And we, brave Drake? We try to see it, but we cannot see. We try to fathom it, but we cannot plunge. We try to comprehend the hell of hells, the hundred lives of horror, madness, anguish, and despair that were exhausted in five minutes by that shabby creature crouched there on the window-ledge. But we cannot understand, or look at it any longer. It is too hard, too hard, and not to be endured. We turn away with nausea, hollowness, blind fear, and unbelief within us.
One man stares, cranes his neck, wets his lips, and whispers: “Jesus! To do a thing like that takes guts!”
Another, harshly: “Nah! It don’t take guts! A guy who’d do a thing like that is crazy! He don’t know what he’s doin’ to begin with!”
And others, doubtfully, half-whispering, with eyes focused on the ledge: “But Jesus!”
A taxi-driver, turning away and moving towards his cab, with an attempt at casual indifference that does not ring entirely true: “Oh, well! Just another guy, I guess!”
Then one man, turning to his companion with a little puckered smile: “Well, what about it, Al? You still feel like eating?”
And his companion, quietly: “Eating, hell! I feel like two or three stiff shots of rye! Come on, let’s go round to Steve’s!”
They go. The Concentrated Blotters of the World cannot abide it. They must somehow blot it out.
So a policeman comes round the corner now with an old tarpaulin, with which he covers the No-Head. The crowd remains. Then the green wagon from the morgue. The Thing, tarpaulin and all, is pushed into it. It drives away. A policeman with thick-soled boots scuffs and pushes skull-pieces and brain-fragments into the gutter. Someone comes with sawdust, strews it. Someone from the drugstore with formaldehyde. Later, someone with a hose and water. From the subway come an adolescent boy and girl with the hard, tough faces of the city; they walk past it, deliberately and arrogantly step among it, look at the lamp-post, then at each other, and laugh!
All’s over now, all’s gone, the crowd’s departed. Something else remains. It cannot be forgotten. There’s a sick, humid smell upon the air, what was light and clear and crystal has gone out of day, and something thick and glutinous—half taste, half smell, and all impalpable—remains upon your tongue.
There would have been a time and place for such a thing, brave Admiral Drake, if he, our fellow Green, had only fallen as a hollow man and landed dryly, or if he had opened to disperse a grey embalming fluid in the gutter. It would have been all right if he had just been blown away like an old paper, or if he had been swept aside like remnants of familiar litter, and then subsumed into the Standard Concentrated stuff from which he came. But C. Green would not have it so. He exploded to drench our common substance of viscous grey with the bright indecency of blood, to resume himself from number, to become before our eyes a Man, and to identify a single spot of all our general Nothingness with the unique passion, the awful terror, and the dignity of Death.
So, Admiral Drake—“an unidentified man fell ‘or jumped yesterday at noon” from a window of your own hotel. That was the news. Now you’ve had the story.
We are “the hollow men, the hollow men”? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.
30. The Anodyne
Fox read it instantly, the proud nose sniffing upwards sharply—“man fell or jumped…Admiral Francis Drake Hotel…Brooklyn.” The sea-pale eyes took it in at once, and went on to more important things.
Fox was cold, then? Hard? Selfish? Lacking in understanding? Unsympathetic? Unimaginative? By no means.
Could not have known Green, then? Was too much the patrician to know Green? Was too high, too rare, too subtle, too fine-fibred to know Green? None of these.
Fox knew everything, or almost everything. (If there’s a lack here, we will smell it out.) Fox had been born with everything, and had learned much, yet his learning had not made him mad, or ever blunted the keen blade of knowing. He saw all things as they were: had never (in his mind and heart) called man a “white man” yet, because Fox saw man was not “white man”—man was pink man tinged with sallow, man was sallow tinged with grey, man was pink-brown, red-bronze, or white-red-sallow, but not white.
So Fox (in mind and heart) would call it as it was. This was the boy’s straight eye. Yet his clarities were obscured for other men. His straightness was thought cunning by crude-cunning rogues, his warmth seemed ice to all the hearty-false, and to the false-sincere Fox was a twister. Not one of these things was true of him.
Fox knew Green all right—knew him better than we, the Concentrated Blotters of Green’s ilk. For, being of the ilk, we grow confused, struggle with Green (so with ourselves), argue, debate, deny, are tarred with the same brush, and so lose judgment.
Not so, Fox. Not of Green’s ilk, yet was he still of the whole family of earth. Fox knew at once that Green had blood in him. Fox placed him instantly: saw sky above him, Admiral Drake Hotel behind him, lamp-post, pavement, people, Brooklyn corner, cops, rouged Jewesses, the motor-cars, the subway entrance, and exploded brains—and, had he been there, would have said in a low, somewhat puzzled, and abstracted tone: