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chapter xxiii
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chapter xxiii And My Own Nearly a whole year passed before I managed to get away. It was the most restless and discontented year of my life. Somehow, as long as I stuck in the rut back there in America I did not fret. Now I looked back at those twenty incredible years and marveled that I had survived them. The longing for Vaslui was getting so keen it bordered on pain. It was something vastly more poignant than just homesickness . It became an obsession, a downright hunger. Time and again I paused and pinched myself to make sure I was not dreaming. I had dreamed about it so long and so often—yes, literally dreamed; back in my slum days, regretfully; later, in the Middle West, with a dull ache; more recently, with an adoring tenderness—that I could no longer think of it by daylight as a real place.How many nights, do you suppose, had I seen myself pulling into its little brick station, and heard the conductor shouting, “Vaslui, ten minutes,” and found my mother exactly where I had left her,and walked up that long road to town, that Via Dolorosa of hers, and reveled in its familiar sights, and vowed that never, never would I go away again. Was there now actually such a place, or had I invented it for some novel I was going to write? Or maybe it was like that village of Germelshausen which I had read about, and which had a trick of disappearing for a hundred years at a time. It would not have surprised me at all if, after landing somewhere in Rumania, I had stepped up to the window to ask for a ticket to Vaslui and been stared at by the girl agent in stark terror. This dawdling abroad and not getting to the one place that was Europe to me was getting on my nerves. What did I care about Paris and all the rest as long as my Eldorado,Vaslui the Golden,was still hundreds of leagues removed? It was but a station on the way. And I felt as irritated as any traveler whose train is needlessly held up at some junction halfway to his destination. On one occasion this tantalizing delay brought me nearly to the breaking point. Not more than a month after our landing in Europe I 189 did succeed in wrenching myself away. I got to Prague. I stopped ten days in Vienna and a week in Budapest, almost touching the threshold of my own country. Then came a telegram, and I had to rush back posthaste to Paris. It looked as if the fates had maliciously conspired to keep me from my goal. To me, Vaslui was something of a sacred memory. That was about all. It was the place where my father and mother had lived and died. Half the time it was the hardest thing imaginable to convince myself that I had ever been there in the flesh. I had merely heard about it from my parents, so often and so vividly that it had come to seem real. It was not in Rumania. Where in the world was Rumania? I could as easily placeVaslui in Tennessee; but I could not make myself realize that I had ever belonged anywhere but in America. That green youth who had emigrated twenty years before from Vaslui, and who was supposed to be no less a person than myself, was as thin as air. He was just a character in my own book, a mere invention . I could not help smiling as I went back and read of his exploits. That raw, romantic innocent who, without ever having quit his mother’s apron strings, was setting out to conquer America! And then his fantastic doings in the slums and sweatshops of New York—had I ever been in the skin of that young fool? But little by little he was taking shape. Pretty soon he found his tongue, shed his steerage trappings , and wrenched himself loose from the foreign colony altogether. The dumb, gesticulating, unkempt, comic-opera alien dived down into the seething rapids of American life and came up again—a student in a Middle Western college, speaking the language of Missouri, rooting at the games, earning his way through—for all the world one of the hundred million; a sample product of the American miracle plant; a full-eared cornstalk shot up out of a Rumanian...