Sunday afternoon, and in the cities the chop-suey signs wink on and flash their sterile promises of unborn joy.
Sunday night, and the hard stars, and the bleak enclosures of our wintry weather—the buildings of old rusty brick, in cold enclosed, the fronts of old stark brown, the unpainted houses, the deserted factories, wharves, piers, warehouses, and office buildings, the tormented shabbiness of Sixth Avenues; and in the smaller towns, bleak Main Streets, desolate with shabby store fronts and be-raisined clusters of lamp standards, and in the residential streets of wooden houses (dark by ten o’clock), the moaning of stark branches, the stiff lights, limb-bepatterned, shaking at street corners. The light shines there with wintry bleakness on the clapboard front and porch of a shabby house where the policeman lives—blank and desolate upon the stuffy, boxlike little parlour where the policeman’s daughter amorously receives—and almost—not quite—gives. Hot, fevered, fearful, and insatiate, it is all too close to the cold street light—too creaking, panting, flimsy-close to others in the flimsy house—too close to the policeman’s solid and slow-creaking tread—yet somehow valiant, somehow strong, somehow triumphant over the stale varnish of the little parlour, the nearness of the street, the light, the creaking boughs, and papa’s tread—somehow triumphant with hot panting, with rose lips and tender tongue, white underleg and tight-locked thighs—by these intimacies of fear and fragrant hot desire will beat the ashen monotone of time and even the bleak and grey duration of the winter out.
Does this surprise you, Admiral Drake?
“But Christ!”—Green leaves the house, his life is bitter with desire, the stiff light creaks. “When will it end?” thinks Green. “When will spring come?”
It comes at last unhoped for, after hoping, comes when least expected, and when given up. In March there is a day that’s almost spring, and C. Green, strong with will to have it so, says: “Well, it’s here”—and it is gone like smoke. You can’t look spring too closely in the eye in March. Raw days return, and blown light, and gusty moanings of the wind. Then April comes, and small, soaking rain. The air is wet and raw and chilled, but with a smell of spring now, a smell of earth, of grass exploding in small patches, here and there a blade, a bud, a leaf. And spring comes, marvellous, for a day or two—“It’s here!” Green thinks. “It’s here at last!”—and he is wrong again. It goes, chill days and greyness and small, soaking rains return. Green loses hope. “There is no spring!” he says. “You never get spring any more; you jump from winter into summer—we’ll have summer now and the hot weather before you know it.”
Then spring comes—explodes out of the earth in a green radiance—comes up overnight! It’s April twenty-eighth—the tree there in the city backyard is smoke-yellow, feathered with the striplings of young leaf! It’s April twenty-ninth—the leaf, the yellow, and the smoke have thickened overnight. April thirtieth—you can watch it grow and thicken with your eye! Then May the first—the tree’s in leaf now, almost full and dense, young, feather-fresh! The whole spring has exploded from the earth!
All’s explosive with us really, Admiral Drake—spring, the brutal summer, frost, October, February in Dakota with fifty-one below, spring floods, two hundred drowning along Ohio bottoms, in Missouri, in New England, all through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee. Spring shot at us overnight, and everything with us is vast, explosive, floodlike. A few hundred dead in floods, a hundred in a wave of heat, twelve thousand in a year by murder, thirty thousand with the motor-car—it all means nothing here. Floods like this would drown out France; death like this would plunge England in black mourning; but in America a few thousand C. Greens more or less, drowned, murdered, killed by motor-cars, or dead by jumping out of windows on their heads—well, it just means nothing to us—the next flood, or next week’s crop of death and killings, wash it out. We do things on a large scale, Admiral Drake.