Lonesome Traveler (20 page)

APRIL IN Paris, sleet in Pigalle, and last moments.—In my skidrow hotel it was cold and still sleeting so I put on my old blue jeans, old muffcap, railroad gloves and zip-up rain jacket, the same clothes I'd worn as a brakeman in the mountains of California and as a forester in the Northwest, and hurried across the Seine to Les Halles for a last supper of fresh bread and onion soup and
pâté
.—Now for delights, walking in the cold dusk of Paris amid vast flower markets, then succumbing to thin crisp
frites
with rich sausage hot dog from a stall on the windswept corner, then into a mobbed mad restaurant full of gay workers and bourgeois where I was temporarily peeved because they forgot to bring me wine too, so gay and red in a clean stemmed glass.—After eating, sauntering on home to pack for London
tomorrow, then deciding to buy one final Parisian pastry, intending a Napoleon as usual, but because the girl thought I'd said “Milanais” I accepted her offer and took a bite of my Milanais as I crossed the bridge and bang! the absolutely final greatest of all pastries in the world, for the first time in my life I felt overpowered by a taste sensation, a rich brown mocha cream covered with slivered almonds and just a touch of cake but so pungent that it stole through my nose and taste buds like bourbon or rum with coffee and cream.— I hurried back, bought another and had the second one with a little hot
espresso
in a cafe across the street from the Sarah Bernhardt Theater—my last delight in Paris savoring the taste and watching Proustian show-goers coming out of the theater to hail cabs.

In the morning, at six, I rose and washed at the sink and the water running in my faucet talked in a kind of Cockney accent.— I hurried out with full pack on back, and in the park a bird I never heard, a Paris warbler by the smoky morning Seine.

I took the train to Dieppe and off we went, through smoky suburbs, through Normandy, through gloomy fields of pure green, little stone cottages, some red brick, some half-timbered, some stone, in a drizzle along the canal-like Seine, colder and colder, through Vernon and little places with names like Vauvay and Something-sur-Cie, to gloomy Rouen, which is a horrible rainy dreary place to have been burned at the stake.— All the time my mind excited with the thought of England by nightfall, London, the fog of real old London.— As usual I was standing in the cold vestibule, no room inside the train, sitting occasionally on my pack crowded in with a gang of shouting Welsh schoolboys and their quiet coach who loaned me the
Daily Mail
to read.— After Rouen the ever-more-gloomy Normandy hedgerows and meadows, then Dieppe with its red rooftops
and old quais and cobblestoned streets with bicyclists, the chimney pots smoking, gloom rain, bitter cold in April and I sick of France at last.

The channel boat crowded to the hilt, hundreds of students and scores of beautiful French and English girls with pony tails and short haircuts.— Swiftly we left the French shore and after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle, England, springtime in England.

All the students sang in gay gangs and went through to their chartered London coach car but I was made to sit (I was a take-a-seater) because I had been silly enough to admit that I had only fifteen shillings equivalent in my pocket.— I sat next to a West Indies Negro who had no passport at all and was carrying piles of strange old coats and pants—he answered strangely the questions of the officers, looked extremely vague and in fact I remembered he had bumped into me absentmindedly in the boat on the way over.— Two tall English bobbies in blue were watching him (and myself) suspiciously, with sinister Scotland Yard smiles and strange long-nosed brooding attentiveness like in old Sherlock Holmes movies.— The Negro looked at them terrified. One of his coats dropped on the floor but he didn't bother to pick it up.— A mad gleam had come into the eyes of the immigration officer (young intellectual fop) and now another mad gleam in some detective's eye and suddenly I realized the Negro and I were surrounded.— Out came a huge jolly redheaded customs man to interrogate us.

I told them my story—I was going to London to pick up a royalty check from an English publisher and then on to New York on the
lie de France
.—They didn't believe my story—I wasn't shaved, I had a pack on my back, I looked like a bum.

“What do you
think
I am!” I said and the redheaded man said “That's just it, we don't quite know in the least what you were doing in Morocco, or in France, or arriving in England with fifteen bob.” I told them to call my publishers or my agent in London. They called and got no answer—it was Saturday. The bobbies were watching me, stroking their chins.— The Negro had been taken into the back by now—suddenly I heard a horrible moaning, as of a psychopath in a mental hospital, and I said “What's that?”

“That's your Negro friend.”

“What's the matter with him?”

“He has no passport, no money, and is apparently escaped from a mental institution in France. Now do you have any way to verify this story of yours, otherwise we s'll have to detain you.”

“In custody?”

“Quite. My dear fellow, you can't come into England with fifteen bob.”

“My dear fellow, you can't put an American in jail.”

“Oh yes we can, if we have grounds for suspicion.”

“Dont you believe I'm a writer?”

“We have no way of knowing this.”

“But I'm going to miss my train. It's due to leave any minute.”

“My dear fellow …” I rifled through my bag and suddenly found a note in a magazine about me and Henry Miller as writers and showed it to the customs man. He beamed:

“Henry Miller? That's most unusual. We stopped
him
several years ago, he wrote quite a bit about New-haven.” (This was a grimmer New Haven than the one in Connecticut with its dawn coalsmokes.) But the customs man was immensely pleased, checked my name again, in the article and on my papers, and said, “Well,
I'm afraid it's going to be all smiles and handshakes now. I'm awfully sorry. I think we can let you through—with the provision that you leave England inside a month.”

“Don't worry.” As the Negro screamed and banged somewhere inside and I felt a horrible sorrow because he had not made it to the other shore, I ran to the train and made it barely in time.— The gay students were all in the front somewhere and I had a whole car to myself, and off we went silently and fast in a fine English train across the countryside of olden Blake lambs.—And I was safe.

English countryside—quiet farms, cows, meads, moors, narrow roads and bicycling farmers waiting at crossings, and ahead, Saturday night in London.

Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees.— Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines.— Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buckingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.)—Past the Palace, down the Mall through St. James's Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St. Paul's Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad.— So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.

I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight. “My dear fellow it's awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon. We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?”

“Yes!” So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham
Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple.— He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan's
English Social History
.—Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie.— Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England.— They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinking, “Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?” The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.— Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.

And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the
St. Matthew Passion
by the St. PauPs—choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir.— I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother's kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again.— And realized that it didn't matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either.— Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: “And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages,” Outside as I walked in the dusk
around Christopher Wren's great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler's blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission.

In the British Museum I looked up my family in
Rivista Araldica
, IV, Page 240, “Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.”

I could have known.

At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton.— The performance was
Antony and Cleopatra
.—It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra's words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobar-bus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the drunken rout on Pompey's boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played.

On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees growing out of Shakespeare's fields, and the dreaming meadows full of lamb dots.

THE AMERICAN HOBO HAS A HARD TIME hoboing nowadays due to the increase in police surveillance of highways, railroad yards, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the thousand-and-one hiding holes of industrial night.— In California, the pack rat, the original old type who goes walking from town to town with supplies and bedding on his back, the “Homeless Brother,” has practically vanished, along with the ancient gold-panning desert rat who used to walk with hope in his heart through struggling Western towns that are now so prosperous they dont want old bums any more.— “Man dont want no pack rats here even though they founded California” said an old man hiding with a can of beans and an Indian fire in a river bottom outside Riverside California in 1955.—Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to
freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy.—There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.

I myself was a hobo but only of sorts, as you see, because I knew someday my literary efforts would be rewarded by social protection—I was not a real hobo with no hope ever except that secret eternal hope you get sleeping in empty boxcars flying up the Salinas Valley in hot January sunshine full of Golden Eternity toward San Jose where mean-looking old bo's ‘ll look at you from surly lips and offer you something to eat and
a
drink too—down by the tracks or in the Guadaloupe Creekbottom.

The original hobo dream was best expressed in a lovely little poem mentioned by Dwight Goddard in his
Buddhist Bible:

Oh for this one rare occurrence

Gladly would I give ten thousand pieces of gold!

A hat is on my head, a bundle on my back
,

And my staff, the refreshing breeze and the full moon
.

In America there has always been (you will notice the peculiarly Whitmanesque tone of this poem, probably written by old Goddard) a definite special idea of footwalking freedom going back to the days of Jim Bridger and Johnny Appleseed and carried on today by a vanishing group of hardy old timers still seen sometimes waiting in a desert highway for a short bus ride into town for panhandling (or work) and grub, or wandering the Eastern part of the country hitting Salvation Armies and moving on from town to town and state to state toward the eventual doom of big-city skid rows when their feet give out.— Nevertheless not long ago in California I did see (deep in the gorge by a railroad track outside San Jose buried in eucalyptus leaves and the blessed oblivion of vines) a bunch of cardboard and
jerrybuilt huts at evening in front of one of which sat an aged man puffing his 15¢ Granger tobacco in his corncob pipe (Japan's mountains are full of free huts and old men who cackle over root brews waiting for Supreme Enlightenment which is only obtainable through occasional complete solitude.)

In America camping is considered a healthy sport for Boy Scouts but a crime for mature men who have made it their vocation.— Poverty is considered a virtue among the monks of civilized nations—in America you spend a night in the calaboose if you're caught short without your vagrancy change (it was fifty cents last I heard of, Pard—what now?)