YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Thomas Wolfe
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many costly trains and ships, and who never looked out of windows any more; old men and women from the country on first visits to their children in the city, who looked about them constantly and suspiciously with the quick eyes of birds and animals, alert, mistrustful, and afraid. There were people who saw everything, and people who saw nothing; people who were weary, sullen, sour, and people who laughed, shouted, and were exultant with the thrill of the voyage; people who thrust and jostled, and people who stood quietly and watched and waited; people with amused, superior looks, and people who glared and bristled pugnaciously. Young, old, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, Americans — they were all there in the station, their infinitely varied destinies suddenly harmonised and given a moment of intense and sombre meaning as they were gathered into the murmurous, all-taking unity of time.
George had a berth in car K19. It was not really different in any respect from any other pullman car, yet for George it had a very special quality and meaning. For every day K19 bound together two points upon the continent — the great city and the small town of Libya Hill where he had been born, eight hundred miles away. It left New York at one-thirty-five each afternoon, and it arrived in Libya Hill at eleven-twenty the next morning.
The moment he entered the pullman he was transported instantly from the vast allness of general humanity in the station into the familiar geography of his home town. One might have been away for years and never have seen ‘an old familiar face; one might have wandered to the far ends of the earth; one might have got with child a mandrake root, or heard mermaids singing, or known the words and music of what songs the Sirens sang; one might have lived and worked alone for ages in the canyons of Manhattan until the very memory of home was lost and far as in a dream: yet the moment that he entered K19 it all came back again, his feet touched earth, and he was home.
It was uncanny. And what was most wonderful and mysterious about it was that one could come here to this appointed meeting each day at thirty-five minutes after one o’clock, one could come here through the humming traffic of the city to the gigantic portals of the mighty station, one could walk through the concourse for ever swarming with its bustle of arrival and departure, one could traverse the great expanses of the station, peopled with Everybody and haunted by the voice of time — and then, down those steep stairs, there in the tunnel’s depth, underneath this hive-like universe of life, waiting in its proper place, no whit different outwardly from all its other grimy brethren, was K19.
The beaming porter took his bag with a cheerful greeting: “Yes, suh, Mistah Webbah! Glad to see you, suh! Comin’ down to see de folks?”
And as they made their way down the green aisle to his seat, George told him that he was going home to his aunt’s funeral. Instantly the negro’s smile was blotted out, and his face took on an expression of deep solemnity and respect.
“I’se sorry to hear dat, Mistah Webbah,” he said, shaking his head. “Yes, suh, I’se pow’ful sorry to hear you say dat.”
Even before these words, were out of mind, another voice from the seat behind was raised in greeting, and George did not have to turn to know who it was. It was Sol Isaacs, of The Toggery, and George knew that he had been up to the city on a buying trip, a pilgrimage that he made four times a year. Somehow the knowledge of this commercial punctuality warmed the young man’s heart, as did the friendly beak-nosed face, the gaudy shirt, the bright neck-tie, and the dapper smartness of the light grey suit — for Sol was what is known as “a snappy dresser”.
George looked around him now to see if there were any others that he knew. Yes, there was the tall, spare, brittle, sandy-complexioned figure of the banker, Jarvis Riggs, and on the seat opposite, engaged in conversation with him, were two other local dignitaries. He recognized the round-featured, weak amiability of the Mayor, Baxter Kennedy; and, sprawled beside him, his long, heavy shanks thrust out into the aisle, the bald crown of his head with its tonsured fringe of black hair thrown back against the top of the seat, his loose-jowled face hanging heavy as he talked, was the large, well-oiled beefiness of Pa on Flack, who manipulated the politics of Libya Hill and was called “Parson” because he never missed a prayer-meeting at the Campbellite Church. They were talking earnestly and loudly, and George could overhear fragments of their conversation:
“Market Street — oh, give me Market Street any day!”
“Gay Rudd is asking two thousand a front foot for his. He’ll get it, too. I wouldn’t take a cent less than twenty-five, and I’m not selling anyway.”
“You mark my word, she’ll go to three before another year is out! And that’s not Al! That’s only the beginning!”
Could this be Libya Hill that they were talking about? It didn’t sound at all like the sleepy little mountain town he had known all his life. He rose from his seat and went over to the group.
“Why, hello, Webber! Hello, son!” Parson Flack screwed up his face into something that was meant for an ingratiating smile and showed his big yellow teeth. “Glad to see you. How are you, son?”
George shook hands all round and stood beside them a moment.
“We heard you speaking to the porter when you came in,” said the Mayor, with a look of solemn commiseration on his weak face. “Sorry, son. We didn’t know about it. We’ve been away a week. Happen suddenly? . . . Yes, yes, of course. Well, your aunt was pretty old. Got to expect that sort of thing at her time of life. She was a good woman, a good woman. Sorry, son, that such a sad occasion brings you home.”
There was a short silence after this, as if the others wished it understood that the Mayor had voiced their sentiments, too. Then, this mark of respect to the dead being accomplished, Jarvis Riggs spoke up heartily:
“You ought to stay around a while, Webber. You wouldn’t know the town. Things are booming down our way. Why, only the other day Mack Judson paid three hundred thousand for the Draper Block. The building is a dump, of course — what he paid for was the land. That’s five thousand a foot. Pretty good for Libya Hill, eh? The Reeves estate has bought up all the land on Parker Street below Parker Hill. They’re going to build the whole thing up with business property. That’s the way it is all over town. Within a few years Libya Hill is going to be the largest and most beautiful city in the state. You mark my words.”
“Yes,” agreed Parson Flack, nodding his head ponderously, knowingly, “and I hear they’ve been trying to buy your uncle’s property on South Main Street, there at the corner of the Square. A syndicate wants to tear down the hardware store and put up a big hotel. Your uncle wouldn’t sell. He’s smart.”
George returned to his seat feeling confused and bewildered. He was going back home for the first time in several years, and he wanted to see the town as he remembered it. Evidently he would find it considerably changed. But what was this that was happening to it? He couldn’t make it out. It disturbed him vaguely, as one is always disturbed and shaken by the sudden realisation of Time’s changes in something that one has known all one’s life.
The train had hurtled like a projectile through its tube beneath the Hudson River to emerge in the dazzling sunlight of a September afternoon, and now it was racing across the flat desolation of the Jersey meadows. George sat by the window and saw the smouldering dumps, the bogs, the blackened factories slide past, and felt that one of the most wonderful things in the world is the experience of being on a train. It is so different from watching a train go by. To anyone outside, a speeding train is a thunderbolt of driving rods, a hot hiss of steam, a blurred flash of coaches, a wall of movement and of noise, a shriek, a wail, and then just emptiness and absence, with a feeling of “There goes everybody!” without knowing who anybody is. And all of a sudden the watcher feels the vastness and loneliness of America, and the nothingness of all those little lives burled past upon the immensity of the continent. But if one is inside the train, everything is different. The train itself is a miracle of man’s handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction. One feels the brakes go on when the train is coming to a river, and one knows that the old gloved hand of cunning is at the throttle. One’s own sense of manhood and of mastery is heightened by being on a train. And all the other people, how real they are! One sees the fat black porter with