Of Time and the River (71 page)

The class had now become so absorbed in its private conversations that it was not for a moment aware of its instructor nor of the fierce accusation of his glance. His face would grow dark and swollen with a rush of blood and passion, he would begin to tremble with rage, veins stood out on his forehead. Then in a very extraordinary way, through a sort of comical intuition, silence would come upon the class again: Mr. Osherofsky, who had turned in his seat and was talking behind his hand to Mr. Shulemovitch, gradually became aware that something was amiss from the expression of Mr. Shulemovitch’s face, which altered so subtly that almost without changing a muscle, it indicated that it was no longer aware of Mr. Osherofsky, that it was not listening to him, that it did not know him, that it wished he would go away, and that it was absorbed in its own meditation. Abruptly Mr. Osherofsky ceased talking, his small bright eyes shifted around rapidly at Eugene, and immediately his gaze plunged intently into his book, while his face took on an expression of sly humility.

Meanwhile, Miss Feinberg, who was now so completely absorbed in her conversation with Miss Weisman that she had twisted around almost completely to the back, received a sharp warning prod and a meaningful frown from her companion, accompanied by a significant lifting of the eyebrows. Miss Feinberg at once flopped heavily around in her seat, her heavy face fixed upon Eugene in an expression of vacant and insolent meekness. A loose smile faintly touched the corners of her lax heavy mouth: her jaws ruminated slightly at a wad of gum. Mr. Gorewitz during this commotion had turned in his seat and swept the faces of his comrades with a glance full of scornful reproof. Now he hissed loudly at them: “Sh-h! Sh-h! Sh-h!” Then, as a heavy silence fell upon the room, he turned in his seat and looked up at Eugene with an expression of understanding and commiseration. He shook his head pityingly, with a scornful smile, as he thought of these souls living in darkness and unwilling to admit the light! Then his own face darkened! Let them wallow in ignorance if they liked, but let them remember that other people were seeking for truth and beauty! Let them show some consideration for others! Then his gaze softened, a glow of tenderness suffused his oily features, as he gazed upon Eugene’s infuriated face: he looked at him now with love, with reverence, with adoration, and with the sympathy of a kindred spirit! His eloquent glance said:—“The poet, the prophet, the seer such as you, has at every time in history been mocked and misunderstood by the philistine mob. Why should you suffer so, dear teacher? You are above them. They can never know you or appreciate you as I do. Despise them, beloved master. Cast not your pearls before swine.”

This devoted and tender message had been lost, however, on his instructor: Eugene’s face was set in a fixed glare of rage as he regarded his class. For a moment he was absolutely speechless.

“If anyone thinks,” he began at length in a voice that was small and choked with fury, “that I am here—” apparently someone did think so, for at this moment, slowly, craftily, the knob of the door began to move, slowly the door swung open as if propelled by a ghostly hand. He paused again, and this time murder sweltered in his heart and was legible upon his face. Softly with the tread of a cat he stepped toward the door, and paused as if getting ready to spring, while it opened: the class waited tensely with held breath. Then, as slowly as the door had opened, a face was thrust in through the opening: it was the face of one of the hall guards, the face of an old man, a face of unutterable melancholy and of the most dismal sourness: the old dull face with its dry sagging flesh and its small watery eyes turned slowly on its scrawny neck, surveying Eugene, the class, and the four walls of the room in a glance full of dislike and suspicion. Then slowly and craftily, as it had come, as if it had been thrust forward on a stick by some unseen hand, the face withdrew, and the door swung to silently once again.

For a moment Eugene stared at the closing door with an expression of stupefaction. Then suddenly a surge of humour, powerful, choking, explosive, and tongueless in its unutterable and wordless implication, welled up in his throat. He cast the book from him with a roar of laughter in which the class joined.

“Get out of here,” he shouted. “I’m through! That’s enough. Go away! Leave me alone!”

XLVIII

The Hotel Leopold, where he now lived, was situated on a short and grimy street about two blocks from the university, northward, in the direction of Union Square.

The Leopold, although one of the city’s smaller hotels, was not a single building, but a congeries of buildings which covered an entire block. The central and main building of the system was a structure of twelve storeys, of that anomalous stone and brick construction which seems to have enjoyed a vogue in the early nineteen hundreds. To the left was a building twenty or thirty years older, known as “the old annex.” It was eight storeys high, of old red brick, and the street floor was occupied by shops and a restaurant. To the right was a building of six storeys, which was known as “the new annex.” This building, more simple in design than the others, was constructed of basal stone of the rough, porous, light-hued kind which was predominant in many of the new architectures throughout the nation. The building, neat, compact, and for the most part unadorned by useless ornament, somehow gave the effect of having been stamped out, with a million others of its kind, by a gigantic biscuit-cutter of such buildings—and hence to speak, how or in what way it was hard to say, yet instantly apparent, the mechanic spirit of a “newer” or more “modern” scheme— the scheme of “the ‘twenties,” of 1922 or 1924.

It was hard to know why one found fault with the building, but somehow it left one without joy. In many obvious ways this would be apparent at once, not only to the architect, but to the layman— it was superior to its companion structures. Although not a building which combined simple grace with use—as the old colonial structures of New England do—it was at least a building lacking in the clumsy and meaningless adornment which disfigured the surface of its two companions. Moreover, the rough, porous-looking brick had a look of lean and homely integrity: it was hard to know why one disliked the building, and yet one did—the other two, with all their confusing and unreasoning decoration, were the warmer, better, and more cheerful places.

What was it? It was almost impossible to define the quality of “the new annex” or its depressing effect upon the spectator, yet its quality was unmistakable. It belonged somehow to a new and accursed substance which had come into the structure of life—a substance barren, sterile, and inhuman—designed not for the use of man, but for the blind proliferations of the man-swarm to accommodate the greatest number in the smallest space—to shelter, house, turn out, take in, all the nameless, faceless, mindless man- swarm atoms of the earth.

The transient population of the Leopold, comparatively, was small. The great tidal fluctuation of brief visitors—business men, salesmen, newly wedded couples on their honeymoons, people from small towns out for a spree or a week or two of bright-light gaiety—which swarmed in unceasing movements in and out of the city, had scarcely touched the life of the Leopold. The hotel, set in a quarter of the city that was a little remote from the great business and pleasure districts, depended largely for its custom on the patronage of a “permanent” clientele. It was, in short, the kind of place often referred to as “a quiet family hotel”—a phrase which the management of the Leopold made use of in advertising the merits of their establishment, on the hotel stationery.

But that phrase, with its soothing connotations of a tranquil, felicitous and gentle domesticity, was misleading. For the Leopold was decidedly not “quiet” and although it contained within its cell-like rooms almost every other kind of life, of “family life” there was almost none and what there was, so desolate and barren, that one felt himself to be looking at the museum relics of what had once been a family rather than at the living and organic reality. And because of this, one felt constantly about the Leopold the spirit of defeat—either of lives still searching, restless and unfound, or of lives which, in the worst sense of the word, had fallen upon evil days.

And curiously, in spite of the hotel’s pious assurance of its “quiet family life,” its boast of permanency, there hovered about the place continually, indefinably but certainly, a feeling of naked insecurity, a terrifying transiency—not the frank transiency of the great tourist hotels with their constant daily flux of changing faces—but the horrible transiency of lives held here for a period in the illusion of a brief and barren permanence, of lives either on the wing or on the wane.

Here, for example, among the three or four hundred beings who inhabited the motley structure of these conjoined walls, were a number of young people who had only recently come from smaller places and were still stunned and bewildered by the terrific impact of the city upon their lives, or who, after a year or two of such bewilderment, were just beginning to orient themselves, to adjust their lives to the city’s furious tempo, and to look around with a bolder and more knowing calculation for some kind of residence a little closer to their true desires.

To young people of this sort the Leopold had offered, when they first came to the city, its spurious promise of warm asylum. Many of them had landed here—or rather popped in here like frightened rabbits—after their first terrified immersion in the man-swarm fury of the city’s life, and the feeling of desolation, houseless naked loneliness, bewilderment, and scrambling, scuttling terror which the sudden impact of that ruthless, sudden revelation had aroused in them.

For this reason, those barren walls, those terrible, hive-like cells of the Hotel Leopold were not without a glory of their own. For in those cell-like rooms there could be held all of the hope, hunger, passion, bitter loneliness and earth-devouring fury that a room could hold, or that this world can know, or that this little racked and riven vessel of desire, this twisted tenement of man’s bitter brevity, can endure.

Here, in these desolate walls, on many a night long past and desperately accomplished, many a young man had paced the confines of his little cell like a maddened animal, had beat his knuckles bloody on the stamped-out walls, had lashed about him, a creature baffled and infuriated by the million illusions of warmth, love, security and joy which the terrific city offered him and which, tantalus-like, slipped from his fingers like a fume of painted smoke the instant that he tried to get his grasp upon it.

Again, if the Hotel Leopold had housed all of the hope, joy, fury, passion, anguish, and devouring hunger that the earth can know, and that the wild and bitter tenement of youth can hold, it also housed within its walls all of the barren and hopeless bitterness of a desolate old age. For here—unloved, friendless, and unwanted, shunted off into the dreary asylum of hotel life—there lived many old people who hated life, and yet who were afraid to die.

Most of them were old people with a pension, or a small income, which was just meagrely sufficient to their slender needs. Some of them, widowed, withered, childless, and alone, were drearily wearing out the end of their lives here in a barren solitude. Some had sons and daughters, married, living in the city, who came dutifully to stamp the dreary tedium of waning Sunday afternoons with the stale counterfeits of filial devotion.

The rest of the time the old people stayed in their rooms and washed their stockings out and did embroidery, or descended to the little restaurant to eat, or sat together in one corner of the white-tiled lobby and talked.

Why could they never make it come to life? Why was no great vine growing from the hearts of all these old and dying people? Why were their flesh, their sagging, pouch-like jowls and faces so dry, dead, and juiceless, their weary old eyes so dull and lustreless, their tones so nasal, tedious and metallic? Why was it that they seemed never to have known any of the pain, joy, passion, evil, glory of a dark and living past? Why was it that their lives, on which now the strange dark radiance of million-visaged time was shining, seemed to have gained neither wisdom, mystery nor passion from the great accumulation of the buried past—to have been composed, in fact, of an infinite procession of dreary moments and little mean adventures, each forgotten, lost, and buried, as day by day the grey sand of their lives ran out its numberless grains of barren tedium.

This, indeed, seemed to be the truth about them: as they sat together in one corner of the lobby talking, all their conversation seemed made up of dreary dialogues such as these:

“How do you do, Mrs. Grey? I didn’t see you in the restaurant tonight.”

“No—” the old woman spoke triumphantly, proudly conscious of a sensational adventure—“I ate out tonight at a new place that my son-in-law told me about
I had the most DEE-licious meal—a WON-derful meal—all anyone could eat and only sixty cents. First I had a dish of nice fruit salad—and then I had a bowl of soup— oh-h! DEE-licious soup, Mrs. Martin—it was vegetable soup, but oh- h! DEE-licious!—a whole meal in itself—and then—” with a ruminant satisfaction she continued her arid catalogue—“I had some nice lamb chops, and some DEE-licious green peas—and a nice baked potato—and some salad—and some rolls and butter—and then I had a nice cup of coffee—and a piece of apple-pie—oh-h! the apple-pie was simply DEE-licious, Mrs. Martin, I had—”