Of Time and the River (30 page)
“Is there any other comment?”
XVII
Often during these years of fury, hunger, and unrest, when he was trying to read all the books and know all the people, he would live for days, and even for weeks, in a world of such mad and savage concentration, such terrific energy, that time would pass by him incredibly, while he tried to eat and drink the earth, stare his way through walls of solid masonry into the secret lives of men, until he had made the substance of all life his own.
And during all this time, although he was living a life of the most savage conflict, the most blazing energy, wrestling day by day with the herculean forces of the million-footed city, listening to a million words and peering into a hundred thousand faces, he would nevertheless spend a life of such utter loneliness that he would go for days at a time without seeing a face or hearing a voice that he knew, and until the sound of his own voice seemed strange and phantasmal to him.
Then suddenly he would seem to awake out of this terrific vision, which had been so savage, mad, and literal that its very reality had a fabulous and dreamlike quality, and time, strange million- visaged time, had been telescoped incredibly, so that weeks had passed by like a single day. He would awake out of this living dream and see the minutes, hours, and days, and all the acts and faces of the earth pass by him in their usual way. And instantly, when this happened, he would feel a bitter and intolerable loneliness—a loneliness so acrid, grey, and bitter that he could taste its sharp thin crust around the edges of his mouth like the taste and odour of weary burnt-out steel, like a depleted storage battery or a light that had gone dim, and he could feel it greyly and intolerably in his entrails, the conduits of his blood, and in all the substance of his body.
When this happened, he would feel an almost unbearable need to hear the voice and see the face again of someone he had known and at such a time as this he would go to see his Uncle Bascom, that strange and extraordinary man who, born like the others in the wilderness, the hills of home, had left these hills for ever.
Bascom now lived alone with his wife (for his four children were grown up and would have none of him) in a dingy section of one of the innumerable suburbs that form part of the terrific ganglia of Boston, and it was here that the boy would often go on Sundays.
After a long confusing journey that was made by subway, elevated, and street car, he would leave the chill and dismal street car at the foot of a hill on a long, wide, and frozen street lined with tall rows of wintry elms, with smoky wintry houses that had a look of solid, closed and mellow warmth, and with a savage frozen waste of tidal waters on the right—those New England waters that are so sparkling, fresh and glorious, like a tide of sapphires, in the springtime, and so grim and savage in their frozen desolation in the winter.
Then the street car would bang its draughty sliding doors together, grind harshly off with its cargo of people with pinched lips, thin red pointed noses, and cod-fish faces, and vanish, leaving him with the kind of loneliness and absence which a street car always leaves when it has gone, and he would turn away from the tracks along a dismal road or street that led into the district where his uncle had his house. And stolidly he would plunge forward against the grey and frozen desolation of that place to meet him.
And at length he would pause before his uncle’s little house, and as he struck the knocker, he was always glad to hear the approaching patter of his Aunt Louise’s feet, and cheered by the brightening glance of her small birdy features, as she opened the door for him, inwardly exultant to hear her confirm in her bright ladylike tones his own prediction of what she would say: “Oh, THEAH you ah! I was wondering what was keeping you.”
A moment later he would be greeted from the cellar or the kitchen by his uncle Bascom’s high, husky and yet strangely remote yell, the voice of a prophet calling from a mountain:
“Hello, Eugene, my boy. Is that YOU?” And a moment later the old man would appear, coming up to meet him from some lower cellar- depth, swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward him howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed and faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching his great hands together at his waist; then hold one gaunt hand out to him and howl:
“Hello, hello, hello, sit down, sit down, sit down,” after which, for no apparent reason, he would contort his gaunt face in a horrible grimace, convolve his amazing rubbery lips, and close his eyes and his mouth tightly and laugh through his nose in forced snarls: “Phuh! Phuh Phuh! Phuh! Phuh!”
Bascom Pentland had been the scholar of his amazing family: he was a man of powerful intelligence and disordered emotions. Even in his youth, his eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, manner had made him an object of ridicule to his Southern kinsmen, but their ridicule was streaked with pride, since they accepted the impact of his personality as another proof that theirs was an extraordinary family. “He’s one of ‘em, all right,” they said exultantly, “queerer than any of us!”
Bascom’s youth, following the war between the States, had been seared by a bitter poverty, at once enriched and warped by a life that clung to the earth with a rootlike tenacity that was manual, painful, spare and stricken, and that rebuilt itself—fiercely, cruelly, and richly—from the earth. And because there burned and blazed in him from the first a hatred of human indignity, a passionate avowal of man’s highness and repose, he felt more bitterly than the others the delinquencies of his father, and the multiplication of his father’s offspring, who came regularly into a world of empty cupboards.
“As each of them made its unhappy entrance into the world,” he would say later, his voice tremulous with passion, “I went out into the woods striking my head against the trees, and blaspheming God in my anger. Yes, sir,” he continued, pursing his long lip rapidly against his few loose upper teeth, and speaking with an exaggerated pedantry of enunciation, “I am not ashamed to confess that I did. For we were living in conditions un-WORTHY—UNWORTHY”—his voice rising to an evangelical yell, “I had almost said—of the condition of animals. And—SAY—what do you think?”—he said, with a sudden shift in manner and tone, becoming, after his episcopal declaration, matter of fact and whisperingly confidential. “Why, do you know, my boy, at one time I had to take my OWN father aside and point out to him we were living in no way becoming decent people.”—Here his voice sank to a whisper, and he tapped Eugene on the knee with his big, stiff finger, grimacing horribly and pursing his lip against his dry upper teeth.
Poverty had been the mistress of his youth and Bascom Pentland had not forgotten: poverty had burned its way into his heart. He took what education he could find in a backwoods school, read everything he could, taught, for two or three years, in a country school and, at the age of twenty-one, borrowing enough money for railway fare, went to Boston to enrol himself at Harvard. And, somehow, because of the fire that burned in him, the fierce determination of his soul, he had been admitted, secured employment waiting on tables, tutoring, and pressing everyone’s trousers but his own, and lived in a room with two other starved wretches on $3.50 a week, cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, and studying in the one place.
At the end of seven years he had gone through the college and the school of theology, performing brilliantly in Greek, Hebrew, and metaphysics.
Poverty, fanatical study, the sexual meagreness of his surroundings, had made of him a gaunt zealot: at thirty he was a lean fanatic, a true Yankee madman, high-boned, with grey thirsty eyes and a thick flaring sheaf of oaken hair—six feet three inches of gangling and ludicrous height, gesticulating madly and obliviously before a grinning world. But he had a grand lean head: he looked somewhat like the great Ralph Waldo Emerson—with the brakes off.
About this time he married a young Southern woman of a good family: she was from Tennessee, her parents were both dead, and in the ‘seventies she had come North and had lived for several years with an uncle in Providence, who had been constituted guardian of her estate, amounting probably to about $75,000, although her romantic memory later multiplied the sum to $200,000. The man squandered part of her money and stole the rest: she came, therefore, to Bascom without much dowry, but she was pretty, bright, intelligent, and had a good figure. Bascom smote the walls of his room with bloody knuckles, and fell down before God.
When Bascom met her she was a music student in Boston: she had a deep full-toned contralto voice which was wrung from her somewhat tremulously when she sang. She was a small woman, birdlike and earnest, delicately fleshed and boned, quick and active in her movements and with a crisp tart speech which still bore, curiously, traces of a Southern accent. She was a brisk, serious, ladylike little person, without much humour, and she was very much in love with her gaunt suitor. They saw each other for two years: they went to concerts, lectures, sermons; they talked of music, poetry, philosophy and of God, but they never spoke of love. But one night Bascom met her in the parlour of her boarding-house on Huntington Avenue, and with a voice vibrant and portentous with the importance of the words he had to utter, began as follows: “Miss Louise!” he said carefully, gazing thoughtfully over the apex of his hands, “there comes a time when a man, having reached an age of discretion and mature judgment, must begin to consider one of the GRAVEST— yes! by all means one of the most important events in human life. The event I refer to is—matrimony.” He paused, a clock was beating out its punctual measured tock upon the mantel, and a horse went by with ringing hoofs upon the street. As for Louise, she sat quietly erect, with dignified and ladylike composure, but it seemed to her that the clock was beating in her own breast, and that it might cease to beat at any moment.
“For a minister of the Gospel,” Bascom continued, “the decision is particularly grave, because, for him—once made, it is IRREVOCABLE, once determined upon, it must be followed INEXORABLY, RELENTLESSLY— aye! to the edge of the grave, to the UTTERMOST gates of death, so that the possibility of an error in judgment is FRAUGHT”—his voice sinking to a boding whisper—“is FRAUGHT with the most terrible consequences. Accordingly,” Uncle Bascom said in a deliberate tone, “having decided to take this step, realizing to the FULL—to the FULL, mind you—its gravity, I have searched my soul, I have questioned my heart. I have gone up into the mount-ings and out into the desert and communed with my MAKER until”—his voice rose like a demon’s howl—“there no longer remains an ATOM of doubt, a PARTICLE of uncertainty, a VESTIGE of DISBELIEF! Miss Louise, I have decided that the young lady best fitted in every way to be my helpmate, the partner of my joys and griefs, the confidante of my dearest hopes, the in-SPIR-a-tion of my noblest endeavours, the companion of my declining years, and the SPIRIT that shall accompany me along each step of life’s vexed and troubled way, sharing with me whatever God in His INSCRUTABLE Providence shall will, whether of wealth or poverty, grief or happiness—I have decided, Miss Louise, that that lady must be—yourself!—and, therefore, I request,” he said slowly and impressively, “the honour of your hand in mar-ri-age.”
She loved him, she had hoped, prayed, and agonized for just such a moment, but now that it had come she rose immediately with ladylike dignity, and said: “Mistah Pentland: I am honuhed by this mahk of yoah esteem and affection, and I pwomise to give it my most UNnest considahwation without delay. I wealize fully, Mistah Pentland, the gwavity of the wuhds you have just uttuhed. Foh my paht, I must tell you, Mistah Pentland, that if I accept yoah pwoposal, I shall come to you without the fawchun which was WIGHTfully mine, but of which I have been depwived and defwauded by the WASCALITY— yes! the WASCALITY of my gahdian. I shall come to you, theahfoh, without the dow’y I had hoped to be able to contwibute to my husband’s fawchuns.”
“Oh, my DEAR Miss Louise! My DEAR young lady!” Uncle Bascom cried, waving his great hand through the air with a dismissing gesture. “Do not suppose—do not for one instant suppose, I beg of you!— that consideration of a monetary nature could influence my decision. Oh, not in the slightest!” he cried. “Not at all, not at all!”
“Fawchnatly,” Louise continued, “my inhewitance was not WHOLLY dissipated by this scoundwel. A pohtion, a vewy small pohtion, remains.”
“My dear girl! My dear young lady!” Uncle Bascom cried. “It is not of the SLIGHTEST consequence. . . . How much did he leave?” he added.
Thus they were married.
Bascom immediately got a church in the Middle West: good pay and a house. But during the course of the next twenty years he was shifted from church to church, from sect to sect—to Brooklyn, then back to the Middle West, to the Dakotas, to Jersey City, to Western Massachusetts, and finally back to the small towns surrounding Boston.
When Bascom talked, you may be sure God listened: he preached magnificently, his gaunt face glowing from the pulpit, his rather high, enormously vibrant voice husky with emotion. His prayers were fierce solicitations of God, so mad with fervour that his audiences uncomfortably felt they came close to blasphemy. But, unhappily, on occasions his own mad eloquence grew too much for him: his voice, always too near the heart of passion, would burst in splinters, and he would fall violently forward across his lectern, his face covered by his great gaunt fingers, sobbing horribly.
This, in the Middle West, where his first church had been, does not go down so well—yet it may be successful if one weeps mellowly, joyfully—smiling bravely through the tears—at a lovely aisle processional of repentant sinners; but Bascom, who chose uncomfortable titles for his sermons, would be overcome by his powerful feelings on those occasions when his topic was “Potiphar’s Wife,” “Ruth, the Girl in the Corn,” “The Whore of Babylon,” “The Woman on the Roof,” and so on.
His head was too deeply engaged with his conscience—he was in turn Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, searching through the whole roaring confusion of Protestantism for a body of doctrine with which he could agree. And he was for ever finding it, and later for ever renouncing what he had found. At forty, the most liberal of Unitarians, the strains of agnosticism were piping madly through his sermons: he began to hint at his new faith in prose which he modelled on the mighty utterance of Carlyle, and in poetry, in what he deemed the manner of Matthew Arnold. His professional connection with the Unitarians, and indeed with the Baptists, Methodists, Holy Rollers, and Seventh Day Adventists, came to an abrupt ending after he read from his pulpit one morning a composition in verse entitled “The Agnostic,” which made up in concision what it lacked in melody, and which ended each stanza sadly, but very plainly, on this recurrence: