The Accursed (31 page)
“The Brain, within Its Groove . . .”
T
HE WRITER MUST APPEAL TO
P
HYSICIANS
&
TO
M
EN CONVERSANT WITH THE LATENT
SPRINGS
&
OCCASIONAL PERVERSIONS, OF
THE HUMAN MIND
.
—Charles Brockden Brown, Advertisement for
Weiland,
1798
F
ollowing his sister’s death Josiah Slade was generally noted to be “gravely altered” and to “behave strangely”; yet observers, seeing only the outward man, had no idea how very much altered and how strange the young heir to Crosswicks Manse had become.
Where before Annabel’s death Josiah had been frantic with activity in searching for her, and hoping to exact revenge upon Axson Mayte, now he became a virtual hermit sequestered away at Crosswicks, rarely consenting even to dine with his family. He had tried to locate the Bog Kingdom in which Annabel had been held captive, but without success; nor did maps of New Jersey, of early eras, suggest any such vast marshy area, apart from the Pine Barrens and the smaller marshland in Crosswicks Forest, covering only a few acres, which Josiah had explored numerous times, to no avail.
Many times, Josiah fantasized having murdered Axson Mayte when he’d been introduced to the man, by Woodrow Wilson, on the university campus; except of course, he would never have committed such a mad act.
“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”
Through the winter and spring of 1906 Josiah spent most of his time locked away at the Manse, brooding and berating himself for his failure; for he did truly believe that he was to blame for his sister’s death, as he had not prevented it. Through the long nights he read and reread such books as he considered crucial to his understanding of human nature, and possibly illuminating in suggesting a course of action for him to take: Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Edgar Allan Poe’s
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,
Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland;
the 1818 edition of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus;
and not least, Milton’s epic
Paradise Lost
and such tragedies of Shakespeare—
Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet
—that seemed to pertain particularly to his situation. So restless was Josiah, he could rarely sit still for more than a half hour, but had to pace about, or rush outside to walk hurriedly by moonlight; it was his habit to read several books at once; no sooner did he begin a book than he pushed it aside to take up another—now Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie,
now Jack London’s
The Call of the Wild;
now Plato, Thucydides, Goethe and Hegel, from his grandfather Winslow’s library; now, the magnificent if rather shopworn Gutenberg Bible enshrined in the library, that could never be removed from it. (At such times, Winslow Slade sat silently nearby, observing his frowning grandson, but making little comment; for, like Josiah, Winslow seemed to have felt that he was in some way to blame for Annabel’s death, in having failed to prevent it; and, since his stroke of some months before, the elderly man had lost much of the vigor and goodwill for which he’d been renowned and seemed rather more simply a melancholy individual whom life had left behind, marooned amid the debris of his old, former life and reputation.) “Do you have any question, Josiah?”
“Question? What question?”
“About what you’re reading . . . You look as if you might have a question.”
Winslow Slade spoke in a kindly and unassuming voice, having seen his grandson grimace, in perusing the Bible; for there is much in the Bible to provoke grimaces of incomprehension. But Josiah only just shrugged.
“I have plenty of questions, Grandfather. But not questions the Bible can answer.”
But Josiah’s concentration was poor, no matter the ferocity of his intention, for his thoughts assailed him increasingly, in the form of alien “voices.”
You will, will you?—eh? Yes of course you will—you!
When the voices rose to a din, Josiah had to flee the house and wander into the forest, or tramp along back roads; his nerves were so tightly strung, he could not bear the company of other people; he had ceased seeing, or even speaking with, his male friends in Princeton, who had ceased trying to contact him after numerous rebuffs. He’d have liked to visit Pearce van Dyck in his office at the university but could not bring himself to step onto the college campus. The fatuous college boys roused him to impatience and contempt, and the intelligent, serious-minded college boys roused him to envy, and a yearning for his lost youth.
As much as possible Josiah avoided the busyness of Nassau Street. For he imagined, not unreasonably, that, as he made his way along the sidewalk heads turned in his wake; in pity, in sympathy, yet in cruel satisfaction as well.
Is that one of them?—the Slades?
Think they’d be ashamed to show their faces . . .
In Micawber Book Store, Josiah had formerly liked to browse in a pleasurable sort of trance, collecting an armload of books to purchase; now, he made a furtive course through the aisles, in search of a particular title that might strike his fancy and that he must own immediately, and read, as if his life depended upon it. So Josiah had, in recent weeks, impulsively purchased books as diverse as Mark Twain’s
Pudd’nhead Wilson,
whose “calendar” of sharply observed little ironies struck his fancy, and Ulysses S. Grant’s
Personal Memoirs,
that seemed to him a frank, fearless, yet melancholy document; and, belatedly, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
that roused Josiah to emotions of sympathy and indignation, and settled for him, for all time, that the responsibility of “white” Americans was to establish a society in which “Negro” Americans might be freely at home, as equals.
One slender book, Josiah had ordered, and picked up now, with much anticipation—
Poems
by Emily Dickinson. The little volume of mostly short poems had gone through several editions, Josiah saw, since its publication in 1890; the edition he held in his hand had been published in 1896. Yet, apart from Wilhelmina’s remarks, Josiah had never heard anything about the poetess, and was doubtful of the worth of his purchase until, on his way back to Crosswicks, a distance of about a mile, he leafed through the pages, and was struck by a “voice” of uncommon timbre, far from any poetic voice he had yet encountered:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
“If I am to be haunted by ‘voices,’ how wise it would be, to be haunted by this one!”
Yet, there were times when Josiah felt that he must escape from Crosswicks, and from Princeton; not by train (where he would have encountered fellow Princetonians) but by motorcar he traveled to New York City, to walk the streets, marveling at the throngs of people of whom many appeared to be immigrants, speaking languages utterly foreign to him. Though Josiah had relatives and family friends who lived in mansions on Park Avenue, and overlooking Central Park on Fifth Avenue, he made no effort to contact these individuals but far more preferred to walk aimlessly along the teeming streets of the Bowery, as it was called—long ago, a verdant Dutch farm; equally attractive were the congested streets of the West Side, the open “fresh produce” markets and meat-packing district near the Hudson River, the garment district, the “fresh flower” district, the blocks of brownstone tenements of the Lower East Side filled with life as a hive is filled with bees . . . Simply to cross a street wide as lower Fifth Avenue, Sixth or Seventh Avenues, or the aptly titled, so cunningly slanting Broadway, upon which traffic rushed in ill-defined lanes of two general directions—horse-drawn cargo-trucks, horse-drawn fire trucks, carriages and taxicabs; a frequent incursion of motor-vehicles compounding the confusion, in a constant blaring of horns—was a challenge that made Josiah’s blood leap as at the prospect of battle. For the drivers of both cargo-trucks and fire trucks plunged forward into slower traffic, heedless of horns and the screams of pedestrians; the more whipping their frothing horses, as the congested way should have made them cautious. Josiah was several times almost struck by galloping horses, and by a brass-trimmed motorcar whose uniformed driver but glanced at him as it passed within inches as if the heir to the Slade fortune were of no more consequence than a luckless street cur; yet his most dangerous moment came when a careening fire truck pulled by four ill-matched horses veered out of the street, to avoid a head-on collision with a careening cargo-truck, and onto the crowded pedestrian walkway. Badly shaken Josiah shouted at the driver—“Damn you! Keep to the street!”—but within seconds the fire truck had plunged onward. Quickly one felt rage, but quickly rage subsided, for the fact of Manhattan street-life, Josiah saw, was its
drumming vividness,
and its
transience.
Where rarely Josiah smiled in Princeton, frequently he found himself smiling in Manhattan, bemused by such impersonal activity, and such a spirit of brashness.
How vast the world was, and how mysterious! How small, how provincial, how
dreamlike
was Princeton, New Jersey; how sheltered from the rough vitality, vulgarity, and
foreignness
was the university, that seemed to float, like an enchanted island, somewhere just a little above the Earth. Especially, the bookstores of Manhattan were very different from Micawber Book Store, with its fastidiously shelved books and high-quality journals and magazines and, in special glass cases at the rear, first-edition and antiquarian books, that sold at high prices. In a large, bustling store on upper Broadway, that more resembled a small warehouse than a bookstore, Josiah acquired Lincoln Steffens’s controversial
The Shame of the Cities
, which was not sold at Micawber, as well as several issues of a crudely printed Socialist magazine called
Appeal to Reason,
which he’d never before seen
,
whose title attracted him. “For that is our only hope—an ‘appeal to reason.’ ” And afterward, sitting in Union Square, oblivious to the hubbub on all sides, Josiah began reading an excerpt of
The Jungle,
that dealt with the squalid conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses and meat-packers, in a most personal, even intimate way, that quite captivated Josiah, even as it sickened him.
Indignantly he wondered—could such revelations be true? The wealthy and unscrupulous Chicago meat-packer “Durham” of the novel appeared to be a thinly disguised J. Ogden Armour.
Thinking, “But the Armours are our friends. They are my grandparents’ and my parents’ friends. Are the Armours themselves aware of
this
?”
Josiah could not believe that the well-bred Princeton family, whose sons he’d known at the Academy, had anything directly to do with the Chicago branch of the family, of which J. Ogden Armour was the head; though surely, they owned stock in the thriving company, as perhaps the Slades did as well . . . At the time of a massive strike in Chicago two years before, which had involved the hiring of thousands of Negro strike-breakers, to replace the striking union workers, Josiah had been traveling in the West and had rarely seen a newspaper, or cared about “news.” Now, reading of these incidents in
Appeal to Reason,
he was ashamed of himself for being so ill-informed.
The Princeton Slades and the Princeton Armours were distinguished families of the West End, thus allies and friends
by tradition.
Annabel had been a classmate and friend of Eloise Armour, in a little circle that had included Wilhelmina Burr. And one of the Armour sons, Timothy, an upperclassman at Princeton University when Josiah had been a freshman, had been instrumental in acquiring for Josiah, who’d scorned it, the precious invitation to join Ivy. Josiah wanted to think that the Armours’ reaction to
The Jungle
would be similar to his own.
Yet, reading further, in other issues of the Socialist magazine, Josiah was increasingly appalled, and sickened. That workers labored in such conditions, not unlike his dear sister Annabel’s experience in the cellar of the Bog Palace, was outrageous; so poor, so trapped in the economic vise, even sickly men, and injured men, had no choice but to return to the conditions that were killing them: tuberculosis, rheumatism, “brown lung” and blood poisoning, and every kind of physical injury from accidents on the killing-floors that were slick with blood and offal. Most hideous were the fertilizer rooms and the “steamy tank” rooms where, Josiah read, workers sometimes slipped into vats of boiling water and were dissolved within seconds, to be sent out into the world as “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”! (After reading the notorious chapter nine of Upton Sinclair’s exposé, Josiah had had to close the magazine to recover.)
“Can it be, I’ve unwittingly eaten some part of a fellow human being? At Crosswicks, at our dining room table, my family and I have been
cannibals
?” The thought was so awful, Josiah could not bring himself to eat anything, even bread and cheese, for the remainder of that day.
VOICES! LIKE HOUNDS
of hell, in hot pursuit.
Infrequently Josiah attended church services now. And, when he did, he resisted sitting in the Slades’ pew at the front of the church, for he felt a revulsion for his Slade-self, seeing this individual through the eyes of others, as one of privilege and shame in about equal measure. And so, Josiah slunk into the First Presbyterian Church hoping to be undetected, by even his own family; he slipped into a pew at the rear of the church, and hid his face, in a paroxysm of remorse.
As much remorse for his having failed to murder Axson Mayte, as for his failure to have detected his sister’s unhappiness as the fiancée of Lieutenant Bayard.
He had not ever been one to pray openly, in a church setting; nor had private prayer meant much to him, who could not perceive how, considering the millions of inhabitants of the world, the Creator could be aware of any of them, as individuals; still less could he understand why. He’d long abandoned the hope of acquiring his grandfather Winslow’s combining of faith and intelligence, that had made Winslow Slade so revered a figure—among those of his kind.