Or is it?
Here’s how we’re introduced to Bartley Alexander. The dialogue is between his wife, Winifred, and an old professor of his.
“I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. I don’t believe he remembers,” she said suddenly. “Won’t you smoke, Mr. Wilson?”
Wilson lit a cigarette. “No, I don’t suppose he does. He was never introspective. He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I have ever known. We did n’t know exactly what to do with him.”
A servant came in and noiselessly removed the tea-tray. Mrs. Alexander screened her face from the firelight, which was beginning to throw wavering bright spots on her dress and hair as the dusk deepened.
“Of course,” she said, “I now and again hear stories about things that happened when he was in college.”
“But that is n’t what you want.” Wilson wrinkled his brows and looked at her with the smiling familiarity that had come about so quickly. “What you want is a picture of him, standing back there at the other end of twenty years. You want to look down through my memory.”
She dropped her hands in her lap. “Yes, yes; that’s exactly what I want.”
At this moment they heard the front door shut with a jar, and Wilson laughed as Mrs. Alexander rose quickly. “There he is. Away with perspective! No past, no future for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The only moment that ever was or will be in the world!”
A man of the fiery moment, with no past and no future. And while others seem to admire him for this and the success that it has brought him, Bartley’s internal world is much different from their ideal.
He found himself living exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which confronted him, -- of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such a thing possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to be free; and there was still something unconquered in him, something besides the strong work-horse that his profession had made of him. He felt rich to-night in the possession of that unstultified survival; in the light of his experience, it was more precious than honors or achievement. In all those busy, successful years there had been nothing so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling was the only happiness that was real to him, and such hours were the only ones in which he could feel his own continuous identity -- feel the boy he had been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Paris without a dollar in his pocket.
In Bartley’s internal thoughts he lives almost entirely in the past. Indeed…
The man who sat in his offices in Boston was only a powerful machine. Under the activities of that machine the person who, at such moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading and dying. He remembered how, when he was a little boy and his father called him in the morning, he used to leap from his bed into the full consciousness of himself. That consciousness was Life itself. Whatever took its place, action, reflection, the power of concentrated thought, were only functions of a mechanism useful to society; things that could be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had an absolute value for each individual, and it was just that original impulse, that internal heat, that feeling of one’s self in one’s own breast.
And it is in this state, and in his worldly travels that Bartley meets and becomes re-acquainted with Hilda Burgoyne, a woman now of middle-age like him, but whom he had once loved in his fiery youth.
Bartley looked at Hilda across the yellow light of the candles and broke into a low, happy laugh. “How jolly it was being young, Hilda! Do you remember that first walk we took together in Paris? We walked down to the Place Saint-Michel to buy some lilacs. Do you remember how sweet they smelled?”
“Indeed I do. Come, we’ll have our coffee in the other room, and you can smoke.”
Hilda rose quickly, as if she wished to change the drift of their talk, but Bartley found it pleasant to continue it.
“What a warm, soft spring evening that was,” he went on, as they sat down in the study with the coffee on a little table between them; “and the sky, over the bridges, was just the color of the lilacs. We walked on down by the river, did n’t we?”
Hilda laughed and looked at him questioningly. He saw a gleam in her eyes that he remembered even better than the episode he was recalling.
“I think we did,” she answered demurely. “It was on the Quai we met that woman who was crying so bitterly. I gave her a spray of lilac, I remember, and you gave her a franc. I was frightened at your prodigality.”
“I expect it was the last franc I had. What a strong brown face she had, and very tragic. She looked at us with such despair and longing, out from under her black shawl. What she wanted from us was neither our flowers nor our francs, but just our youth. I remember it touched me so. I would have given her some of mine off my back, if I could. I had enough to spare then,” Bartley mused, and looked thoughtfully at his cigar.
They were both remembering what the woman had said when she took the money: “God give you a happy love!” It was not in the ingratiating tone of the habitual beggar: it had come out of the depths of the poor creature’s sorrow, vibrating with pity for their youth and despair at the terribleness of human life; it had the anguish of a voice of prophecy. Until she spoke, Bartley had not realized that he was in love. The strange woman, and her passionate sentence that rang out so sharply, had frightened them both. They went home sadly with the lilacs, back to the Rue Saint-Jacques, walking very slowly, arm in arm. When they reached the house where Hilda lodged, Bartley went across the court with her, and up the dark old stairs to the third landing; and there he had kissed her for the first time. He had shut his eyes to give him the courage, he remembered, and she had trembled so --
Bartley started when Hilda rang the little bell beside her. “Dear me, why did you do that? I had quite forgotten -- I was back there. I as very jolly,” he murmured lazily, as Marie came in to take away the coffee.
In exactly this way Hilda, I believe, is actually the bridge of the book’s title. She is Alexander’s Bridge, not across space, but back across time. A bridge to a past that Bartley thinks he so desperately needs.
The Vibration of an Unnatural Excitement
But that bridge is fraught with danger. For as he indulges himself, each time he journeys across it and enjoys the powerful pulsation of Life that it offers, he finds it increasingly difficult to return, to resume his life in the present and the security that it offers. The compulsion becomes so real that it takes on a kind of dark presence in Bartley’s life.
Left alone, he paced up and down his study. He was at home again, among all the dear familiar things that spoke to him of so many happy years. His house to-night would be full of charming people, who liked and admired him. Yet all the time, underneath his pleasure and hopefulness and satisfaction, he was conscious of the vibration of an unnatural excitement. Amid this light and warmth and friendliness, he sometimes started and shuddered, as if some one had stepped on his grave. Something had broken loose in him of which he knew nothing except that it was sullen and powerful, and that it wrung and tortured him. Sometimes it came upon him softly, in enervating reveries. Sometimes it battered him like the cannon rolling in the hold of the vessel. Always, now, it brought with it a sense of quickened life, of stimulating danger. To-night it came upon him suddenly, as he was walking the floor, after his wife left him. It seemed impossible; he could not believe it. He glanced entreatingly at the door, as if to call her back. He heard voices in the hall below, and knew that he must go down. Going over to the window, he looked out at the lights across the river. How could this happen here, in his own house, among the things he loved? What was it that reached in out of the darkness and thrilled him? As he stood there he had a feeling that he would never escape. He shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold window glass, breathing in the chill that came through it. “That this,” he groaned, “that this should have happened to me!”
Note the way he looks across the river. He will do this numerous times in the remainder of Cather’s short novel, the author, I believe, conflating the twin bridge metaphors -- the external one across space and the internal one across time. He looks longingly at the span across the river not because he wants to be there, but because he wants to be then, and even he, a character in a novel, cannot resist the power of the author’s comparison.
And, of course, the past is intoxicating, not just to Bartley, but as they continue to relive it as he visits London again and again, to Hilda.
After miles of outlying streets and little gloomy houses, they reached London itself, red and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness coming up from the river, that betokened fog again tomorrow. The streets were full of people who had worked indoors all through the priceless day and had now come hungrily out to drink the muddy lees of it. They stood in long black lines, waiting before the pit entrances of the theatres -- short-coated boys, and girls in sailor hats, all shivering and chatting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all the dull city noises -- in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of the buses, in the street calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd. It was like the deep vibration of some vast underground machinery, and like the muffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.
“Seems good to get back, does n’t it?” Bartley whispered, as they drove from Bayswater Road to Oxford Street. “London always makes me want to live more than any other city in the world. You remember our priestess mummy over in the mummy-room, and how we used to long to go and bring her out on nights like this? Three thousand years! Ugh!”
Bartley is referring to antiquities in the British Museum, a place he and Hilda used to frequent when they were young and in love. They talk about places where they might go and have some dinner, and then Bartley asks Hilda if she is not too tired.
“I’m not tired at all. I was just wondering how people can ever die. Why did you remind me of the mummy? Life seems the strongest and most indestructible thing in the world. Do you really believe that all those people rushing about down there, going to good dinners and clubs and theatres, will be dead some day, and not care about anything? I don’t believe it, and I know I shan’t die, ever! You see, I feel too -- too powerful!”
The carriage stopped. Bartley sprang out and swung her quickly to the pavement. As he lifted her in his two hands he whispered: “You are -- powerful!”
Indeed she is. She is a bridge, not just to the past, but to the immortality of youth.
But, of course, it is not to last. In the morality play that all novels of the time must apparently be, Bartley will pay for his indulgence. The dark presence that is his youth exerts greater and greater pressure on him until it forces him to choose between the life he has now and the one he had already lost. In his desperation he writes to Hilda from the comfort of his Boston study, surrounded by the things of his current life which have always given him such happiness.
How is it, I ask myself, that everything can be so different with me when nothing here has changed? I am in my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quiet streets where my friends live. They are all safe and at peace with themselves. But I am never at peace. I feel always on the edge of danger and change.
He goes on.
It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When he tries to live a second, he develops another nature. I feel as if a second man had been grafted into me. At first he seemed only a pleasure-loving simpleton, of whose company I was rather ashamed, and whom I used to hide under my coat when I walked the Embankment, in London. But now he is strong and sullen, and he is fighting for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one activity: to grow strong. No creature ever wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose, he will absorb me altogether.
And eventually, it does. Bartley decides to abandon his current life and move permanently to London to be with Hilda and to resume the path of his youth. He pens a pained letter to his wife, but is called away to inspect his bridge project before he can deliver it. With the potential of his decision tucked carefully in an envelope in his breast pocket, he boards a train and begins his journey north.
The train stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then the hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he was glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on the solid roadbed again. He did not like coming and going across that bridge, or remembering the man who built it. And was he, indeed, the same man who used to walk that bridge at night, promising such things to himself and to the stars? And yet, he could remember it all so well: the quiet hills sleeping in the moonlight, the slender skeleton of the bridge reaching out into the river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big white house; upstairs, in Winifred’s window, the light that told him she was still awake and still thinking of him. And after the light went out he walked alone, taking the heavens into his confidence, unable to tear himself away from the white magic of the night, unwilling to sleep because longing was so sweet to him, and because, for the first time since first the hills were hung with moonlight, there was a lover in the world. And always there was the sound of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death; the wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which men could direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless; death and love, the rushing river and his burning heart.
There is more. The bridge he has been sent to inspect collapses and Bartley and countless others die, but this passage seems more like the climax of the novel -- or if not its climax, then at least its essence. Because the forces that Bartley is wrestling with -- those of death and love, the rushing river and his burning heart -- are, in the end, unresolvable. They subsume the struggle that is the wrenching of meaning out of life, either one just begun or one already half-lived.
Is that clumsy? In a way, I guess it is.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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