The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze Read online

  He put away the records and forgot them. Their music joined all the other music he had ever heard and became lost. A week went by. One evening suddenly, in his silence, he heard the passage again, one two three four five six seven eight, fourteen times. Another week went by. Every now and then he would hear the passage. It would be when he felt unspeakably alive, when he seemed to possess strength enough to smash everything in the earth that was ugly.

  There was nothing for me to do in the city Sundays, so I used to work. Sitting at the teletype machine had become the major business of my life, so I used to work on Sundays too. But on Sundays business would be very slow, and most of the day I would sit around in the office, moping, dreaming, thinking about the house I wanted to get for myself. The teletype machine sends and receives messages. It is a great mechanical triumph, and it put thousands of old time telegraphers out of work. These men used to get as much as a dollar an hour for their work, but when the teletype machine was perfected and put into use these men lost their jobs and young fellows like me who didn’t know the first thing about regular telegraphy got their jobs. It was a great stroke of efficiency, the perfection of this machine. It saved the telegraph companies millions of dollars every year. I used to earn about twenty-eight cents an hour, and I used to be able to send and receive twice as many telegrams as the fastest telegraph operator would have been able to receive and send in the same length of time. But on Sundays business would be very slow and the teletype would be silent sometimes for as long as an hour.

  One Sunday morning, after a long silence, my machine began to function, so I went over to it to receive and check the message, but it was not a message, not a regular telegram. I read the words, hello hello hello. I had never thought of the machine as being related in any way to me. It was there for the messages of other people, and the tapping of this greeting to me seemed very startling. For one thing, it was strictly against company rules to use the machine for anything other than the transmission of regular business. It was a breach of company discipline for a teletype operator, and it was because of this fact that I began to think a great deal of the other operator who had sent me the greeting. I typed the word hello, and we began a conversation.

  It seemed very strange for me to be using the machine in a way useful to myself. I talked with the other operator for about an hour. It was a girl, and she was working in the operating room at the main office. I was working in one of the numerous branch offices in the city. We did a lot of talking for about an hour, and then suddenly I read the words wire chief, so I knew that the big shot had returned to the room and that we would not be able to go on talking.

  Suddenly, in the silence, he began to hear the passage again, one two three four five six seven eight, over and over again, and it began to have specific meaning for him: the house, the clean earth around it, the warm sun, and another, one two three four five six seven eight, himself and this other and the house and the earth and the sun and clear senses and deep sleep and one two three four five six seven eight, and meaning and fullness and no sense of being lost and no feeling of being caught.

  I began to try to visualize the girl. I began to wonder if she would go out with me to this house I wanted and help me fill it with our lives, together. After a while the teletype machine began to tap again, and again I read hello hello, wire chief gone.

  It was very splendid, the way it happened, a breach of company discipline and so on.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon she came down from the main office and walked into the office where I was working. She hadn’t said she was coming down, but the moment she stepped into the office I knew who she was because as soon as I saw her face I began to hear the music, one two three four five six seven eight, swiftly, and it was so bad with me that I wanted to leap over the counter and embrace her and tell her about the house.

  We talked politely instead.

  At six o’clock, when he was through working for the day, he walked with her out of the city to her house, talking with her, hearing the music over and over again. For the first time in months he began really to laugh. She was splendid. Her mind was deliciously alive; she loved mischief, and in her eyes he seemed to see the earth, the bright earth, full of light and warmth, and the strength of growing things. It was a place to build the house and to be alive and himself.

  That evening he played the record over and over again, and finally the landlady came to his room and said, Mr. Romano, it is almost half past eleven.

  They got to be pretty good friends, and he began to tell her about the house. At first she didn’t really listen to what he said; she merely listened to the way he said it, but after a while she began to listen to everything he had to say, all the insane things about the machines getting into them and destroying them and destroying everything decent in them.

  They stopped working Sundays and began going across the bay to Marin County. Every Sunday they walked into the hills of Marin County, talking about the house. All during September and October, 1927, they were together on Sundays, walking in the hills across the bay from San Francisco.

  The feeling of being lost began to leave him. There was at least one person in the world who knew that he was alive and attached some importance to the fact, and for a while it looked as if the house he had wanted so long would actually materialize, and he would enter it with this girl, laughing, and they would be in it together, forever and forever.

  I have said that he was nineteen.

  Forever and forever, this is the amusing part. All day long at the teletype machine he would hear the music, one two three four five six seven eight, forever and forever and forever, and this girl and this music and the house that was to be, all mingled, and for a while he believed in the inevitability of his hope.

  I am coming now to the truth. I am not permitting myself to make a story.

  In August and September and October, because of something inexplicable, atmospheric if you like, they were splendidly one, melody and counterpoint, precisely, perfectly, and the dream of eternity was not a fantastic dream.

  The house, they wanted. They wanted it desperately. In August and September and October. They wanted themselves desperately. And so on.

  Things happen. They happen subtly, quietly, strangely. Everything for a moment is thus: then when one looks again, everything is changed and is now thus: a new configuration, the blood thus, the earth thus, and the meaning of life thus. There is nothing you can do about it. Only art is precise and everlastingly itself: everlastingly dependable.

  They did not quarrel. The girl did not get sick and die. She did not run off with another young man or with an older rich man.

  All of a sudden, the melody was silenced, the counterpoint faded away. It was November.

  I used to sit in my room, trying to understand what had happened to us. The house. Why, it was laughable. How would I ever be able to own a house on my salary? The feeling of being lost. That was nonsense. It was absolutely stupid. I used to walk up and down my room, smoking one cigarette after another, trying to understand the sudden toppling of the edifice we had built for ourselves. I wanted to know why we no longer wanted to go away from the city. It was not the girl alone. I myself had stopped talking about the house. I myself had stopped hearing the music, and suddenly the silence had returned, and I was standing in the midst of it, again lost, but now without the wish to return to myself. Let it go, I felt. Let it stand as it is. And so on.

  During the winter they gradually fell away from one another, and then suddenly in March, 1928, he knew that the whole business was a thing of the past, that it was dead.

  Something happened to her. She lost her job. She moved away, to another address, to another city, he didn’t know which. He lost track of her.

  In June something happened to him.

  One afternoon I was sitting at the teletype machine, working it, and all of a sudden I began to hear the passage, one two three four five six seven eight, swiftly, and I began to see her face and the land
scape that was her eyes, and I began to hear her laughter, one two three four five six seven eight, and as I worked the machine this music and the remembrance of this girl and the resurrection of the house we were to have made for ourselves, all these things began to be in my mind the way they had been in the summer, as truth and reality, and I began to feel lost and bewildered and confused.

  That evening he played the record, but he listened to it only once because it brought tears to his eyes. He had laughed at the tears, but he had not dared to listen to the music a second time. The whole thing was really very amusing, he thought. He had got the music and the girl and the house together as one significance in his mind, and it was amusing.

  But the next day I began trying to locate her. It happened automatically. I was taking a walk and before I knew it I was at her old address, asking the people who had moved into the house if they knew where she had gone. They did not know. I walked until one o’clock in the morning. The music was getting into me again, and I was beginning to hear it very often.

  Whenever he sat down to operate the teletype machine, he would begin to hear the music, emerging from the machine, one two three four five six seven eight. Every Sunday he found himself begging the machine to bring her to him again. It was preposterous. He knew that she was no longer with the company, and yet he found himself expecting the machine to tap out her old greeting to him, hello hello hello. It was preposterous. Absolutely.

  He had never known a great deal about her. He had known her name and what she had meant to him, but nothing more.

  And the music: over and over again.

  One afternoon, he got up from the teletype machine and removed his work jacket. It was a little after two, and he quit his job and went away with his money. I don’t want any of the prosperity, he said. He went up to his room and put all the things he wanted to take away with him into two suitcases.

  The phonograph and the records he presented to Mrs. Liebig, the landlady. The phonograph is old, he told her, and it is apt to groan now and then, especially when you put on anything by Beethoven. But it still runs. The records aren’t much. There is some decent music, but most of the records are monotonous jazz. He was feeling the music while he was speaking to the landlady, and it was really paining him to be leaving the phonograph and the records in a strange house, but he was sure he didn’t want them any longer.

  Walking from the waiting room of the depot to the train, I could feel the music tearing out my heart, and when the train began to get under way and when the whistle screamed, I was sitting helplessly, weeping for this girl and the house, and sneering at myself for wanting more of life than there was in life to have.

  And Man

  One morning, when I was fifteen, I got up before daybreak, because all night I hadn’t been able to sleep, tossing in bed with the thought of the earth and the strangeness of being alive, suddenly feeling myself a part of it, definitely, solidly. Merely to be standing again, I had thought all night. Merely to be in the light again, standing, breathing, being alive. I left my bed quietly in the darkness of early morning and put on my clothes, a blue cotton shirt, a pair of corduroy pants, stockings and shoes. It was November and it was beginning to turn cold, but I did not wish to put on more clothes. I felt warm enough. I felt almost feverish, and with more clothes I knew it would not happen. Something was going to happen, and I felt that if I put on too much clothes it would dwindle away and all that I would have would be the remembrance of something expected, then lost.

  All through the sleeplessness of the night I could feel turning in me, like a multitude of small and large wheels, some swift and wordless thought, on the verge of articulation, some vast remembrance out of time, a fresh fullness, a new solidity, a more graceful rhythm of motion emerging from the hurried growth that had taken place in me during the summer.

  With the beginning of spring that year came the faint and fragmentary beginning of this thought, burning in my mind with the sound of fire eating substance, sweeping through my blood with the impatience and impetuosity of a deluge. Before the beginning of this thought I had been nothing more than a small and sullen boy, moving through the moments of my life with anger and fear and bitterness and doubt, wanting desperately to know the meaning and never quite being able to do so. But now in November I was as large physically as a man, larger, for that matter, than most men. It was as if I had leaped suddenly from the form of myself as a boy to the vaster form of myself as a man, and to the vaster meaning of myself as something specific and alive. Look at him, my relatives were saying, every part of his body is growing, especially his nose. And they made sly jokes about my private organs, driving me out of my head with shame. How about it? they asked, even the ladies. Is it growing? Do you dream of big women, hundreds of them?

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, I used to say. But I did know. Only I was ashamed. Look at that nose, they used to say. Just look at that enormous nose on his face.

  During the summer I sometimes stopped suddenly before a mirror to look at myself, and after a moment I would turn away, feeling disgusted with my ugliness, worrying about it. I couldn’t understand how it was that I looked utterly unlike what I imagined myself to be. In my mind I had another face, a finer, a more subtle and dignified expression, but in the mirror I could see the real reflection of myself, and I could see that it was ugly, thick, bony, and coarse. I thought it was something finer, I used to say to myself. I hadn’t bothered before about looking at myself. I had thought that I knew precisely how I looked, and the truth distressed me, making me ashamed. Afterwards I stopped caring. I am ugly, I said. I know I am ugly. But it is only my face.

  And I could believe that my face was not the whole of it. It was simply a part of myself that was growing with the rest, an outward part, and therefore not as important as the inward part. The real growth was going on inside, not simply within the boundaries of my physical form, but outward through the mind and through the imagination to the real largeness of being, the limitless largeness of consciousness, of knowing and feeling and remembering.

  I began to forget the ugliness of my face, turning again to the simplicity and kindliness of the face I believed to be my own, the face of myself in the secrecy of my heart, in the night light of sleep, in the truth of thought.

  It is true that my face seems ugly, I said, but it is also true that it is not ugly. I know it is not, because I have seen it with my own eyes and shaped it with my own thought, and my vision has been clear and my thought has been clean. It cannot be ugly.

  But how was anyone to understand the real truth, how was anyone to see the face that I saw, and know that it was the real reflection of my being? This worried me a lot. There was a girl in my class at high school whom I worshipped, and I wanted this girl to see that my face, the face she saw, was not the truthful one, that it was merely a part of the growth that was going on. And I wanted her to be able to see with me the truthful face, because I felt that if she did see it, she would understand my love for her, and she would love me.

  All through the night I had tossed with the thought of myself somehow alive on the earth, somehow specific and at the same time a substance that was changing and would always change, from moment to moment, imperceptibly, myself entering one moment thus, and emerging thus, over and over again. I wanted to know what it was in me that was static and permanent and endurable, what it was that belonged not to myself alone but to the body of man, to his legend, to the truth of his motion over the earth, moment after moment, century after century. All through the night it seemed that I would soon learn, and in the morning I left my bed, standing in the darkness and the stillness, feeling the splendor of having form and weight and motion, having, I hoped, meaning.

  I walked quietly through the darkness of the house and emerged, standing for a moment in the street, acknowledging the magnificence of our earth, the large beauty of limitless space about our insignificant forms, the remoteness of the great celestial bodies of our universe, our oceans, our
mountains, our valleys, the great cities we had made, the strong and clean and fearless things we had done. The small boats we had made and sent over the wild waters, the slow growth of railroads, the slow accumulation of knowledge, the slow but everlasting seeking after God, in the vastness of the universe, in the solidity of our own earth, in the glory of our own small beings, the simplicity of our own hearts.

  Merely to be standing, merely to be breathing that day was a truth in the nature of an inexplicable miracle. After all these years, I thought . . . I myself standing here in the darkness, breathing, knowing that I live. I wanted to say something in language, with the words I had been taught in school, something solemn and dignified and joyous . . . to express the gratitude I felt to God. But it was impossible. There were no words with which to say it. I could feel the magnificence coming through the cold clean air, touching my blood, racing through it, dancing, but there were no words with which to say it.

  There was a fire hydrant in our street, and I had always wanted to hurdle it, but I had always been afraid to try. It was made of metal and I was made of flesh and blood and bone, and if I did not clear the fire hydrant, leaping swiftly, my flesh would smash against it, paining me, perhaps breaking a bone in one of my legs.

  Suddenly I was leaping over the hydrant, and, clearing it, I was thinking, I can do it now. I can do anything now.