Of Time and the River (20 page)
There was laughter.
He was for ever making these epigrams; his face had a somewhat saturnine cast, his lips twisted ironically, his eyes shot splintered promises of satiric wisdom. He looked like a very caustically humorous person; but unhappily he had no humour. But they thought he had. No one with a face like that could be less than keen.
So he had something to say for every occasion. He had discovered that the manner counted for wit. If the talk was of Shaw’s deficiencies as a dramatist, he might say:
“But, after all, if one is going in for all that sort of thing, why not have lantern slides and a course of lectures?”
Thus he was known, not merely as a subtle-souled and elusive psychologist but also as a biting wit.
“Galsworthy wrote something that looked like a play once,” someone remarked. “There were parts of Justice that weren’t bad.”
“Yes. Yes,” said Dodd, peering intently at his language. “Justice—there were some interesting things in that. It’s—it’s— it’s rather a PITY about him, isn’t it?” And as he said these words he frowned earnestly and intently. There was genuine pity in his voice, for the man’s spirit had great charity and sweetness in it.
As they dispersed, someone remarked that Shaw might have made a dramatist if he had ever known anything about writing a play.
“But he DATES so—how he DATES!” Scoville remarked.
“Those earlier plays—”
“Yes, I agree”—thus Wood again. “Almost Mid-Victorian. Shaw:—a prophet with his face turned backwards.” Then they went away in small groups.
XI
To reach his own “office,” as Bascom Pentland called the tiny cubicle in which he worked and received his clients, the old man had to traverse the inner room and open a door in a flimsy partition of varnished wood and glazed glass at the other end. This was his office: it was really a very narrow slice cut off from the larger room, and in it there was barely space for one large dirty window, an ancient dilapidated desk and swivel chair, a very small battered safe buried under stacks of yellowed newspapers, and a small bookcase with glass doors and two small shelves on which there were a few worn volumes. An inspection of these books would have revealed four or five tattered and musty law books in their ponderous calf-skin bindings—one on Contracts, one on Real Property, one on Titles—a two-volume edition of the poems of Matthew Arnold, very dog-eared and thumbed over; a copy of Sartor Resartus, also much used; a volume of the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the Iliad in Greek with minute yellowed notations in the margins; a volume of the World Almanac several years old; and a very worn volume of the Holy Bible, greatly used and annotated in Bascom’s small, stiffly laborious, and meticulous hand.
If the old man was a little late, as sometimes happened, he might find his colleagues there before him. Miss Muriel Brill, the typist, and the eldest daughter of Mr. John T. Brill, would be seated in her typist’s chair, her heavy legs crossed as she bent over to undo the metal latches of the thick galoshes she wore during the winter season. It is true there were also other seasons when Miss Brill did not wear galoshes, but so sharply and strongly do our memories connect people with certain gestures which, often for an inscrutable reason, seem characteristic of them, that any frequent visitor to these offices at this time of day would doubtless have remembered Miss Brill as always unfastening her galoshes. But the probable reason is that some people inevitably belong to seasons, and this girl’s season was winter—not blizzards or howling winds, or the blind skirl and sweep of snow, but grey, grim, raw, thick, implacable winter: the endless successions of grey days and grey monotony. There was no spark of colour in her, her body was somewhat thick and heavy, her face was white, dull, and thick-featured and instead of tapering downwards, it tapered up: it was small above, and thick and heavy below, and even in her speech, the words she uttered seemed to have been chosen by an automaton, and could only be remembered later by their desolate banality. One always remembered her as saying as one entered: “. . . Hello! . . . You’re becoming quite a strangeh! . . . It’s been some time since you was around, hasn’t it? . . . I was thinkin’ the otheh day it had been some time since you was around. . . . I’d begun to think you had forgotten us. . . . Well, how’ve you been? Lookin’ the same as usual, I see. . . . Me? . . . Oh, can’t complain. . . . Keepin’ busy? I’LL say! I manage to keep goin’. . . . Who you lookin’ for? Father? He’s in THERE. . . . Why, yeah! Go right on in.”
This was Miss Brill, and at the moment that she bent to unfasten her galoshes, it is likely that Mr. Samuel Friedman would also be there in the act of rubbing his small dry hands briskly together, or of rubbing the back of one hand with the palm of the other in order to induce circulation. He was a small youngish man, a pale somewhat meagre-looking little Jew with a sharp ferret face: he, too, was a person who goes to “fill in” those vast swarming masses of people along the pavements and in the subway—the mind cannot remember them or absorb the details of their individual appearance, but they people the earth, they make up life. Mr. Friedman had none of the richness, colour, and humour that some members of his race so abundantly possess; the succession of grey days, the grim weather seemed to have entered his soul as it enters the souls of many different races there—the Irish, the older New England stock, even the Jews—and it gives them a common touch that is prim, drab, careful, tight and sour. Mr. Friedman also wore galoshes, his clothes were neat, drab, a little worn and shiny, there was an odour of thawing dampness and warm rubber about him as he rubbed his dry little hands saying: “Chee! How I hated to leave that good wahm bed this morning! When I got up I said, ‘HOLY Chee!’ My wife says, ‘Whatsa mattah?’ I says, ‘Holy Chee! You step out heah a moment where I am an’ you’ll see whatsa mattah.’ ‘Is it cold?’ she says. ‘Is it cold! I’ll tell the cock-eyed wuhld!’ I says. Chee! You could have cut the frost with an axe: the wateh in the pitchehs was frozen hahd; an’ she has the nuhve to ask me if it’s cold! Is it cold!’ I says. ‘Do you know any more funny stories?’ I says. Oh, how I do love my bed! Chee! I kept thinkin’ of that guy in Braintree I got to go see today an’ the more I thought about him, the less I liked him! I thought my feet would tu’n into two blocks of ice before I got the funniss stahted! ‘Chee! I hope the ole bus is still workin’,’ I says. If I’ve got to go thaw that damned thing out,’ I says, ‘I’m ready to quit.’ Chee! Well, suh, I neveh had a bit of trouble: she stahted right up an’ the way that ole moteh was workin’ is nobody’s business.”
During the course of this monologue Miss Brill would give ear and assent from time to time by the simple interjection: “Uh!” It was a sound she uttered frequently, it had somewhat the same meaning as “Yes,” but it was more non-committal than “Yes.” It seemed to render assent to the speaker, to let him know that he was being heard and understood, but it did not commit the auditor to any opinion, or to any real agreement.
The third member of this office staff, who was likely to be present at this time, was a gentleman named Stanley P. Ward. Mr. Stanley P. Ward was a neat middling figure of a man, aged fifty or thereabouts; he was plump and had a pink tender skin, a trim Vandyke, and a nice comfortable little pot of a belly which slipped snugly into the well-pressed and well-brushed garments that always fitted him so tidily. He was a bit of a fop, and it was at once evident that he was quietly but enormously pleased with himself. He carried himself very sprucely, he took short rapid steps and his neat little paunch gave his figure a movement not unlike that of a pouter pigeon. He was usually in quiet but excellent spirits, he laughed frequently and a smile—rather a subtly amused look—was generally playing about the edges of his mouth. That smile and his laugh made some people vaguely uncomfortable: there was a kind of deliberate falseness in them, as if what he really thought and felt was not to be shared with other men. He seemed, in fact, to have discovered some vital and secret power, some superior knowledge and wisdom, from which the rest of mankind was excluded, a sense that he was “chosen” above other men, and this impression of Mr. Stanley Ward would have been correct, for he was a Christian Scientist, he was a pillar of the Church, and a very big Church at that—for Mr. Ward, dressed in fashionable striped trousers, rubber soles, and a cut-away coat, might be found somewhere under the mighty dome of the Mother Church on Huntingdon Avenue every Sunday suavely, noiselessly, and expertly ushering the faithful to their pews.
This completes the personnel of the first office of the John T. Brill Realty Company, and if Bascom Pentland arrived late, if these three people were already present, if Mr. Bascom Pentland had not been defrauded of any part of his worldly goods by some contriving rascal of whom the world has many, if his life had not been imperilled by some speed maniac, if the damnable New England weather was not too damnable, if, in short, Bascom Pentland was in fairly good spirits he would on entering immediately howl in a high, rapid, remote and perfectly monotonous tone: “Hello, Hello, Hello! Good morning, Good morning, Good-morning!”—after which he would close his eyes, grimace horribly, press his rubbery lip against his big horse-teeth, and snuffle with laughter through his nose, as if pleased by a tremendous stroke of wit. At this demonstration the other members of the group would glance at one another with those knowing, subtly supercilious nods and winks, that look of common self-congratulation and humour with which the more “normal” members of society greet the conduct of an eccentric, and Mr. Samuel Friedman would say: “What’s the mattah with you, Pop? You look happy. Some one musta give you a shot in the ahm.”
At which, a course powerful voice, deliberate and rich with its intimation of immense and earthy vulgarity, might roar out of the depth of the inner office: “No, I’ll tell you what it is.” Here the great figure of Mr. John T. Brill, the head of the business, would darken the doorway. “Don’t you know what’s wrong with the Reverend? It’s that widder he’s been takin’ around.” Here, the phlegmy burble that prefaced all of Mr. Brill’s obscenities would appear in his voice, the shadow of a lewd smile would play around the corner of his mouth: “It’s the widder. She’s let him have a little of it.”
At this delicate stroke of humour, the burble would burst open in Mr. Brill’s great red throat, and he would roar with that high, choking, phlegmy laughter that is frequent among big red-faced men. Mr. Friedman would laugh drily (“Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!”), Mr. Stanley Ward would laugh more heartily, but complacently, and Miss Brill would snicker in a coy and subdued manner as became a modest young girl. As for Bascom Pentland, if he was really in a good humour, he might snuffle with nosy laughter, bend double at his meagre waist, clutching his big hands together, and stamp at the floor violently several times with one stringy leg; he might even go so far as to take a random ecstatic kick at objects, still stamping and snuffling with laughter, and prod Miss Brill stiffly with two enormous bony fingers, as if he did not wish the full point and flavour of the jest to be lost on her.
Bascom Pentland, however, was a very complicated person with many moods, and if Mr. Brill’s fooling did not catch him in a receptive one, he might contort his face in a pucker of refined disgust, and mutter his disapproval, as he shook his head rapidly from side to side. Or he might rise to great heights of moral denunciation, beginning at first in a grave low voice that showed the seriousness of the words he had to utter: “The lady to whom you refer,” he would begin, “the very charming and cultivated lady whose name, sir”—here his voice would rise on its howling note and he would wag his great bony forefinger—“whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened—”
“No, I wasn’t, Reverend. I was only tryin’ to whiten it,” said Mr. Brill, beginning to burble with laughter.
“—Whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened with your smutty suggestions,” Bascom continued implacably, “—that lady is known to me, as you very well know, sir,” he howled, wagging his great finger again, “solely and simply in a professional capacity.”
“Why, hell, Reverend,” said Mr. Brill innocently, “I never knew she was a perfessional. I thought she was an amatoor.”
At this conclusive stroke, Mr. Brill would make the whole place tremble with his laughter, Mr. Friedman would laugh almost noiselessly, holding himself weakly at the stomach and bending across a desk, Mr. Ward would have short bursts and fits of laughter, as he gazed out the window, shaking his head deprecatingly from time to time, as if his more serious nature disapproved, and Miss Brill would snicker, and turn to her machine, remarking: “This conversation is getting too rough for me!”
And Bascom, if this jesting touched his complex soul at one of those moments when such profanity shocked him, would walk away, confiding into vacancy, it seemed, with his powerful and mobile features contorted in the most eloquent expression of disgust and loathing ever seen on any face, the while he muttered, in a resonant whisper that shuddered with passionate revulsion: “Oh, BAD! Oh, BAD! Oh, BAD! BAD! BAD!”—shaking his head slightly from side to side with each word.
Yet there were other times, when Brill’s swingeing vulgarity, the vast coarse sweep of his profanity not only found Uncle Bascom in a completely receptive mood, but evoked from him gleeful responses, counter-essays in swearing which he made slyly, craftily, snickering with pleasure and squinting around at his listeners at the sound of the words, and getting such stimulus from them as might a renegade clergyman exulting in a feeling of depravity and abandonment for the first time.
To the other people in this office—that is, to Friedman, Ward, and Muriel, the stenographer—the old man was always an enigma; at first they had observed his peculiarities of speech and dress, his eccentricity of manner, and the sudden, violent, and complicated fluctuation of his temperament, with astonishment and wonder, then with laughter and ridicule, and now, with dull, uncomprehending acceptance. Nothing he did or said surprised them any more, they had no understanding and little curiosity, they accepted him as a fact in the grey schedule of their lives. Their relation to him was habitually touched by a kind of patronizing banter—“kidding the old boy along,” they would have called it—by the communication of smug superior winks and the conspiracy of feeble jests. And in this there was something base and ignoble, for Bascom was a better man than any of them.