Grandsons E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This is the story of two brothers, Peter and Andy Gale, and their cousin Jack, three young Americans of today. Their grandfather, Anton Gale, came to the United States sixty years before, an immigrant from Carniola, and was killed in a Chicago riot in 1886. Their grandmother was part Indian, part Yankee. The father of Peter and Andy was a small business man and Jack’s father was a steel worker. This is their background, but their lives and problems are representative of millions of young Americans today, regardless of racial heritage. They are products of America: America’s problem.
Peter Gale is the central character of the narrative. He went to college, fought in the war, was wounded, became a newspaper man, was a poet and a dreamer. When the story opens he is at cross-purposes with himself and his world. His brother Andy is more a man of the times: direct, brutal, but basically lovable and pathetic. Jack, their cousin, is a labor leader. All three are looking for something. America looms tremendous and lovely in Peter’s mind and heart, but what is his place in it? What are Andy’s and Jack’s places in it? Questions asked everywhere in present-day America.
Louis Adamic writes with the fervor of complete conviction. His love of America is strong, and he writes with his heart.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1935

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Dedication

To

Carey McWilliams

Part One

I MEET PETER GALE TWICE IN NINE YEARS

Chapter 1

I

I first met Peter Gale two months, perhaps nine weeks, before the Armistice. We were in a rest zone somewhere west of the Meuse-Argonne front, where he joined our outfit. He had been assigned to it some time before. A young sergeant, who, I soon found out, was even younger than he looked, he had been to an automatic-rifle school near Tours and came to the company as a specialist noncom to take charge of our automatic-rifle platoon.

I was a regular line noncom, and for a while Sergeant Gale and I slept in the same dog-tent, pitched in a shell-torn wood under a perennially dripping oak tree shedding large, prematurely browned, rotted leaves, and were thus thrown in close personal contact; too close for comfort. He and I were in that tiny tent a great deal even when not sleeping or trying to sleep, for it rained a good part of the time, and that was our only shelter.

We lay on the damp, dirty straw and blankets under the wet, leaky canvas, reading damp copies of the soldiers’ newspapers, Stars & Stripes, and soggy old magazines and books, whatever came our way, merely to be reading, to kill time; and talking spasmodically; often just lying still, very still, arms crossed under our heads, looking at the soppy khaki canvas above or out into the muddy “street” beyond the tips of our heavy field shoes in front of us, listening to the dull, distant roar of heavy guns, or the gentle maddening patter of rain on the tent and on the rotted leaves above the tent.

I recall little of what we talked about. Peter Gale made no strong impression on me. Which was no reflection upon him. Life in those days toward the close of the war was for the most part a matter of exciting (usually baseless) rumors concerning what was going on at the front and to what part of the line we were to be sent next; of hectic, seemingly (and perhaps actually) pointless activities of all sorts, and of rather extreme personal discomforts due to the continuous rains, mud, and chill autumn winds. Most of us soldiers were not deeply, intimately interested in one another as persons, except now and then, perhaps, for a moment or two. Also, at the time most of us, I suppose, were not particularly interesting as individuals; only in the aggregate, as parts of parts of parts… of a colossal, hastily-put-together war machine.

But contemplating him casually, as I remember I did off and on, I sometimes thought—fitfully, offhandedly—that as a person Peter Gale, perhaps, was a little above the average among the young soldiers in the outfit. Despite his youth and the obvious fact that he was anything but a natural soldier, he made a fairly good noncom and instructor in the nomenclature and tactics of the automatic rifle, although that weapon very evidently appealed to him (as it did to me) more as a piece of extremely deft mechanism than as a frightfully efficient instrument for mass-murder. He—also quite evidently—forced himself, with no slight effort, to be a good soldier: a good soldier in the most ordinary sense of the term, implying discipline, the prompt performance of one’s tasks and duties to the best of one’s ability, and as clean personal habits as were feasible under the circumstances.

He was a little over a year older than I, just twenty; was six feet one, slightly taller than I, long-legged, and thin for his height, but strong and, despite a clear hint of gawkiness in his bearing, almost graceful. He had a good face with strong, symmetrical features; a large, firm mouth; a faint beard, which he shaved oftener than was really necessary; a mildly hooked nose; rather deep-set, wide-apart, slightly aslant brown eyes under narrow black brows; a broad, high, slowly sloping forehead; big, well-shaped ears, close to a medium-sized head; and thick, straight, shiny-dark hair, cut according to the provisions of paragraph so-and-so in Army Regulations, and parted on the left side… (but I could not now give this description of him as he looked toward the middle of autumn in 1918, had I not met him again, rather suddenly and, of course, under wholly different circumstances, nine years later, in the United States).

The mildly hooked nose, coupled with the olive tint of his skin, made me think at first—quite casually, for it didn’t matter to me one way or another—that in spite of the apparently Anglo-Saxon surname, Gale, he probably was Jewish… but I soon learned I was wrong.

He was a restless, moody young man. Sometimes he looked clearly depressed. He mixed very little with the other boys, privates or noncoms, keeping much to himself. Off duty, he seemed to like to walk alone through the scarred countryside under the ceaselessly drizzling sky in the camp’s environs—a tall, brooding young figure in a short, tight gray slicker. I think I was one of the two or three men—they called us men—in the outfit with whom he talked at all outside of the line of duty.

He frequently mumbled in his sleep. He seemed to be dreaming of something that made him exclaim, “Jeez!… Jeez!” I couldn’t make out what he was muttering between exclamations, and never said anything to him about it. I had a feeling it would have made him uncomfortable.

He was writing or trying to write what to me looked like poetry; but, although I was a little curious about this, I made no effort to find out whether it really was poetry and, if so, what it was like, and never indicated that I was even aware of it. He palpably was trying to hide it from me. I only caught glimpses of the script with its uneven lines in his notebook. It looked like free verse.

He neither drank nor smoked. Once, on my urging, he took a glass of cognac, and a little later remarked to me that he didn’t like the stuff. Girls and women, both native French ones and American Red Cross and Salvation Army workers, appeared to take his attention, but, so far as I knew, he steered clear of them. I couldn’t decide whether he was bashful or heeding—so far as the French women were concerned—the admonitions of lecturers in Y. M. C. A. huts who held forth on the dangers threatening inexperienced young American soldiers from females available to them in France.

Shortly after Peter Gale and I found ourselves in the same pup-tent, he told me, I forget in what connection, that he was from Pennsylvania and had been attending the University of Pittsburgh when the United States entered the war. He had voluntarily enlisted “for the duration of the emergency.”

II

I remember just one comparatively lengthy conversation with him, which we had toward the end of that “rest” period.

Early one rainy evening, as we lay in our tent after supper, he suddenly, almost abruptly—but evidently after considerable hesitation—asked me:

“What nationality are you?”

I was—in my speech, at any rate—unmistakably a foreigner, although officially already a citizen of the United States, and his question was a perfectly natural one. Prior to my joining the army to help Woodrow Wilson make the world safe for democracy, I had been in America just a little over three years, and now, a year and a half later, my English vocabulary, though improved, was still meager and my pronunciation and sentence formation somewhat stiff and awkward.

“You don’t mind my asking you, do you?” he added, hastily, stirring uneasily on his side of the tent.

“Oh, no,” I said, “not at all”; then told him that by birth I was a Slovenian from Carniola, at the time still it province of Austria, but which, I added, was destined eventually, after the defeat of the Central Powers, to become part of a new state including all Yugoslavs; for Slovenians, I explained, were Yugoslavs, or South-Slavs, a group of small nations which also included the Serbians and Croatians.

Peter Gale appeared interested.

“Carniola,” he said eagerly. “There are quite a few Slovenians from Carniola in Pennsylvania, in and around Pittsburgh especially; and, I guess, in other parts of the United States, too. Aren’t there?”

“Yes, quite a few, relatively,” I said, “maybe around two, three hundred thousand, I don’t know exactly. The Slovenians, you know, are a very small nation, one of the smallest in the world: about a million and a quarter of them altogether.” (I probably did not speak as well as I quote myself here.)

He said nothing for several moments, then asked, “What sort of place is Car-ni-ola?” syllabicating the name slowly, as though he liked the sound of it.

I had left Carniola when not yet fifteen, and my knowledge of my native land was scant indeed, but I told him what I knew, or thought I knew, of it—perhaps nothing more than that it was a very small and very lovely country, mainly alpine, all green in spring and summer, brown and red in autumn, deep in snow in wintertime, inhabited for the most part by peasants who on the whole were fine, simple, hardy people; and possibly I mentioned, too, that there was only one town in the entire province that could be called a city, Ljubljana, where I had attended school for a few years, and which had a population of sixty-odd thousand.

After another little pause he asked, “But why did you come to America?” Then, again: “I hope you don’t mind my asking you these things. Do you?”

“Oh no,” I said, “of course not. Why should I?”

For an instant I thought that his questions were not casual, not just to be saying something to pass the time away, but deliberate, prompted by vital personal interest.

I replied, I think, that I had come to America as a result of reading American dime novels translated into the Slovenian, hearing returned immigrants talk about their experiences in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, and Minnesota, and seeing a few postcards of the Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a few other such startling sights. The United States, I probably told him, had been exciting my imagination since I was eight or nine, and I had been wanting to emigrate ever since I could remember, till in 1913 a set of circumstances (which I probably did not recount in detail) had helped me to induce my parents, who were fairly well-to-do peasants in Lower Carniola, to consent to my going over the Big Pond and give me the money for the trip.

“Carniola must be a pretty nice place, all right,” he said, smiling. “I’ve heard Slovenians around Pittsburgh talk a lot about their old country. They all seem to be terribly stuck on it, especially the women, who find it hard to keep things clean in their homes in Pittsburgh and the little towns around there on account of the smoke and soot from the mills and coke ovens. In those steel and coke towns, women have to wash their window curtains every other day, while in the old country, I’ve heard one of them say more than once, curtains stayed white or clean for two, three weeks… Not that I didn’t believe them; but a couple of times, listening to them rave about things in their old country, I wondered,” he smiled and tried to give his voice a humorous inflection, “why they came to America, since Car-ni-ola was such a wonderful place.”

“They came to America,” I said, in my stiff English, struggling to make it grammatical, “because there was no room for them in Carniola. As I say, it is a very small country, and it is crowded even if only a little over a million people are living there. Some have to get out. Besides, for centuries the Austrian rule there has been unfavorable to Slovenians. Many of them, also, have been emigrating to America to escape military service in Austria.”

“I see,” said Peter Gale.

A short silence; then, as I recall rather clearly, he began to say something else, but suddenly stopped himself, hesitated for a few moments, finally remarking, with a great effort to appear casual, “My grandfather on my father’s side was a Slovenian from Carniola,” and smiled uncertainly.

“The hell you say!” I said, for by then I had picked up a good deal of such he-man army phraseology, which I used at every opportunity. It made me feel very American and older than my nineteen years.

Peter Gale nodded, smiling again. “He came over, my grandfather, early in the 1870’s, I think. He spelled his name just as I spell mine, G-a-l-e, but in the old country, I’ve been told, they pronounced it something like Galé. Anton Galé was his full name, but Americans, of course, started to pronounce it Gale right away.”

I remembered at once there were some people by that name in the village of Gatina, not far from Blato, my native village; and I had a faint notion, too, a mere glimmering of a notion, that as a boy I had heard tell about one of the Galés from Gatina who—s trebuhom za kruhom, with belly after bread—had gone to America long before I was born. The idea that this boy, a native of America, now sharing with me this miserable little canvas shelter in a war-battered wood in France, possibly was related to the Galés of Gatina excited me for the moment.

“Do you know,” I said, quickly, “what village or town, what part of Carniola, he came from, your grandfather?”

“No,” said Peter Gale. “All I know is that he was a Slovenian from Austria, from Carniola. When he came to America he went to Butte, Montana, and worked in some mines there, quartz or copper mines, I don’t know which, and soon after coming there married a woman who was half Indian. She looked almost white and, I heard, was very good-looking; beautiful, in fact. The other half in her probably was Yankee. God knows… She was my grandmother,” he smiled, hesitating, “that’s… that’s why I look a bit like an Indian, if you noticed.”

I said, “I thought maybe you were Jewish; it didn’t occur to me you might be part Indian; and I wondered how you came by your name.”

Peter Gale laughed a bit. “I’ve been taken several times for a Jew because of the bend in my nose. I’m one sixteenth Indian: Crow or Sioux, I don’t know which, but I think either one or the other, though it doesn’t matter, of course… Anyhow, after living and working in Montana for six or seven years, my grandfather came to Chicago, I think in 1885, with his family. Why he came, I don’t know, either. I guess people just moved a lot… He had two children, two boys—my father and my uncle, both born in Montana. Then, after about a year in Chicago, the old boy was killed in a riot—the Haymarket riot in 1886. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” I said. At that time I still knew very little of America’s violent past.

“I don’t know much about it, either,” said Peter Gale, “but some day, if I get out of this war, I intend to look it up. I imagine something must be written about it, though in the Pittsburgh Library I found nothing on it at all. All I know about it is what I heard my father and my uncle tell, mostly my uncle… The riot was part of some labor trouble in Chicago at the time. It seems that a bunch of anarchists or radicals there had something to do with it. A bomb exploded on a spot called Haymarket Square. My grandfather happened to be there with my uncle—Uncle Tony—who was then twelve or thirteen years old. My father was about eleven; he was home with his mother. So far as I know, the old boy, my grandfather, wasn’t an anarchist or anything like it; just a workingman, I guess; a Hunky laborer with a wife and two kids, maybe out of a job, who came to listen to the speakers. There was supposed to be a meeting for working-people who were interested in the eight-hour day or something like that, when, all of a sudden, the bomb went off and killed and wounded a number of policemen who came to disband the gathering, along with a lot of workers like my grandfather. My uncle got knocked over and had a scar on his head all his life from something that hit him in that explosion. He died last year, I mean Uncle Tony, in an accident in the steel mill in McClairsport, Pa., where he worked.”

Peter Gale, I remember, livened up considerably telling me this. I was keenly interested, and had we not been interrupted at this point, he probably would have talked on. But “assembly” was blown, and we had to crawl out of our tents and fall in for a night drill; for toward the end of that “rest” period there wasn’t much resting even when it rained.

Later in the evening, when we returned to camp, wet, cold, muddy, and tired, neither of us felt like talking, though I had it in mind to get back to Anton Galé, who probably had come from the village of Gatina, in Carniola; and Peter Gale, too (as he told me nine years later), had wanted to talk further to me about his grandfather.

III

The next two, three days were hectic, unpleasant ones. We broke camp. Our division was returning to the front, and it rained, intermittently drizzling and pouring, without let-up. Buttoned tight in dirty gray slickers over our overcoats, carrying rifles slung muzzles downward to keep the barrels dry, we marched in reeking, soft mud midway to our knees. Water trickled from our helmets, down our napes. The dye of our uniforms was being transferred to our underwear and our skins.

I was in front of the column of our company. Peter Gale was near the tail-end of it, with the automatic rifles. Resting for fifteen minutes or half an hour in a half-ruined, largely deserted village not far from the line, we mixed a little and I caught sight of his tall, gawky figure standing alone under a steel helmet by the roadside, and went over to him and said:

“Hello, soldier! don’t you know the old army rule? When on the march, never stand when you can sit down and never sit down when you can lie down.” I had heard this rule propounded as a joke.

He smiled. “Why don’t you sit down or lie down? There’s a lot of soft mud around.”

I said, “I wish I’d joined the navy instead of the army,” which just then, inspired by the mud, was a favorite remark in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. I said it to be saying something and to practice my English.

Fie said, “I’ve a brother in the navy.”

I said, “The hell you say! ”

He said, “Yes; he’s in the army transport service, really.”

I said, “He don’t—he doesn’t have to walk in mud a foot deep, anyhow.”

“I guess not,” said Peter Gale.

Then, on a sudden impulse, I said to him: “You told me about your grandfather, that his name was Galé. There are a bunch of Galés in a village near where I was born in Carniola; their name is spelled just like yours, G-a-l-e, and pronounced Galé; and I think I heard people say that one of them went to America a long time ago, long before I was born. He may have been your grandfather.”

Peter Gale was at once very much interested. “Jeez, I’m glad you told me that. Funny I should have mentioned my grandfather to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, isn’t it? What do you call this—a coincidence, no?”

“Yes,” he smiled. “Isn’t it a funny coincidence?”

Whistles blew all over the village; we had to fall in again and go on.

“We’ll talk some more about it,” said Peter, “if we get a chance.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think that’s about all I can tell you.”

He pondered a moment, then said, “Well, thanks, anyhow. Good luck!”

We were taking over the sector that night.

“Same to you!” I said.

A half-hour later, trudging in deep mud again, I think I forgot all about Anton Galé and Carniola. Possibly Peter Gale also.

IV

At the front, he and I were in different dugouts, several hundred yards apart. His duties and mine seldom brought us together. I saw little of him.

A week passed, or ten days. Things were rather quiet along our sector. There was no real action. There were only rain and rumors that war was soon to end. Germany and Austria were beaten, on the verge of capitulating.

Then, of a sudden, one morning I heard that “that kid sergeant who just got to the outfit… what’s his name?… yeah, the tall, thin guy… Gale… yeah, Sergeant Gale…” had been seriously wounded and gassed the night before going to the rear with a detail of men for some sort of supplies. There had been a light bombardment and a piece of shrapnel had hit him in the back, and he had tumbled into a shell-hole, on the bottom of which was a quantity of still potent heavier-than-air poison gas. None of his men had seen him fall, and he had lain in that hole for several hours, till daybreak, when they finally succeeded in finding him, unconscious… “The poor bastard maybe ain’t got a chance.”

For a couple of weeks, off and on, I imagined he was dead or dying.

Then my own experiences and the general excitement and confusion immediately after the signing of the Armistice pushed Peter Gale pretty well out of my consciousness.

V

And in the ensuing nine years, during which I led a full, though anything but satisfying life, moving about a great deal in the United States, sailing to South America and the Orient, and finally settling in Southern California, he probably occurred to me two or three times. One occasion was in 1922 or thereabouts, when I read Frank Harris’ novel, The Bomb, which pretends to be the inside story of the explosion on Haymarket Square in Chicago in ’86.

I practically forgot him.

Chapter 2

I

Late autumn, 1927.

I had been living in southern California for about four and a half years. For two of those years I had been holding down a semi-clerical job at the port pilot station in Los Angeles Harbor, better known as San Pedro, where I was practically my own boss and had a good deal of time to myself, to do almost anything I liked. I read. I wondered about things, all sorts of things, in America. I tried to solve my personal problem, which seemed a complicated one and emotionally tied up with things in America. I experimented with writing in English.

Occasionally… but “occasionally” is too generous a word… only infrequently I published a story, a sketch, or an article in one of the “little magazines” on the Coast, while a few of my pieces had appeared in obscure mid-Western and Eastern publications; and one day I received a letter addressed to me in care of, and forwarded to me from, the office of The Western Shore in Los Angeles, which some time prior had brought out a short story of mine:

Are you the fellow who came to the United States from Carniola a few years before the war, then was a sergeant or corporal—don’t remember which—in France, on the Meuse-Argonne front, just before the Armistice? If you are, then you may recall me. For a while you and I bunked in the same dog-tent. I told you my grandfather had come to America from Carniola, too. He was killed in the Haymarket bomb explosion in Chicago in 1886—remember my telling you about him? And it seems to me you told me that people by the name of Gale or Galé lived in some village near where you came from.

I think you’re he, all right; and, if agreeable to you, I should like very much to see you again some time soon—real soon. In ‘Notes about Contributors’ in back of the magazine, I see that you’re living in San Pedro. I’ve been moving around a lot the past three, four years; all over the map. Momentarily I’m here in L. A., a reporter on the Star, but thinking of quitting before long and heading back for S. F.—I’ve been there before and liked it.

Drop me a line, will you, and let’s get together—or, better yet, ring me up here at the Star office, Spring 7300, between eight a. m. and six p. m., or at the Hotel Romola, Figueroa 2600, where I have a room, after six p. m.

Sincerely,

Peter Gale

I remembered him, at first dimly, then a little more clearly, and phoned him the same day I received the letter. He apparently was glad I called so promptly after hearing from him, and on my part it was pleasant, somehow, to remotely recognize his voice over the wire. Although, as I say, I hadn’t thought of him for years, somewhere in back of my mind he was indexed as one of the pleasant encounters (there hadn’t been many) during the war.

The next day was Saturday, and I told him I usually went to Los Angeles Saturday afternoons, anyhow—was he free tomorrow evening?—what time?—and where could we meet?

He said, “I’ll try to get off early—four, five o’clock. What do you say about us having dinner together? I know a pretty good place on Grand Avenue, not far from the Romola… How about coming to the hotel, say, at five?”

I said, “All right.”

The Romola was one of the better hotels near the center of the downtown district, and, without any real interest in the matter, I wondered for a minute how a reporter on the Star, which paid its employees notoriously meager salaries, could afford to live there.

II

At five o’clock Saturday afternoon I knocked on his door and Peter Gale opened it and greeted me eagerly, pressing my hand long with both of his.

“It’s fine to see you, no kidding,” he said. “When I saw your name on the cover of the magazine and then read your story, I was pretty sure it was you. I’d remembered your name… Nine years, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

We both laughed irrelevantly.

“Does it seem nine years to you?” he asked.

I said, “It seems like nine months—hardly that.”

He stared at me a long moment. “Doesn’t to me,” he said, lowering his eyes. “To me, to tell you the truth,” looking up again, “it seems like every bit of nine years and more. I was wondering, just before you came, how it seemed to you.”

The seriousness with which he said this discomfited me for an instant. I thought he would go on, but he didn’t, and there followed a brief, slightly awkward silence as we looked at one another.

“Sit down, will you?” he said, abruptly.

We sat down, opposite one another: he on the edge of his bed, I on a chair.

“You’re older, of course,” smiled Peter Gale, eyeing me (while I eyed him), “and your civilian clothes make you look different, as mine probably make me look different to you, but I believe if we suddenly bumped into one another somewhere I’d recognize you. You still have an accent, but your English is much better.”

I laughed and said, “I think I’d recognize you, too.”

We laughed again, trying to hide our embarrassment before one another’s gazes. On second thought I began to doubt I would have recognized him on unexpected meeting but said nothing.

There was a pause in our conversation, then it went on in spurts.

Peter Gale was slightly heavier than he had been in France. His gawkiness was gone, but now there was a slight stoop in his shoulders. He looked at least nine years older. His face was lined, but the general expression of it was still that of a young man. His eyes were a little deeper under the dark, narrow eyebrows; his hair a bit thinner… and, although he was not yet thirty, there were light touches of gray on his temples and above and behind his ears.

This startled me for a moment, almost shocked me.

But the most noticeable change (as I gradually recalled little details of his looks and personality in 1918) was in his manner. He had been restive, moody; now he was brusque, abrupt, at once impulsive and hesitant; hectic, jittery. His speech was jumpy, jerky, slangier than it had been nine years before; his laugh sudden, uncertain.

All this made me vaguely ill at ease for several minutes after we shook hands. I didn’t think I’d like him, or that he would interest me especially. I had been coming in contact with too many people like this. America was full of them. To the devil with them, even if they happened to be wounded ex-soldiers and grandsons of Slovenian immigrants from Carniola. I was sorry I had called him.

But this was a quick, superficial thought, a quick, superficial reaction on my part, all tied up, as it presently occurred to me, with my own complicated personal problem, which had become so much of a strain on my consciousness that, in turn, it tried to devise little tricks—quick, superficial thoughts—to suppress it and keep it off its premises. These little tricks, however, never worked, never for long… and now gradually I ceased to regret my getting in touch with Peter Gale. Nearly everything about him, his whole personality, with all its uncertain, disquieting aspects, and especially his restiveness, his jerky speech and manner, slowly but insistently and inescapably assumed for me a sharp, though at the same time puzzling and unsettled, significance.

As he talked to me, I was looking at him, but scarcely listened because I was at once startled and preoccupied by my altered view of him. I was suddenly recalling him very, very clearly as he had been nine years earlier in France, just before he had been wounded. And it occurred to me, simultaneously, that in that period, by one process or another, he had developed into a full-fledged representative—even an extreme representative, perhaps—of a type of person which to my considerable (if but occasional) personal perturbation, I had begun, some years before, to encounter in its various versions all over the country—the restless hectic-mannered young man who often, but not always, was an ex-soldier of the World War.

The type bothered me a great deal, but it also interested me, as did all sorts of other phenomena in the United States; and this perturbation and this interest, as I sometimes admitted to myself, were closely connected with things in me—with my personal lacks, urges, proclivities, ambitions, of which I was more or less conscious—with the love that, going about the country, I had developed for America, for physical (aside from human) America, with its wealth and beauty and its terrific technological progress—and, lastly and most vitally, perhaps, with the concern that I felt, off and on, for human America: what it was doing to itself, its mind and spirit, its sense of values, and to the vast, untellably marvelous continent it had in its charge.

By then I had definitely decided to remain in the United States, and the human problem of the country had become, or, rather, had touched and aggravated, my personal problem, making me restive, uneasy. I couldn’t figure out things quickly enough to suit me. In this quandary, as so many young men at the time, I became a sort of Menckenite, subscribing (superficially) to the idea that America was a circus, a colossal show full of clowns, freaks, and fantastic things of all sorts, full of sideshows, full of laughs. And I did laugh at America, with Henry Mencken and by myself, in my attempts at writing and otherwise, but my laughter was never pure mirth. Basically, things bothered me; America, human America, bothered me. And I had the damnedest time to be calm and keep laughing.

Actually, it now occurred to me, I was probably as jumpy and jittery as this fellow, Peter Gale. I was perhaps but a different version of the same type. In fact, there was no “perhaps” in this. I was. I differed from him probably only in that I kept my jitteriness inside me, hidden, under control. But beneath our psychological skins as Americans, he and I possibly were brothers or cousins, relations of some sort, birds, more or less, of a feather, naturally drawn to one another.

Anyhow, here we had gotten together in Los Angeles, nine years after our brief initial contact in the war.

Peter Gale wore good clothes. His room was a spacious corner one on the tenth or eleventh floor (high for Los Angeles), nicely furnished, light and airy, with two large windows, one of them open. There was a window also in the bathroom. I thought it must cost him at least twenty a week, probably twenty-five; and his salary on the paper, if he was just a reporter, which he had written me he was, could not be more than thirty. Of course, I said to myself, he might have a private income, and it was none of my business, anyhow.

He had been saying something which I had barely heard; now he was silent and I, not knowing what he had said, was at a loss for a remark. So there was another pause.

“How’ve you been all this time, anyhow?” he asked, to break the pause and probably, I thought, also because he was interested.

“That’s a long story,” I said. “And you?”

“That’s a long story, too.”

We both smiled; then, looking at one another quizzically, laughed again.

“Will you have a drink?” he said, rising.

I said, “Will you?”

“Yes, sure.”

“All right; then I’ll have one, too.”

He phoned for glasses, ice, and ginger ale, then drew an unopened quart bottle of Johnnie Walker from a case, which he had had locked in his clothes-closet and proceeded to uncork it.

“If I remember right,” I said, “you didn’t use to drink; you didn’t like it.”

“That’s right,” he said, “but in the last two, three years I’ve taken to it a little. Not much, though. I take a drink like this, with some one else. Hardly ever take one alone and don’t miss it a bit if I don’t see a drop for weeks, months.”

I wondered for an instant what he was doing with a full case if he was not a steady drinker.

He smoked, too, but, it appeared to me, with no real relish, merely out of nervousness, without inhaling.

We talked awhile of some of our mutual experiences in France.

A bellhop brought in a tiny pail of ice, two glasses, a bottle of ginger ale, and Peter poured highballs for me and himself.

“Well, here’s how!” he said. “Nice to see you.” He seemed—he no doubt was very sincere in saying this.

“Here’s looking at you, Gale,” I said.

“Mud in your eye!”

We laughed awkwardly and drank.

III

 I said, “If I’m not mistaken, you got hit pretty bad, didn’t you, a week or so after we got to the line that time? And weren’t you gassed, too, or something like that?”

For the moment my memory of what had happened to him in France was still a trifle vague, confused.

“Yes,” he said, “a piece of shrapnel put a gash in my back right over the kidneys; it took eight months to heal; and that goddamn gas kept me in hospital for three years after that, till the summer of ’twenty-two.

This took me aback a little. “Three years!”

“Damnoar four, altogether,” said Peter, with a wry smile. “Most of the time after they brought me back from France, in the spring of nineteen-nineteen, I was in the Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio, in Frisco.”

“But you’re all right now?”

“Oh yes,” he said, taking a quick, nervous sip from his glass. “I’ve this hole in my back, which,” he grinned, “doesn’t exactly add to my physical prowess. When the weather is changing, I still feel a stabbing-like pain there. But the gas, I think, has all been cleared out of me… How did you come out of the mess? You weren’t wounded or anything, were you?”

“No,” I said.

He evidently was trying to switch the conversation from himself. But I was curious about him, also a little concerned, all of a sudden.

“Three years—four years is a long time,” I said, “to put in in a lot of hospitals.”

“It’s all over now,” he said, “and to hell with it! But tell me about yourself. How did you get all the way out here to the Coast—and when, why, and so on?… I read your story, and, say, it’s all right, no kidding. Not bad at all. Is it autobiographical?… This was the first thing of yours I’ve seen. Have you written anything else?”

I began to tell him a few things about myself, and talked for five, ten minutes, perhaps, when his telephone rang.

“Excuse me,” he said, jumping up to answer it, then seemed to hesitate just an instant. He passed a hand over his brow and his face went into a faint scowl.

The phone rang again and he took the receiver:

“Hello!… Yes… I’m all right. And you?… No… No, I can’t… Sorry, but I can’t, I’m telling you I’m having dinner with a fellow… friend of mine… You don’t know him; he and I were in France together… Yes… No, you never met him. I just met him myself for the first time in nine years… Thanks just the same… O. K… So long, Andy… Yeah, all right. So long.”

After “Hello!” his voice had changed abruptly. There had come into it a note of annoyance mingled with a curious sort of tenderness.

Hanging up the receiver and resuming his seat, he looked at me as if he meant to say something, but didn’t; hesitating, perhaps, for fully a quarter of a minute. Finally he said: “My brother,” as if he thought I expected an explanation; and, after another brief pause, added, “He lives here… is in business here in L. A.”

He evidently was on edge about something. He held his hands rigidly clasped before him, as if he was in a deep quandary or was trying to restrain himself from something.

I said, “Don’t consider me, Peter.” I called him by his first name for the first time. “If your brother wants you to have dinner with him or something, why, it’s all right with me, if you—”

“No, no,” he interrupted me, relaxing his hands. “We’ll eat here on Grand, you and I. Pretty good place. Good steaks, chops, and everything. I see my brother every few days. See too damn much of him.”

He smiled nervously, looking at me.

I said to myself, “What’s the matter with this fellow, anyhow?”—for while, as I say, I had recognized him as the restless, jittery-mannered young man I had been encountering in various versions elsewhere, I had no clear explanation of him, and he did seem rather jumpier than my previous encounters.

Aloud, just to be saying something, I remarked, “Your brother, he was—or one of your brothers was in the navy during the war, wasn’t he?”

“How do you know?” cried Peter.

“You told me.”

“I told you?” He was all tense again.

“Yes,” I said, “unless I’m confusing you with some one else who had a brother in the navy.” (And I thought, “Why all the excitement?”)

“When did I tell you?”

“In France, nine years ago.”

“Oh, did I?” he said, abruptly lowering his voice. He seemed embarrassed and annoyed at himself for speaking to me in such an excited tone. “You’ve a good memory.”

I said, “I think it was on the road when we went to the front the last time, in that village just behind the lines.”

“Oh yes, yes, I remember. He was… That’s right, my brother was in the navy,” he drawled a little, trying to sound casual. “He was in the army transport service—on a troopship running from Hoboken to Brest and back.”

Then another little pause.

Peter rose. “Will you have another drink?“ he asked.

“No, thanks; I’ve enough.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Highballs don’t go well just before eating and I don’t care much for the stuff, anyway. I guess I’m one of those who drink because there’s prohibition. Getting hungry?”

“No,” I said, “not exactly—”

“Then we’ll wait awhile before we go. It’s just two blocks from here.”

“Suit yourself, Peter.”

“I’m not hungry yet, either,” he said, smiling. I thought he liked my calling him by his first name.

I continued to feel uneasy with him, but rather less and less so. For a minute it was soothing to me to compare myself with him.

Although I knew almost no details of his post-war life (or pre-war, for that matter), I was sure I knew him in a general way from his manner. And I thought I knew myself… I was nervous, hectic as the devil most of the time, myself. Now and then it took every bit of my strength of character, or whatever it was I had, to stay put in San Pedro, to stick ten hours a day at the pilot station, to sit in my shack evenings and Sundays and work on a story. It disturbed me that I was this way. Sometimes I felt I would never become a writer, which was all that I wanted to be. I raged at myself, but that only made matters worse.

This restiveness, this semi-hysteria, was a disease, an American disease, and I had it. I had contracted it after the war, if not already before, roaming about, interesting myself in all sorts of things, becoming fascinated by the country, starting to love it, identifying myself with it, calling myself an American… but I was trying to conquer it, trying to be calm, and succeeding, so far, at least as to seem calm. In fact, some people who knew me externally thought I was smug; and in a way I was, but only outwardly. However, this calm and smugness, this living in San Pedro and holding down a petty job which did not interest me at all, was, to a large extent, part of my tactics against my restiveness, my American jumpiness. I knew that, though I seldom thought of it in these terms. Now and then, for short periods, I really was calm and smug, not only outwardly, but inwardly; however, never for long inwardly. Four, five years before I had realized that moving about, bumming, brooding over things, letting things steer me this way and that way, wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was nothing. A shadow.

In this respect I was like most people in America. They were shadows flitting over the face of this beautiful continent. Shadows of what human life could be. Shadows of one another. They were not connected with any basic reality. They were hardly alive. There was little life, real dynamic human life, in America. Only a sort of nervous, furious, superficial existingness. Scarcely anything human, at least contemporary-human, in America had any depth. All was surface—just a lot of bustle, noise; sudden, baffling violence. Those were the symptoms of the disease. The disease itself was something vague, insidious, general. It was in the blood, the nerves, the eyes, the breath of people. I had it, too, but I was conscious of it, and, conscious of it, I could fight it.

An individual’s problem when afflicted with it (as who wasn’t, more or less?) was to get away and above the human everyday superficiality, the violent tempo, the noise and hurry; away and above the symptoms of the disease, for in a way they were the disease; they got into people first and created the sickness, the shadowiness. (I wasn’t quite clear on the matter, revising my idea of it from time to time.)

In the face of this disease, which was so general and whose existence was almost entirely unrecognized, an individual’s first problem was to become calm and strong. Everything, it seemed to me, was not hopeless in America. The boys and girls born in Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and South Carolina, who were issuing anti-American pronunciamientoes written on menu cards of Parisian cafés, were a daft, pathetic little crew. The sun still rose over America every morning, breezes blew, and rivers flowed. And the best thing one could do was to develop one’s ability, whatever it might be.

My natural bent seemed to be toward writing. I wanted to get into America, at America as a writer. I was trying to develop and discipline what ability I thought I had while fighting the great human-American disease that had sneaked upon me immediately after the war, if not earlier, during my first years in this country.

Was Peter Gale conscious of the disease? for he undoubtedly had a terrible case of it. He probably had no idea what was the matter with him, not really. His idea of himself, in all likelihood, was typically American, superficial. Here he was talking to me in fits and starts, rising, walking around, sitting down, clasping his hands, unclasping his hands. His jitteriness was all outside of him. He had no control over it… To hell with him! Why bother with a fellow like this? Suppose he was an ex-soldier and the grandson of a Carniolan. What of it! Associating with him was liable to aggravate my own problem…

These thoughts, chaotic and disconnected, crossed my mind as I watched him, listened to him, answered his questions, felt annoyed with him. But at the same time he interested me. More and more. I was, indeed, drawn to him. There was a kinship between us. With some reservations, he was I externalized.

Peter Gale moved irrelevantly about the room. He put away the bottle of whisky, locked the closet, and asked me, “D’you feel warm? Shall I open the other window?”

I didn’t feel warm, just vaguely uncomfortable, but I thought perhaps he was warm. “Suit yourself,” I said.

He said, “All right,” and shoved up the window.

Then I thought it would ease the situation (although I didn’t know what it was exactly) if I resumed telling him, superficially, of some of the things that had happened to me since the war, where I had been, what I had done and seen. “As I was saying—”

“Oh yes, yes,” said Peter. “Jeez! I’m sorry! This telephone—”

“That’s all right,” I said; then talked to him for half an hour or a little longer, and he listened, occasionally interrupting me with a question or remark. But it was clear he had something else on his mind. He was aware I was wondering about him, studying him; and now and then he looked at me intently, rigidly, for minutes at a time, not listening, studying me in turn.

Chapter 3

I

Save for a few rather forced remarks about the weather and the lines of a new automobile parked at a spot we passed, Peter Gale and I walked the two blocks from the Romola to the restaurant on Grand in silence. I didn’t feel like talking of my post-war experiences any more. It was too one-sided a game. And, anyhow, I had talked to him very superficially, without satisfaction, merely talked, skimming the bare facts, and thus practically lied to him; for bare facts usually are lies or partlies. Although I had decided that he and I were, more or less, birds of a feather, I had not really opened up to him. I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him of my basic personal problem; and who was he, anyway, that I should really talk to him about myself? Also, he obviously had troubles of his own.

I continued to feel remotely uneasy with him, at the same time that my curiosity and a strange sense of kinship between us prompted me to want to know him in detail, to draw him out… Maybe he wanted to be drawn out. My experience had been that most Americans were eager, at least willing, to tell their stories, if they knew them. Of course, many of them had no stories to tell, just autobiographical anecdotes, brief four-minute tales, little jokes, one after the other, pointless, unconnected, without sequence. They had no sense of any sort of continuity in their lives. In many cases there evidently was no continuity in their lives.