was gone, and Boston was gone, and the Berkshire hills, with the spring buds barely showing, where only a few weeks before he had seen snow under the trees, ice in the ponds, on the Indian-haunted road to Deerfield, these, too, had fled soundlessly away into a past which had now neither meaning nor existence. Those people might still be there, the Berkshires might still be there, and the Puritans who had conquered the Indians, and the wilderness which had conquered the Puritans; but the train, hollowing a golden and evanescent tunnel through the darkness, fleeting and impermanent as a falling star, denied all things but itself. “Good-by, Gil; good-by, Noni,” the flushed little face had cried, with open mouth, and Noni had stooped and kissed her, the black hatbox bumping against her knee, and the book had almost been forgotten, thrust at the last moment under Gil’s arm, it had all been flurried and confused, as with all partings; as if the reality, in its contrapuntal hurry to take shape at all, had somehow not taken, or been able to take, its proper shape, or had even fallen short of reality. “And good-by, Mr. Blomberg,” she had murmured hurriedly, half-averting her face — ah, these Jews, if they’ve got to be Jews, and have Jewish names, they might at least look like Jews — and so on to the train and into motion, and out of time, too, in the sense that they had now become time. All day, all night, the landscape whirling and unfolding and again folding, rising and falling, swooping and melting, opening and shutting, Blomberg gliding evenly among the haunted birches and junipers of the Berkshires, a puritan among puritans — and weren’t the Jews, after all, the oldest puritans in the world? — Blomberg defending the stockade at Deerfield in deep snow, Blomberg bowling at ninepins with the Dutch trolls of the Catskills, Blomberg gazing down from the railway bridge at Hendrik Hudson’s little ship, the Half Moon, which vanished away down the broad river like a rose petal into the sunset. And what was it the Negro porter had said, there on the platform at Albany, while they waited to change trains — said to the fat lady, who insisted that this was the train to Chicago? The train now gave him the rhythm, embodied the burred voices, brought them back alive and eerie out of the past — Okay, lady, you can take it, but if you do you got to change, this ain’t no through train, this train goin’ to Cincinnati, yes, ma’am!
The train to Cincinnati, the train to the west, the south, the train into darkness and nothing—
Unreal, but also uncannily real, the business of settling into the empty car, the car filled with smoke, the forward door open and swallowing smoke, scooping smoke, like a hungry mouth, while they climbed swiftly, and then less swiftly, and at last laboringly, and with delayed rhythms, into the Berkshires, along ledges of rock, above brawling little mountain streams, past deserted farms and stations, tilting slowly round an embanked curve to stare intimately, for a lost moment, into an old apple orchard — settling into this motion, this principle of placelessness, Gil flushing and smiling, self-conscious and awkward, as he lifted Noni’s black hatbox up to the rack, and hung the raincoats. And all the idle chatter, in the empty car, with only half a dozen salesmen for company, and a woman with a child, and the Italian foreman, and the Mexican. “Air-conditioned!” Noni had cried. “Air-conditioned — I like that! But it is, in a way!”—as a particularly thick cloud of smoke whipped downward in a defile and swept over and past them. She had put her handkerchief to her mouth, coughing; it was then that he first thought she was already showing signs of fatigue, signs of strain, signs of the struggle to keep up appearances. And all for Gil, the bewildered but good-natured Gil, Gil peering a little anxiously at them both, perhaps already suspecting a secret, some sort of league against him, but too decent to ask questions, as yet. As yet! But the time would come. The time was sure to come. It was all absurd, wild, mad, meaningless — what good could it do — what good could it do anyone, Gil least of all! What good can it do, Noni? What good can it do? He said it half aloud, staring out into the shapeless speed of night, through the black lustered window, for he had said it to her so often — on the swan boat, in Boston, as they plied solemnly round and round the little pond in the Public Garden: “No, Blom; you will see,” was all she had said — and in the bar of the Ritz, and in the upstairs cocktail room of the Lincolnshire, eating potato chips and peanuts, “No, Blom, you will see”—and as they walked across the Common towards the golden dome of the State House, showing bright through the fledgling leaves of the beech trees, the elms: “What good can it do, Noni? What good can it possibly do?” And then the blue-winged head turning towards him, almost merrily, with the patient, “No, Blom, you will see!”