Title:      Of Time and The River (1935)
            A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth
Author:     Thomas Wolfe
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Of Time and The River (1935)
            A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth
Author:     Thomas Wolfe





"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of
the beast that goeth downward to the earth?"



To

MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS

A GREAT EDITOR AND A BRAVE AND HONEST MAN, WHO STUCK TO THE WRITER
OF THIS BOOK THROUGH TIMES OF BITTER HOPELESSNESS AND DOUBT AND
WOULD NOT LET HIM GIVE IN TO HIS OWN DESPAIR, A WORK TO BE KNOWN AS
"OF TIME AND THE RIVER" IS DEDICATED WITH THE HOPE THAT ALL OF IT
MAY BE IN SOME WAY WORTHY OF THE LOYAL DEVOTION AND THE PATIENT
CARE WHICH A DAUNTLESS AND UNSHAKEN FRIEND HAS GIVEN TO EACH PART
OF IT, AND WITHOUT WHICH NONE OF IT COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN



"Crito, my dear friend Crito, that, believe me, that is what I seem
to hear, as the Corybants hear flutes in the air, and the sound of
those words rings and echoes in my ears and I can listen to nothing
else."




CONTENTS


Book One

ORESTES: FLIGHT BEFORE FURY

Book Two

YOUNG FAUSTUS

Book Three

TELEMACHUS

Book Four

PROTEUS: THE CITY

Book Five

JASON'S VOYAGE

Book Six

ANTÆUS: EARTH AGAIN

Book Seven

KRONOS AND RHEA: THE DREAM OF TIME

Book Eight

FAUST AND HELEN




"Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Möcht' ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn!

Kennst du das Haus, auf Säulen ruht sein Dach,
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Möcht' ich mit dir, O mein Beschützer, ziehn!

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg,
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut:
Kennst du ihn wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Geht unser Weg; O Vater, lass uns ziehn!"




BOOK I

ORESTES: FLIGHT BEFORE FURY


. . . of wandering for ever and the earth again . . . of seed-time,
bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest.  And of the big flowers,
the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.

Where shall the weary rest?  When shall the lonely of heart come
home?  What doors are open for the wanderer?  And which of us shall
find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what
time, and in what land?  Where?  Where the weary of heart can abide
for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the
tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.

Who owns the earth?  Did we want the earth that we should wander on
it?  Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it?
Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still
upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one
small room for ever.

Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus
through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets?  He
shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence
and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the
snake's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain,
there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.

The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps
against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure for ever.
The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root
threads the bones of buried lovers.

The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl
tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure for
ever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the
sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish.

O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in
all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand
days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her
kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone
and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent
from our loneliness.



I


About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this
century, four people were standing together on the platform of the
railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba.  This
little station, really just a suburban adjunct of the larger town
which, behind the concealing barrier of a rising ground, swept away
a mile or two to the west and north, had become in recent years the
popular point of arrival and departure for travellers to and from
the cities of the east, and now, in fact, accommodated a much
larger traffic than did the central station of the town, which was
situated two miles westward around the powerful bend of the rails.
For this reason a considerable number of people were now assembled
here, and from their words and gestures, a quietly suppressed
excitement that somehow seemed to infuse the drowsy mid-October
afternoon with an electric vitality, it was possible to feel the
thrill and menace of the coming train.

An observer would have felt in the complexion of this gathering a
somewhat mixed quality--a quality that was at once strange and
familiar, alien and native, cosmopolitan and provincial.  It was
not the single native quality of the usual crowd that one saw on
the station platforms of the typical Catawba town as the trains
passed through.  This crowd was more mixed and varied, and it had a
strong colouring of worldly smartness, the element of fashionable
sophistication that one sometimes finds in a place where a native
and alien population have come together.  And such an inference was
here warranted: the town of Altamont a mile or so away was a well-
known resort and the mixed gathering on the station platform was
fairly representative of its population.  But all of these people,
both strange and native, had been drawn here by a common
experience, an event which has always been of first interest in the
lives of all Americans.  This event is the coming of the train.

It would have been evident to an observer that of the four people
who were standing together at one end of the platform three--the
two women and the boy--were connected by the relationship of blood.
A stranger would have known instantly that the boy and the young
woman were brother and sister and that the woman was their mother.
The relationship was somehow one of tone, texture, time, and
energy, and of the grain and temper of the spirit.  The mother was
a woman of small but strong and solid figure.  Although she was
near her sixtieth year, her hair was jet-black and her face, full
of energy and power, was almost as smooth and unlined as the face
of a girl.  Her hair was brushed back from a forehead which was
high, white, full, and naked-looking, and which, together with the
expression of her eyes, which were brown, and rather worn and weak,
but constantly thoughtful, constantly reflective, gave her face the
expression of straight grave innocence that children have, and also
of strong native intelligence and integrity.  Her skin was milk-
white, soft of texture, completely colourless save for the nose,
which was red, broad and fleshy at the base, and curiously
masculine.

A stranger seeing her for the first time would have known somehow
that the woman was a member of a numerous family, and that her face
had the tribal look.  He would somehow have felt certain that the
woman had brothers and that if he could see them, they would look
like her.  Yet, this masculine quality was not a quality of sex,
for the woman, save for the broad manlike nose, was as thoroughly
female as a woman could be.  It was rather a quality of tribe and
character--a tribe and character that was decisively masculine.

The final impression of the woman might have been this:--that her
life was somehow above and beyond a moral judgment, that no matter
what the course or chronicle of her life may have been, no matter
what crimes of error, avarice, ignorance, or thoughtlessness might
be charged to her, no matter what suffering or evil consequences
may have resulted to other people through any act of hers, her life
was somehow beyond these accidents of time, training, and occasion,
and the woman was as guiltless as a child, a river, an avalanche,
or any force of nature whatsoever.

The younger of the two women was about thirty years old.  She was a
big woman, nearly six feet tall, large, and loose of bone and limb,
almost gaunt.  Both women were evidently creatures of tremendous
energy, but where the mother suggested a constant, calm, and almost
tireless force, the daughter was plainly one of those big,
impulsive creatures of the earth who possess a terrific but
undisciplined vitality, which they are ready to expend with a
whole-souled and almost frenzied prodigality on any person,
enterprise, or object which appeals to their grand affections.

This difference between the two women was also reflected in their
faces.  The face of the mother, for all its amazing flexibility,
the startled animal-like intentness with which her glance darted
from one object to another, and the mobility of her powerful and
delicate mouth, which she pursed and convolved with astonishing
flexibility in such a way as to show the constant reflective effort
of her mind, was nevertheless the face of a woman whose spirit had
an almost elemental quality of patience, fortitude and calm.

The face of the younger woman was large, high-boned, and generous
and already marked by the frenzy and unrest of her own life.  At
moments it bore legibly and terribly the tortured stain of
hysteria, of nerves stretched to the breaking point, of the furious
impatience, unrest and dissonance of her own tormented spirit, and
of impending exhaustion and collapse for her overwrought vitality.
Yet, in an instant, this gaunt, strained, tortured, and almost
hysterical face could be transformed by an expression of serenity,
wisdom and repose that would work unbelievably a miracle of calm
and radiant beauty on the nervous, gaunt, and tortured features.

Now, each in her own way, the two women were surveying the other
people on the platform and the new arrivals with a ravenous and
absorptive interest, bestowing on each a wealth of information,
comment, and speculation which suggested an encyclopædic knowledge
of the history of every one in the community.

"--Why, yes, child," the mother was saying impatiently, as she
turned her quick glance from a group of people who at the moment
were the subject of discussion--"that's what I'm telling you!--
Don't I know? . . .  Didn't I grow up with all those people? . . .
Wasn't Emma Smathers one of my girlhood friends? . . .  That boy's
not this woman's child at all.  He's Emma Smathers' child by that
first marriage."

"Well, that's news to me," the younger woman answered.  "That's
certainly news to me.  I never knew Steve Randolph had been married
more than once.  I'd always thought that all that bunch were Mrs.
Randolph's children."

"Why, of course not!" the mother cried impatiently.  "She never had
any of them except Lucille.  All the rest of them were Emma's
children.  Steve Randolph was a man of forty-five when he married
her.  He'd been a widower for years--poor Emma died in childbirth
when Bernice was born--nobody ever thought he'd marry again and
nobody ever expected this woman to have any children of her own,
for she was almost as old as he was--why, yes!--hadn't she been
married before, a widow, you know, when she met him, came here
after her first husband's death from some place way out West--oh,
Wyoming, or Nevada or Idaho, one of those States, you know--and had
never had chick nor child, as the saying goes--till she married
Steve.  And that woman was every day of forty-four years old when
Lucille was born."

"Uh-huh! . . .  Ah-hah! the younger woman muttered absently, in a
tone of rapt and fascinated interest, as she looked distantly at
the people in the other group, and reflectively stroked her large
chin with a big, bony hand.  "So Lucille, then, is really John's
half-sister?"

"Why, of course!" the mother cried.  "I thought every one knew
that.  Lucille's the only one that this woman can lay claim to.
The rest of them were Emma's."

"--Well, that's certainly news to me," the younger woman said
slowly as before.  "It's the first _I_ ever heard of it. . . .  And
you say she was forty-four when Lucille was born?"

"Now, she was all of THAT," the mother said.  "I know.  And she may
have been even older."

"Well," the younger woman said, and now she turned to her silent
husband, Barton, with a hoarse snigger, "it just goes to show that
while there's life there's hope, doesn't it?  So cheer up, honey,"
she said to him, "we may have a chance yet."  But despite her air
of rough banter her clear eyes for a moment had a look of deep pain
and sadness in them.

"Chance!" the mother cried strongly, with a little scornful pucker
of the lips--"why, of course there is!  If I was your age again I'd
have a dozen--and never think a thing of it."  For a moment she was
silent, pursing her reflective lips.  Suddenly a faint sly smile
began to flicker at the edges of her lips, and turning to the boy,
she addressed him with an air of sly and bantering mystery:

"Now, boy," she said--"there's lots of things that you don't know
. . . you always thought you were the last--the youngest--didn't
you?"

"Well, wasn't I?" he said.

"H'm!" she said with a little scornful smile and an air of great
mystery--"There's lots that I could tell you--"

"Oh, my God!" he groaned, turning towards his sister with an
imploring face.  "More mysteries! . . .  The next thing I'll find
that there were five sets of triplets after I was born--Well, come
on, Mama," he cried impatiently.  "Don't hint around all day about
it. . . .  What's the secret now--how many were there?"

"H'm!" she said with a little bantering, scornful, and significant
smile.

"O Lord!" he groaned again--"Did she ever tell you what it was?"
Again he turned imploringly to his sister.

She snickered hoarsely, a strange high-husky and derisive falsetto
laugh, at the same time prodding him stiffly in the ribs with her
big fingers:

"Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," she laughed.  "More spooky business, hey?
You don't know the half of it.  She'll be telling you next you were
only the fourteenth."

"H'm!" the older woman said, with a little scornful smile of her
pursed lips.  "Now I could tell him more than that!  The
fourteenth!  Pshaw!" she said contemptuously--"I could tell him--"

"O God!" he groaned miserably.  "I knew it! . . .  I don't want to
hear it."

"K, k, k, k, k," the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding
him in the ribs again.

"No, sir," the older woman went on strongly--"and that's not all
either!--Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn't
know," and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of
her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand,
fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and
powerful as a man's.--"There's a lot I could tell you that you
never heard.  Long years after you were born, child--why, at the
time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair--" here her face
grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head
with a short convulsive movement--"oh, when I think of it--to think
what I went through--oh, awful, awful, you know," she whispered
ominously.

"Now, Mama, for God's sake, I don't want to hear it!" he fairly
shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding.  "God-
damn it, can we have no peace--even when I go away!" he cried
bitterly, and illogically.  "Always these damned gloomy hints and
revelations--this Pentland spooky stuff," he yelled--"this damned
I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and
damnation!" he shouted incoherently.  "Who cares?  What does it
matter?" he cried, adding desperately, "I don't want to hear about
it--No one cares."

"Why, child, now, I was only saying--" she began hastily and
diplomatically.

"All right, all right, all right," he muttered.  "I don't care--"

"But, as I say, now," she resumed.

"I don't care!" he shouted.  "Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,"
he muttered in a crazy tone as he turned to his sister.  "A
moment's peace for all of us before we die.  A moment of peace,
peace, peace."

"Why, boy, I'll vow," the mother said in a vexed tone, fixing her
reproving glance on him, "what on earth's come over you?  You act
like a regular crazy man.  I'll vow you do."

"A moment's peace!" he muttered again, thrusting one hand wildly
through his hair.  "I beg and beseech you for a moment's peace
before we perish!"

"K, k, k, k, k," the younger woman snickered derisively, as she
poked him stiffly in the ribs--"There's no peace for the weary.
It's like that river that goes on for ever," she said with a faint
loose curving of lewd humour around the edges of her generous big
mouth--"Now you see, don't you?" she said, looking at him with this
lewd and challenging look.  "You see what it's like now, don't
you? . . .  YOU'RE the lucky one!  YOU got away!  You're smart enough
to go way off somewhere to college--to Boston--Harvard--anywhere--
but YOU'RE away from it.  You get it for a short time when you come
home.  How do you think _I_ stand it?" she said challengingly.  "I
have to hear it ALL the time. . . .  Oh, ALL the time, and ALL the
time, and ALL the time!" she said with a kind of weary desperation.
"If they'd only leave me ALONE for five minutes some time I think
I'd be able to pull myself together, but it's this way ALL the time
and ALL the time and ALL the time.  You see, don't you?"

But now, having finished, in a tone of hoarse and panting
exasperation, her frenzied protest, she relapsed immediately into a
state of marked, weary, and dejected resignation.

"Well, I know, I know," she said in a weary and indifferent voice.
". . . Forget about it . . .  Talking does no good . . .  Just try
to make the best of it the little time you're here. . . .  I used
to think something could be done about it . . . but I know
different now," she muttered, although she would have been unable
to explain the logical meaning of these incoherent and disjointed
phrases.

"Hah? . . .  What say?" the mother now cried sharply, darting her
glances from one to another with the quick, startled, curiously
puzzled intentness of an animal or a bird.  "What say?" she cried
sharply again, as no one answered.  "I thought--"

But fortunately, at this moment, this strange and disturbing flash
in which had been revealed the blind and tangled purposes, the
powerful and obscure impulses, the tormented nerves, the whole
tragic perplexity of soul which was of the very fabric of their
lives, was interrupted by a commotion in one of the groups upon the
platform, and by a great guffaw of laughter which instantly roused
these three people from this painful and perplexing scene, and
directed their startled attention to the place from which the
laughter came.

And now again they heard the great guffaw--a solid "Haw!  Haw!
Haw!" which was full of such an infectious exuberance of animal
good-nature that other people on the platform began to smile
instinctively, and to look affectionately towards the owner of the
laugh.

Already, at the sound of the laugh, the young woman had forgotten
the weary and dejected resignation of the moment before, and with
an absent and yet eager look of curiosity in her eyes, she was
staring towards the group from which the laugh had come, and
herself now laughing absently, she was stroking her big chin in a
gesture of meditative curiosity, saying:

"Hah!  Hah!  Hah! . . .  That's George Pentland. . . .  You can
tell him anywhere by his laugh."

"Why, yes," the mother was saying briskly, with satisfaction.
"That's George all right.  I'd know him in the dark the minute that
I heard that laugh.--And say, what about it?  He's always had it--
why, ever since he was a kid-boy--and was going around with
Steve. . . .  Oh, he'd come right out with it anywhere, you know,
in Sunday school, church, or while the preacher was sayin' prayers
before collection--that big, loud laugh, you know, that you could
hear, from here to yonder, as the sayin' goes. . . .  Now I don't
know where it comes from--none of the others ever had it in our
family; now we all liked to laugh well enough, but I never heard no
such laugh as that from any of 'em--there's one thing sure, Will
Pentland never laughed like that in his life--Oh, Pett, you know!
Pett!"--a scornful and somewhat malicious look appeared on the
woman's face as she referred to her brother's wife in that whining
and affected tone with which women imitate the speech of other
women whom they do not like--"Pett got so mad at him one time when
he laughed right out in church that she was goin' to take the child
right home an' whip him.--Told me, says to me, you know--'Oh, I
could wring his neck!  He'll disgrace us all,' she says, 'unless I
cure him of it,' says, 'He burst right out in that great roar of
his while Doctor Baines was sayin' his prayers this morning until
you couldn't hear a word the preacher said.'  Said, 'I was so
mortified to think he could do a thing like that that I'd a-beat
the blood right out of him if I'd had my buggy whip,' says, 'I
don't know where it comes from'--oh, sneerin'-like, you know," the
woman said, imitating the other woman's voice with a sneering and
viperous dislike--"'I don't know where it comes from unless it's
some of that common Pentland blood comin' out in him'--'Now you
listen to me,' I says; oh, I looked her in the eye, you know"--here
the woman looked at her daughter with the straight steady stare of
her worn brown eyes, illustrating her speech with the loose and
powerful gesture of the half-clasped finger-pointing hand--"'you
listen to me.  I don't know where that child gets his laugh,' I
says, 'but you can bet your bottom dollar that he never got it from
his father--or any other Pentland that I ever heard of--for none of
them ever laughed that way--Will, or Jim, or Sam, or George, or Ed,
or Father, or even Uncle Bacchus,' I said--'no, nor old Bill
Pentland either, who was that child's great-grandfather--for I've
seen an' heard 'em all,' I says.  'And as for this common Pentland
blood you speak of, Pett'--oh, I guess I talked to her pretty
straight, you know," she said with a little bitter smile, and the
short, powerful, and convulsive tremor of her strong pursed lips--
"'as for that common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett,' I says, 'I
never heard of that either--for we stood high in the community,' I
says, 'and we all felt that Will was lowerin' himself when he
married a Creasman!'"

"Oh, you didn't say that, Mama, surely not," the young woman said
with a hoarse, protesting, and yet abstracted laugh, continuing to
survey the people on the platform with a bemused and meditative
curiosity, and stroking her big chin thoughtfully as she looked at
them, pausing from time to time to grin in a comical and rather
formal manner, bow graciously and murmur:

"How-do-you-do? ah-hah!  How-do-you-do, Mrs. Willis?"

"Haw!  Haw!  Haw!"  Again the great laugh of empty animal good
nature burst out across the station platform, and this time George
Pentland turned from the group of which he was a member and looked
vacantly around him, his teeth bared with savage joy, as, with two
brown fingers of his strong left hand, he dug vigorously into the
muscular surface of his hard thigh.  It was an animal reflex,
instinctive and unconscious, habitual to him in moments of strong
mirth.

He was a powerful and handsome young man in his early thirties,
with coal-black hair, a strong thick neck, powerful shoulders, and
the bull vitality of the athlete.  He had a red, sensual, curiously
animal and passionate face, and when he laughed his great guffaw,
his red lips were bared over two rows of teeth that were white and
regular and solid as ivory.

--But now, the paroxysm of that savage and mindless laughter having
left him, George Pentland had suddenly espied the mother and her
children, waved to them in genial greeting, and excusing himself
from his companions--a group of young men and women who wore the
sporting look and costume of "the country club crowd"--he was
walking towards his kinsmen at an indolent swinging stride, pausing
to acknowledge heartily the greetings of people on every side, with
whom he was obviously a great favourite.

As he approached, he bared his strong white teeth again in
greeting, and in a drawling, rich-fibred voice, which had
unmistakably the Pentland quality of sensual fullness, humour, and
assurance, and a subtle but gloating note of pleased self-
satisfaction, he said:

"Hello, Aunt Eliza, how are you?  Hello, Helen--how are you, Hugh?"
he said in his high, somewhat accusing, but very strong and
masculine voice, putting his big hand in an easy affectionate way
on Barton's arm.  "Where the hell you been keepin' yourself,
anyway?" he said accusingly.  "Why don't some of you folks come
over to see us sometime?  Elk was askin' about you all the other
day--wanted to know why Helen didn't come round more often."

"Well, George, I tell you how it is," the young woman said with an
air of great sincerity and earnestness.  "Hugh and I have intended
to come over a hundred times, but life has been just one damned
thing after another all summer long.  If I could only have a
moment's peace--if I could only get away by myself for a moment--if
THEY would only leave me ALONE for an hour at a time, I think I
could get myself together again--do you know what I mean, George?"
she said hoarsely and eagerly, trying to enlist him in her
sympathetic confidence--"If they'd only do something for THEMSELVES
once in a while--but they ALL come to me when anything goes wrong--
they never let me have a moment's peace--until at times I think I'm
going crazy--I get QUEER--funny, you know," she said vaguely and
incoherently.  "I don't know whether something happened Tuesday or
last week or if I just imagined it."  And for a moment her big
gaunt face had the dull strained look of hysteria.

"The strain on her has been very great this summer," said Barton in
a deep and grave tone.  "It's--it's," he paused carefully, deeply,
searching for a word, and looked down as he flicked an ash from his
long cigar, "it's--been too much for her.  Everything's on her
shoulders," he concluded in his deep grave voice.

"My God, George, what is it?" she said quietly and simply, in the
tone of one begging for enlightenment.  "Is it going to be this way
all our lives?  Is there never going to be any peace or happiness
for us?  Does it always have to be this way?  Now I want to ask
you--is there nothing in the world but trouble?"

"Trouble!" he said derisively.  "Why, I've had more trouble than
any one of you ever heard of. . . .  I've had enough to kill a
dozen people . . . but when I saw it wasn't goin' to kill me, I
quit worryin'. . . .  So you do the same thing," he advised
heartily.  "Hell, don't WORRY, Helen! . . .  It never got you
anywhere. . . .  You'll be all right," he said.  "You got nothin'
to worry over.  You don't know what trouble is."

"Oh, I'd be all right, George--I think I could stand anything--all
the rest of it--if it wasn't for Papa. . . .  I'm almost crazy from
worrying about him this summer.  There were three times there when
I knew he was gone. . . .  And I honestly believe I pulled him back
each time by main strength and determination--do you know what I
mean?" she said hoarsely and eagerly--"I was just determined not to
let him go.  If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could
have done something to make it start again--I'd have stood over him
and blown my breath into him--got my blood into him--shook him,"
she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands--
"anything just to keep him alive."

"She's--she's--saved his life--time after time," said Barton
slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down
deeply, searching for a word.

"He'd--he'd--have been a dead man long ago--if it hadn't been for
her."

"Yeah--I know she has," George Pentland drawled agreeably.  "I know
you've sure stuck by Uncle Will--I guess he knows it, too."

"It's not that I mind it, George--you know what I mean?" she said
eagerly.  "Good heavens!  I believe I could give away a dozen lives
if I thought it was going to save his life! . . .  But it's the
STRAIN of it. . . .  Month after month . . . year after year . . .
lying awake at night wondering if he's all right over there in that
back room in Mama's house--wondering if he's keeping warm in that
old cold house--"

"Why, no, child," the older woman said hastily.  "I kept a good
fire burnin' in that room all last winter--that was the warmest
room in the whole place--there wasn't a warmer--"

But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the
flood-tide of the other's speech.

"--Wondering if he's sick or needs me--if he's begun to bleed
again--oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it--that poor
old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer,
with that horrible smell about him all the time--everything he
wears gets simply STIFF with that rotten corrupt matter--Do you
know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year
after year, never knowing when he's going to die, to have him hang
on by a thread until it seems you've lived forever--that there'll
never be an end--that you'll never have a chance to live your own
life--to have a moment's peace or rest or happiness yourself?  My
God, does it always have to be this way? . . .  Can I never have a
moment's happiness? . . .  Must they ALWAYS come to me?  Does
EVERYTHING have to be put on my shoulders? . . .  Will you tell me
that?"  Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair.  She was
glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic
entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress
of her hysteria.

"That's--that's the trouble now," said Barton, looking down and
searching for the word.  "She's . . .  She's . . . made the goat
for every one. . . .  She . . . she has to do it all. . . .
That's . . . that's the thing that's got her down."

"Not that I mind--if it will do any good. . . .  Good heaven's,
Papa's life means more to me than anything on earth. . . .  I'd
keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in
him. . . .  But it's the strain of it, the STRAIN of it--to wait,
to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time,
never to know when he will die--always the STRAIN, the strain--do
you see what I mean, George?" she said hoarsely, eagerly, and
pleadingly.  "You see, don't you?"

"I sure do, Helen," he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh,
and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features.  "I know it's
been mighty tough on you. . . .  How is Uncle Will now?" he said.
"Is he any better?"

"Why, yes," the mother was saying, "he seemed to improve--" but she
was cut off immediately.

"Oh, yes," the daughter said in a tone of weary dejection.  "He
pulled out of this last spell and got well enough to make the trip
to Baltimore--we sent him back a week ago to take another course of
treatments. . . .  But it does no real good, George. . . .  They
can't cure him. . . .  We know that now. . . .  They've told us
that. . . .  It only prolongs the agony. . . .  They help him for a
little while and then it all begins again. . . .  Poor old man!"
she said, and her eyes were wet.  "I'd give everything I have--my
own blood, my own life--if it would do him any good--but, George,
he's gone!" she said desperately.  "Can't you understand that? . . .
They can't save him! . . .  Nothing can save him! . . .  Papa's
a dead man now!"

George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug
hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:

"Who went to Baltimore with him?"

"Why, Luke's up there," the mother said.  "We had a letter from him
yesterday--said Mr. Gant looks much better already--eats well, you
know, has a good appetite--and Luke says he's in good spirits.
Now--"

"Oh, Mama, for heaven's sake!" the daughter cried.  "What's the use
of talking that way? . . .  He's not getting any better. . . .
Papa's a sick man--dying--good God!  Can no one ever get that into
their heads!" she burst out furiously.  "Am I the only one that
realizes how sick he is?"

"No, now I was only sayin'," the mother began hastily--"Well, as I
say, then," she went on, "Luke's up there with him--and Gene's on
his way there now--he's goin' to stop off there tomorrow on his way
up north to school."

"Gene!" cried George Pentland in a high, hearty, bantering tone,
turning to address the boy directly for the first time.  "What's
all this I hear about you, son?"  He clasped his muscular hand
around the boy's arm in a friendly but powerful grip.  "Ain't one
college enough for you, boy?" he drawled, becoming deliberately
ungrammatical and speaking good-naturedly but with a trace of the
mockery which the wastrel and ne'er-do-well sometimes feels towards
people who have had the energy and application required for steady
or concentrated effort.  "Are you one of those fellers who needs
two or three colleges to hold him down?"

The boy flushed, grinned uncertainly, and said nothing.

"Why, son," drawled George in his hearty, friendly and yet
bantering tone, in which a note of malice was evident, "you'll be
gettin' so educated an' high-brow here before long that you won't
be able to talk to the rest of us at all. . . .  You'll be floatin'
around there so far up in the clouds that you won't even see a
roughneck like me, much less talk to him"--As he went on with this
kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately
illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the
rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish
scholar.

"--Where's he goin' to this time, Aunt Eliza?" he said, turning to
her questioningly, but still holding the boy's arm in his strong
grip "Where's he headin' for now?"

"Why," she said, stroking her pursed serious mouth with a slightly
puzzled movement, "he says he's goin' to Harvard.  I reckon," she
said, in the same puzzled tone, "it's all right--I guess he knows
what he's about.  Says he's made up his mind to go--I told him,"
she said, and shook her head again, "that I'd send him for a year
if he wanted to try it--an' then he'll have to get out an' shift
for himself.  We'll see," she said.  "I reckon it's all right."

"Harvard, eh?" said George Pentland.  "Boy, you ARE flyin'
high! . . .  What you goin' to do up there?"

The boy, furiously red of face, squirmed, and finally stammered:

"Why . . . I . . . guess . . . I guess I'll do some studying!"

"You GUESS you will!" roared George.  "You'd damn well BETTER do
some studying--I bet your mother'll take it out of your hide if she
finds you loafin' on her money."

"Why, yes," the mother said, nodding seriously, "I told him it was
up to him to make the most of this--"

"Harvard, eh!" George Pentland said again, slowly looking his cousin
over from head to foot.  "Son, you're flyin' high, you are! . . .
Now don't fly so high you never get back to earth again! . . .  You
know the rest of us who didn't go to Harvard still have to walk
around upon the ground down here," he said.  "So don't fly too high
or we may not even be able to see you!"

"George!  George!" said the young woman in a low tone, holding one
hand to her mouth, and bending over to whisper loudly as she looked
at her young brother.  "Do you think anyone could fly very high
with a pair of feet like that?"

George Pentland looked at the boy's big feet for a moment, shaking
his head slowly in much wonderment.

"Hell, no!" he said at length.  "He'd never get off the ground! . . .
But if you cut 'em off," he said, "he'd go right up like a
balloon, wouldn't he?  Haw!  Haw!  Haw!  Haw!"  The great guffaw
burst from him, and grinning with his solid teeth, he dug blindly
at his thigh.

"Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," the sister jeered, seeing the boy's flushed
and angry face and prodding him derisively in the ribs--"This is
our Harvard boy! k, k, k, k!"

"Don't let 'em kid you, son," said George now in an amiable and
friendly manner.  "Good luck to you!  Give 'em hell when you get up
there! . . .  You're the only one of us who ever had guts enough to
go through college, and we're proud of you! . . .  Tell Uncle
Bascom and Aunt Louise and all the rest of 'em hello for me when
you get to Boston. . . .  And remember me to your father and Luke
when you get to Baltimore. . . .  Good-bye, Gene--I've got to leave
you now.  Good luck, son," and with a friendly grip of his powerful
hand he turned to go.  "You folks come over sometime--all of you,"
he said in parting.  "We'd like to see you."  And he went away.

At this moment, all up and down the platform, people had turned to
listen to the deep excited voice of a young man who was saying in a
staccato tone of astounded discovery:

"You DON'T mean it! . . .  You SWEAR she did! . . .  And YOU were
there and saw it with your OWN eyes! . . .  Well, if that don't
beat all I ever heard of! . . .  I'll be DAMNED!" after which
ejaculation, with an astounded falsetto laugh, he looked about him
in an abstracted and unseeing manner, thrust one hand quickly and
nervously into his trousers pocket in such a way that his fine
brown coat came back, and the large diamond-shaped pin of the Delta
Kappa Epsilon fraternity was revealed, and at the same time passing
one thin nervous hand repeatedly over the lank brown hair that
covered his small and well-shaped head, and still muttering in
tones of stupefied disbelief--"Lord!  Lord! . . .  What do you know
about that?" suddenly espied the woman and her two children at the
other end of the platform, and without a moment's pause, turned on
his heel, and walked towards them, at the same time muttering to
his astonished friends:

"Wait a minute! . . .  Some one over here I've got to speak to! . . .
Back in a minute!"

He approached the mother and her children rapidly, at his stiff,
prim and somewhat lunging stride, his thin face fixed eagerly upon
them, bearing towards them with a driving intensity of purpose as
if the whole interest and energy of his life were focussed on them,
as if some matter of the most vital consequence depended on his
reaching them as soon as possible.  Arrived, he immediately began
to address the other youth without a word of greeting or
explanation, bursting out with the sudden fragmentary explosiveness
that was part of him:

"Are you taking this train, too? . . .  Are you going today? . . .
Well, what did you decide to do?" he demanded mysteriously in an
accusing and challenging fashion.  "Have you made up your mind
yet? . . .  Pett Barnes says you've decided on Harvard.  Is that
it?"

"Yes, it is."

"Lord, Lord!" said the youth, laughing his falsetto laugh again.
"I don't see how you can! . . .  You'd better come on with me. . . .
What ever got into your head to do a thing like that?" he said
in a challenging tone.  "Why do you want to go to a place like
that?"

"Hah?  What say?"  The mother who had been looking from one to the
other of the two boys with the quick and startled attentiveness of
an animal, now broke in:

"You know each other. . . .  Hah? . . .  You're taking this train,
too, you say?" she said sharply.

"Ah-hah-hah!" the young man laughed abruptly, nervously; grinned,
made a quick stiff little bow, and said with nervous engaging
respectfulness:  "Yes, Ma'am! . . .  Ah-hah-hah! . . .  How d'ye
do? . . .  How d'ye do, Mrs. Gant?"  He shook hands with her
quickly, still laughing his broken and nervous "ah-hah-hah"--"How
d'ye do?" he said, grinning nervously at the younger woman and at
Barton.  "Ah-hah-hah.  How d'ye do?"

The older woman still holding his hand in her rough worn clasp
looked up at him a moment calmly, her lips puckered in tranquil
meditation:

"Now," she said quietly, in the tone of a person who refuses to
admit failure, "I know you.  I know your face.  Just give me a
moment and I'll call you by your name."

The young man grinned quickly, nervously, and then said
respectfully in his staccato speech:

"Yes, Ma'am. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Robert Weaver."

"AH-H, that's SO!" she cried, and shook his hands with sudden
warmth.  "You're Robert Weaver's boy, of course."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert, with his quick nervous laugh.  "Yes,
Ma'am. . . .  That's right. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Gene and I
went to school together.  We were in the same class at the
University."

"Why, of course!" she cried in a tone of complete enlightenment,
and then went on in a rather vexed manner, "I'll VOW!  I knew you
all along!  I knew that I'd seen you just as soon as I saw your
face!  Your name just slipped my mind a moment--and then, of
course, it all flashed over me. . . .  You're Robert Weaver's
boy! . . .  And you ARE," she still held his hand in her strong,
motherly and friendly clasp, and looking at him with a little sly
smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, she was silent a
moment, regarding him quizzically--"now, boy," she said quietly,
"you may think I've got a pretty poor memory for names and faces--
but I want to tell you something that may surprise you. . . .  I
know more about you than you think I do.  Now," she said, "I'm
going to tell you something and you can tell me if I'm right."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert respectfully.  "Yes, Ma'am."

"You were born," she went on slowly and deliberately, "on September
2nd, 1898, and you are just two years and one month and one day
older than this boy here--" she nodded to her own son.  "Now you
can tell me if I'm right or wrong."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "Yes, Ma'am. . . .  That's right. . . .
You're absolutely right," he cried, and then in an astounded and
admiring tone, he said:  "Well, I'll declare. . . .  If that don't
beat all! . . .  How on earth did you ever remember it!" he cried
in an astonished tone that obviously was very gratifying to her
vanity.

"Well, now, I'll tell you," she said with a little complacent
smile--"I'll tell you how I KNOW. . . .  I remember the day you
were born, boy--because it was on that very day that one of my own
children--my son, Luke--was allowed to get up out of bed after
havin' typhoid fever. . . .  That very day, sir, when Mr. Gant came
home to dinner, he said--'Well, I was just talking to Robert Weaver
on the street and everything's all right.  His wife gave birth to a
baby boy this morning and he says she's out of danger.'  And I know
I said to him, 'Well, then, it's been a lucky day for both of us.
McGuire was here this morning and he said Luke is now well enough
to be up and about.  He's out of danger.'--And I reckon," she went
on quietly, "that's why the date made such an impression on me--of
course, Luke had been awfully sick," she said gravely, and shook
her head, "we thought he was goin' to die more than once--so when
the doctor came and told me he was out of danger--well, it was a
day of rejoicin' for me, sure enough.  But that's how I know--
September 2nd, 1898--that's when it was, all right, the very day
when you were born."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "That is certainly right. . . .  Well,
if that don't beat all!" he cried with his astounded and engaging
air of surprise.  "The most remarkable thing I ever heard of!" he
said solemnly.

"So the next time you see your father," the woman said, with the
tranquil satisfaction of omniscience, "you tell him that you met
Eliza Pentland--he'll know who _I_ am, boy--I can assure you--for
we were born and brought up within five miles from each other and
you can tell him that she knew you right away, and even told you to
the hour and minute the day when you were born! . . .  You tell him
that," she said.

"Yes, Ma'am!" said Robert respectfully, "I certainly will! . . .
I'll tell him! . . .  That is certainly a remarkable thing. . . .
Ah-hah-hah! . . .  Beats all I ever heard of! . . .  Ah-hah-hah,"
he kept bowing and smiling to the young woman and her husband, and
muttering "ah-hah-hah! . . .  Pleased to have met you. . . .  Got
to go now: some one over here I've got to see . . . but I'll
certainly tell him . . . ah-hah-hah. . . .  Gene, I'll see you on
the train. . . .  Good-bye. . . .  Good-bye. . . .  Glad to have
met you all. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Certainly a remarkable
thing. . . .  Good-bye!" and turning abruptly, he left them,
walking rapidly along at his stiff, prim, curiously lunging stride.

The younger woman looked after the boy's tall form as he departed,
stroking her chin in a reflective and abstracted manner:

"So that's Judge Robert Weaver's son, is it? . . .  Well," she went
on, nodding her head vigorously in a movement of affirmation.
"He's all right. . . .  He's got good manners. . . .  He looks and
acts like a gentleman. . . .  You can see he's had a good bringing
up. . . .  I like him!" she declared positively again.

"Why, yes," said the mother, who had been following the tall
retreating form with a reflective look, her hands loose-folded at
her waist--"Why, yes," she continued, nodding her head in a
thoughtful and conceding manner that was a little comical in its
implications--"He's a good-looking all-right sort of a boy. . . .
And he certainly seems to be intelligent enough."  She was silent
for a moment, pursing her lips thoughtfully and then concluded with
a little nod--"Well, now, the boy may be all right. . . .  I'm not
saying that he isn't. . . .  He may turn out all right, after all."

"All right?" her daughter said, frowning a little and showing a
little annoyance, but with a faint lewd grin around the corners of
her mouth--"what do you mean by all right, Mama?  Why, of course
he's all right. . . .  What makes you think he's not?"

The other woman was silent for another moment: when she spoke
again, her manner was tinged with portent, and she turned and
looked at her daughter a moment in a sudden, straight and deadly
fashion before she spoke:

"Now, child," she said, "I'm going to tell you: perhaps everything
will turn out all right for that boy--I hope it does--but--"

"Oh, my God!" the younger woman laughed hoarsely but with a shade
of anger, and turning, prodded her brother stiffly in the ribs.
"Now we'll get it!" she sniggered, prodding him, "k-k-k-k-k!  What
do you call it?" she said with a lewd frowning grin that was
indescribably comic in its evocations of coarse humour--"the low
down?--the dirt?--Did you ever know it to fail?--The moment that
you meet any one, and up comes the family corpse."

"--Well, now, child, I'm not saying anything against the boy--
perhaps it won't touch him--maybe he'll be the one to escape--to
turn out all right--but--"

"Oh, my God!" the younger woman groaned, rolling her eyes around in
a comical and imploring fashion.  "Here it comes."

"You are too young to know about it yourself," the other went on
gravely--"you belong to another generation--you don't know about
it--but I DO."  She paused again, shook her pursed lips with a
convulsive pucker of distaste, and then, looking at her daughter
again in her straight and deadly fashion, said slowly, with a
powerful movement of the hand:

"There's been insanity in that boy's family for generations back!"

"Oh, my God!  I knew it!" the other groaned.

"Yes, sir!" the mother said implacably--"and two of his aunts--
Robert Weaver's own sisters died raving maniacs--and Robert
Weaver's mother herself was insane for the last twenty years of her
life up to the hour of her death--and I've heard tell that it went
back--"

"Well, deliver me," the younger woman checked her, frowning,
speaking almost sullenly.  "I don't want to hear any more about
it. . . .  It's a mighty funny thing that they all seem to get along
now--better than we do . . . so let's let bygones be bygones . . .
don't dig up the past."

Turning to her brother with a little frowning smile, she said
wearily:  "Did you ever know it to fail? . . .  They know it all,
don't they?" she said mysteriously.  "The minute you meet any one
you like, they spill the dirt. . . .  Well, I don't care," she
muttered.  "You stick to people like that. . . .  He looks like a
nice boy and--" with an impressed look over towards Robert's
friends, she concluded, "he goes with a nice crowd. . . .  You
stick to that kind of people.  I'm all for him."

Now the mother was talking again: the boy could see her powerful
and delicate mouth convolving with astonishing rapidity in a series
of pursed thoughtful lips, tremulous smiles, bantering and
quizzical jocosities, old sorrow and memory, quiet gravity, the
swift easy fluency of tears that the coming of a train always
induced in her, thoughtful seriousness, and sudden hopeful
speculation.

"Well, boy," she was now saying gravely, "you are going--as the
sayin' goes--" here she shook her head slightly, strongly, rapidly
with powerful puckered lips, and instantly her weak worn eyes of
brown were wet with tears--"as the sayin' goes--to a strange land--
a stranger among strange people.--It may be a long, long time," she
whispered in an old husky tone, her eyes tear-wet as she shook her
head mysteriously with a brave pathetic smile that suddenly filled
the boy with rending pity, anguish of the soul, and a choking sense
of exasperation and of woman's unfairness--"I hope we are all
here when you come back again. . . .  I hope you find us all
alive. . . ."  She smiled bravely, mysteriously, tearfully.  "You
never know," she whispered, "you never know."

"Mama," he could hear his voice sound hoarsely and remotely in his
throat, choked with anguish and exasperation at her easy fluency of
sorrow, "--Mama--in Christ's name!  Why do you have to act like
this every time someone goes away! . . .  I beg of you, for God's
sake, not to do it!"

"Oh, stop it!  Stop it!" his sister said in a rough, peremptory and
yet kindly tone to the mother, her eyes grave and troubled, but
with a faint rough smile about the edges of her generous mouth.
"He's not going away for ever!  Why, good heavens, you act as if
someone is dead!  Boston's not so far away you'll never see him
again!  The trains are running every day, you know. . . .
Besides," she said abruptly and with an assurance that infuriated
the boy, "he's not going today, anyway.  Why, you haven't any
intention of going today, you know you haven't," she said to him.
"He's been fooling you all along," she now said, turning to the
mother with an air of maddening assurance.  "He has no idea of
taking that train.  He's going to wait over until tomorrow.  I've
known it all along."

The boy went stamping away from them up the platform, and then came
stamping back at them while the other people on the platform
grinned and stared.

"Helen, in God's name!" he croaked frantically.  "Why do you start
that when I'm all packed up and waiting here at the God-damned
station for the train?  You KNOW I'm going away today!" he yelled,
with a sudden sick desperate terror in his heart as he thought that
something might now come in the way of going.  "You KNOW I am!  Why
did we come here?  What in Christ's name are we waiting for if you
don't think I'm going?"

The young woman laughed her high, husky laugh which was almost
deliberately irritating and derisive--"Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!"--
and plodded him in the ribs with her large stiff fingers.  Then,
almost wearily, she turned away, plucking at her large chin
absently, and said:  "Well, have it your own way!  It's your own
funeral!  If you're determined to go today, no one can stop you.
But I don't see why you can't just as well wait over till
tomorrow."

"Why, yes!" the mother now said briskly and confidently.  "That's
exactly what I'd do if I were you! . . .  Now, it's not going to do
a bit of harm to anyone if you're a day or so late in gettin'
there. . . .  Now I've never been there myself," she went on in her
tone of tranquil sarcasm, "but I've always heard that Harvard
University was a good big sort of place--and I'll bet you'll find,"
the mother now said gravely, with a strong slow nod of conviction--
"I'll bet you'll find that it's right there where it always was
when you get there.  I'll bet you find they haven't moved a foot,"
she said, "and let me tell you something, boy," she now continued,
looking at him almost sternly, but with a ghost of a smile about
her powerful and delicate mouth--"now I haven't had your education
and I reckon I don't know as much about universities as you do--but
I've never heard of one yet that would run a feller away for bein'
a day late as long as he's got money enough to pay his tuition. . . .
Now you'll find 'em waitin' for you when you get there--and
YOU'LL GET IN," she said slowly and powerfully.  "You don't have to
worry about that--they'll be glad to see you, and they'll take you
in a hurry when they see you've got the price."

"Now, Mama," he said in a quiet frenzied tone, "I beg of you, for
God's sake, please, not to--"

"All right, all right," the mother answered hastily in a placating
tone, "I was only sayin'--"

"If you will kindly, please, for God's sake--"

"K-k-k-k-k-k!" his sister snickered, poking him in the ribs.

But now the train was coming.  Down the powerful shining tracks a
half-mile away, the huge black snout of the locomotive swung slowly
round the magnificent bend and flare of the rails that went into
the railway yards of Altamont two miles away, and with short
explosive thunders of its squat funnel came barging slowly forward.
Across the golden pollenated haze of the warm autumnal afternoon
they watched it with numb lips and an empty hollowness of fear,
delight, and sorrow in their hearts.

And from the sensual terror, the ecstatic tension of that train's
approach, all things before, around, about the boy came to instant
life, to such sensuous and intolerable poignancy of life as a
doomed man might feel who looks upon the world for the last time
from the platform of the scaffold where he is to die.  He could
feel, taste, smell, and see everything with an instant still
intensity, the animate fixation of a vision seen instantly, fixed
for ever in the mind of him who sees it, and sense the clumped
dusty autumn masses of the trees that bordered the tracks upon the
left, and smell the thick exciting hot tarred caulking of the
tracks, the dry warmth and good worn wooden smell of the powerful
railway ties, and see the dull rusty red, the gaping emptiness and
joy of a freight car, its rough floor whitened with soft siltings
of thick flour, drawn in upon a spur of rusty track behind a
warehouse of raw concrete blocks, and see with sudden desolation,
the warehouse flung down rawly, newly, there among the hot, humid,
spermy, nameless, thick-leaved field-growth of the South.

Then the locomotive drew in upon them, loomed enormously above
them, and slowly swept by them with a terrific drive of eight-
locked pistoned wheels, all higher than their heads, a savage
furnace-flare of heat, a hard hose-thick hiss of steam, a moment's
vision of a lean old head, an old gloved hand of cunning on the
throttle, a glint of demon hawk-eyes fixed for ever on the rails, a
huge tangle of gauges, levers, valves, and throttles, and the
goggled blackened face of the fireman, lit by an intermittent hell
of flame, as he bent and swayed with rhythmic swing of laden shovel
at his furnace doors.

The locomotive passed above them, darkening the sunlight from their
faces, engulfing them at once and filling them with terror, drawing
the souls out through their mouths with the God-head of its instant
absoluteness, and leaving them there, emptied, frightened, fixed
for ever, a cluster of huddled figures, a bough of small white
staring faces, upturned, silent, and submissive, small, lonely, and
afraid.

Then as the heavy rust-black coaches rumbled past, and the wheels
ground slowly to a halt, the boy could see his mother's white
stunned face beside him, the naked startled innocence of her eyes,
and feel her rough worn clasp upon his arm, and hear her startled
voice, full of apprehension, terror, and surprise, as she said
sharply:

"Hah?  What say?  Is this his train?  I thought--"

It was his train and it had come to take him to the strange and
secret heart of the great North that he had never known, but whose
austere and lonely image, whose frozen heat and glacial fire, and
dark stern beauty had blazed in his vision since he was a child.
For he had dreamed and hungered for the proud unknown North with
that wild ecstasy, that intolerable and wordless joy of longing and
desire, which only a Southerner can feel.  With a heart of fire, a
brain possessed, a spirit haunted by the strange, secret and
unvisited magic of the proud North, he had always known that some
day he should find it--his heart's hope and his father's country,
the lost but unforgotten half of his own soul,--and take it for his
own.

And now that day had come, and these two images--call them rather
lights and weathers of man's soul--of the world-far, lost and
lonely South, and the fierce, the splendid, strange and secret
North were swarming like a madness through his blood.  And just as
he had seen a thousand images of the buried and silent South which
he had known all his life, so now he had a vision of the proud
fierce North with all its shining cities, and its tides of life.
He saw the rocky sweetness of its soil and its green loveliness,
and he knew its numb soft prescience, its entrail-stirring ecstasy
of coming snow, its smell of harbours and its traffic of proud
ships.

He could not utter what he wished to say and yet the wild and
powerful music of those two images kept swelling in him and it
seemed that the passion of their song must burst his heart, explode
the tenement of bright blood and agony in which they surged, and
tear the sinews of his life asunder unless he found some means to
utter them.

But no words came.  He only knew the image of man's loneliness, a
feeling of sorrow, desolation, and wild mournful secret joy,
longing and desire, as sultry, moveless and mysterious in its slow
lust as the great rivers of the South themselves.  And at the same
moment that he felt this wild and mournful sorrow, the slow, hot,
secret pulsings of desire, and breathed the heavy and mysterious
fragrance of the lost South again, he felt, suddenly and terribly,
its wild strange pull, the fatal absoluteness of its world-lost
resignation.

Then, with a sudden feeling of release, a realization of the
incredible escape that now impended for him, he knew that he was
waiting for the train, and that the great life of the North, the
road to freedom, solitude and the enchanted promise of the golden
cities was now before him.  Like a dream made real, a magic come to
life, he knew that in another hour he would be speeding worldward,
lifeward, Northward out of the enchanted, time-far hills, out of
the dark heart and mournful mystery of the South for ever.

And as that overwhelming knowledge came to him, a song of triumph,
joy, and victory so savage and unutterable, that he could no longer
hold it in his heart was torn from his lips in a bestial cry of
fury, pain, and ecstasy.  He struck his arms out in the shining air
for loss, for agony, for joy.  The whole earth reeled about him in
a kaleidoscopic blur of shining rail, massed heavy greens, and
white empetalled faces of the staring people.

And suddenly he was standing there among his people on the platform
of the little station.  All things and shapes on earth swam back
into their proper shape again, and he could hear his mother's
voice, the broken clatter of the telegraph, and see, there on the
tracks, the blunt black snout, the short hard blasts of steam from
its squat funnel, the imminent presence, the enormous bigness of
the train.



II


The journey from the mountain town of Altamont to the tower-masted
island of Manhattan is not, as journeys are conceived in America, a
long one.  The distance is somewhat more than 700 miles, the time
required to make the journey a little more than twenty hours.  But
so relative are the qualities of space and time, and so complex and
multiple their shifting images, that in the brief passage of this
journey one may live a life, share instantly in 10,000,000 other
ones, and see pass before his eyes the infinite panorama of
shifting images that make a nation's history.

First of all, the physical changes and transitions of the journey
are strange and wonderful enough.  In the afternoon one gets on the
train and with a sense of disbelief and wonder sees the familiar
faces, shapes, and structures of his native town recede out of the
last fierce clasp of life and vision.  Then, all through the waning
afternoon, the train is toiling down around the mountain curves and
passes.  The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with
the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: the towering summits,
wild and lonely, full of joy and strangeness and their haunting
premonitions of oncoming winter soar above him, the gulches,
gorges, gaps, and wild ravines, fall sheer and suddenly away with a
dizzy terrifying steepness, and all the time the great train toils
slowly down from the mountain summits with the sinuous turnings of
an enormous snake.  And from the very toiling slowness of the
train, together with the terrific stillness and nearness of the
marvellous hills, a relation is established, an emotion evoked,
which it is impossible to define, but which, in all its strange and
poignant mingling of wild sorrow and joy, grief for the world that
one is losing, swelling triumph at the thought of the strange new
world that one will find, is instantly familiar, and has been felt
by every one.

The train toils slowly round the mountain grades, the short and
powerful blasts of its squat funnel sound harsh and metallic
against the sides of rocky cuts.  One looks out the window and sees
cut, bank, and gorge slide slowly past, the old rock wet and
gleaming with the water of some buried mountain spring.  The train
goes slowly over the perilous and dizzy height of a wooden trestle;
far below, the traveller can see and hear the clean foaming
clamours of rock-bright mountain water; beside the track, before
his little hut, a switchman stands looking at the train with the
slow wondering gaze of the mountaineer.  The little shack in which
he lives is stuck to the very edge of the track above the steep and
perilous ravine.  His wife, a slattern with a hank of tight-drawn
hair, a snuff-stick in her mouth, and the same gaunt, slow
wondering stare her husband has, stands in the doorway of the
shack, holding a dirty little baby in her arms.

It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and
instantly familiar, that it seems to the traveller that he must
have known these people for ever, that he must now stretch forth
his hand to them from the windows and the rich and sumptuous luxury
of the Pullman car, that he must speak to them.  And it seems to
him that all the strange and bitter miracle of life--how, why, or
in what way, he does not know--is in that instant greeting and
farewell; for once seen, and lost the moment that he sees it, it is
his for ever and he can never forget it.  And then the slow toiling
train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is
something in his heart he cannot say.

At length the train has breached the last great wall of the soaring
ranges, has made its slow and sinuous descent around the powerful
bends and cork-screws of the shining rails (which now he sees above
him seven times) and towards dark, the lowland country has been
reached.  The sun goes down behind the train a tremendous globe of
orange and pollen, the soaring ranges melt swiftly into shapes of
smoky and enchanted purple, night comes--great-starred and velvet-
breasted night--and now the train takes up its level pounding
rhythm across the piedmont swell and convolution of the mighty
State.

Towards nine o'clock at night there is a pause to switch cars and
change engines at a junction town.  The traveller, with the same
feeling of wild unrest, wonder, nameless excitement and wordless
expectancy, leaves the train, walks back and forth upon the
platform, rushes into the little station luncheon room or out into
the streets to buy cigarettes, a sandwich--really just to feel this
moment's contact with another town.  He sees vast flares and
steamings of gigantic locomotives on the rails, the seamed,
blackened, lonely faces of the engineers in the cabs of their great
engines, and a little later he is rushing again across the rude,
mysterious visage of the powerful, dark, and lonely earth of old
Catawba.

Toward midnight there is another pause at a larger town--the last
stop in Catawba--again the feeling of wild unrest and nameless joy
and sorrow.  The traveller gets out, walks up and down the
platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty
engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all
the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity,
greeting, and farewell,--that lonely, strange, and poignantly
wordless feeling that Americans know so well.  Then he is in the
Pullman again, the last outposts of the town have slipped away from
him and the great train which all through the afternoon has
travelled eastward from the mountains half across the mighty State,
is now for the first time pointed northward, worldward, towards the
secret borders of Virginia, towards the great world cities of his
hope, the fable of his childhood legendry, and the wild and secret
hunger of his heart, his spirit and his life.

Already the little town from which he came in the great hills, the
faces of his kinsmen and his friends, their most familiar voices,
the shapes of things he knew seem far and strange as dreams, lost
at the bottom of the million-visaged sea-depth of dark time, the
strange and bitter miracle of life.  He cannot think that he has
ever lived there in the far lost hills, or ever left them, and all
his life seems stranger than the dream of time, and the great train
moves on across the immense and lonely visage of America, making
its great monotone that is the sound of silence and for ever.  And
in the train, and in ten thousand little towns, the sleepers sleep
upon the earth.

Then bitter sorrow, loneliness and joy come swelling to his throat--
quenchless hunger rises from the adyts of his life and conquers
him, and with wild wordless fury horsed upon his life, he comes at
length, in dark mid-watches of the night, up to the borders of the
old earth of Virginia.



Who has seen fury riding in the mountains?  Who has known fury
striding in the storm?  Who has been mad with fury in his youth,
given no rest or peace or certitude by fury, driven on across the
earth by fury, until the great vine of the heart was broke, the
sinews wrenched, the little tenement of bone, blood, marrow, brain,
and feeling in which great fury raged, was twisted, wrung,
depleted, worn out, and exhausted by the fury which it could not
lose or put away?  Who has known fury, how it came?

How have we breathed him, drunk him, eaten fury to the core, until
we have him in us now and cannot lose him anywhere we go?  It is a
strange and subtle worm that will be for ever feeding at our heart.
It is a madness working in our brain, a hunger growing from the
food it feeds upon, a devil moving in the conduits of our blood, it
is a spirit wild and dark and uncontrollable forever swelling in
our soul, and it is in the saddle now, horsed upon our lives,
rowelling the spurs of its insatiate desire into our naked and
defenceless sides, our owner, master, and the mad and cruel tyrant
who goads us on for ever down the blind and brutal tunnel of
kaleidoscopic days at the end of which is nothing but the blind
mouth of the pit and darkness and no more.

Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red
channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will
work at that great vine, whereat he fed.  Then, then, indeed, he
must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for
madness in a dead man's brain, no place for hunger in a dead man's
flesh, and in a dead man's heart there is a place for no desire.

At what place of velvet-breasted night long, long ago, and in what
leafy darkened street of mountain summer, hearing the footsteps of
approaching lovers in the night, the man's voice, low, hushed,
casual, confiding, suddenly the low rich welling of a woman's
laughter, tender and sensual in the dark, going, receding, fading,
and then the million-noted silence of the night again?  In what
ancient light of fading day in a late summer; what wordless passion
then of sorrow, joy, and ecstasy--was he betrayed to fury when it
came?

Or in the black dark of some forgotten winter's morning, child of
the storm and brother to the dark, alone and wild and secret in the
night as he leaned down against the wind's strong wall towards
Niggertown, blocking his folded papers as he went, and shooting
them terrifically in the wind's wild blast against the shack-walls
of the jungle-sleeping blacks, himself alone awake, wild, secret,
free and stormy as the wild wind's blast, giving it howl for howl
and yell for yell, with madness, and a demon's savage and exultant
joy, up-welling in his throat!  Oh, was he then, on such a night,
betrayed to fury--was it then, on such a night, that fury came?



He never knew; it may have been a rock, a stone, a leaf, the moths
of golden light as warm and moving in a place of magic green, it
may have been the storm-wind howling in the barren trees, the
ancient fading light of day in some forgotten summer, the huge
unfolding mystery of undulant, oncoming night.

Oh, it might have been all this in the April and moist lilac
darkness of some forgotten morning as he saw the clean line of the
East cleave into morning at the mountain's ridge.  It may have been
the first light, bird-song, an end to labour and the sweet ache and
pure fatigue of the lightened shoulder as he came home at morning
hearing the single lonely hoof, the jinking bottles, and the wheel
upon the street again, and smelled the early morning breakfast
smells, the smoking wheat cakes, and the pungent sausages, the
steaks, biscuits, grits, and fried green apples, and the brains and
eggs.  It may have been the coil of pungent smoke upcurling from
his father's chimney, the clean sweet gardens and the peach-bloom,
apples, crinkled lettuce wet with dew, bloom and cherry bloom down-
drifting in their magic snow within his father's orchard, and his
father's giant figure awake now and astir, and moving in his house!

Oh, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there!  To feel the
fire-full chimney-throat roar up a-tremble with the blast of his
terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen
range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of
breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed!  Oh, to
hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous hoarse
frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous muttering
mounting to faint howls as with infuriated relish he prepared the
roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him muttering as
the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him growling as
savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimney-throat, to hear
him muttering back and forth now like a raging beast, finally to
hear his giant stride racing through the house prepared now,
storming to the charge, and the well-remembered howl of his
awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the back-room stairs
he flung it open, yelling at them to awake.

Was it in such a way, one time as he awoke, and heard below his
father's lion-ramp of morning that fury came?  He never knew, no
more than one could weave the great web of his life back through
the brutal chaos of ten thousand furious days, unwind the great
vexed pattern of his life to silence, peace, and certitude in the
magic land of new beginnings, no return.

He never knew if fury had lain dormant all those years, had worked
secret, silent, like a madness in the blood.  But later it would
seem to him that fury had first filled his life, exploded,
conquered, and possessed him, that he first felt it, saw it, knew
the dark illimitable madness of its power, one night years later on
a train across Virginia.



III


It was a little before midnight when the youth entered the smoking
room of the Pullman where, despite the lateness of the hour,
several men still sat.  At just this moment the train had entered
the State of Virginia, although, of course, none of the men who sat
there talking knew this.

It is true that some of them might have known, had their interest
and attention been directed toward this geographic fact, had they
been looking for it.  Just at this moment, indeed, as the train,
scarcely slackening its speed, was running through the last of the
Catawba towns, one of the men glanced up suddenly from the
conversation in which he and the others were earnestly engaged,
which was exclusively concerned with the fascinating, ever-mounting
prices of their property and the tempting profits undoubtedly to be
derived from real-estate speculation in their native town.  He had
looked up quickly, casually, and absently, with that staggering
indifference of prosperous men who have been so far, so often, on
such splendid trains, that a trip across the continent at night
toward the terrific city is no longer a grand adventure of their
lives, but just a thing of custom, need, and even weariness, and
who, therefore, rarely look out of windows any more:

"What is this?" he said quickly.  "Oh, Maysville, probably.  Yes, I
guess this must be Maysville," and had then returned vigorously
from his brief inspection of the continent of night, a few lights,
and a little town, to the enticing topic which had for several
hours absorbed the interests of the group.

Nor was there any good reason why this traveller who had glanced so
swiftly and indifferently from the window of the train should feel
any greater interest than he showed.  Certainly the briefest and
most casual inspection would have convinced the observer that, in
Baedeker's celebrated phrase, there was "little here that need
detain the tourist."  What the man saw in the few seconds of his
observation was the quiet, dusty and sparsely lighted street of a
little town in the upper South.  The street was shaded by large
trees and there were some level lawns, more trees, and some white
frame-houses with spacious porches, gables, occasionally the wooden
magnificence of Georgian columns.

On everything--trees, houses, foliage, yards, and street--there was
a curious loneliness of departure and October, an attentive almost
mournful waiting.  And yet this dark and dusty street of the tall
trees left a haunting, curiously pleasant feeling of strangeness
and familiarity.  One viewed it with a queer sudden ache in the
heart, a feeling of friendship and farewell, and this feeling was
probably intensified by the swift and powerful movement of the
train which seemed to slide past the town almost noiselessly, its
wheels turning without friction, sound, or vibrancy on the pressed
steel ribbons of the rails, giving to a traveller, and particularly
to a youth who was going into the secret North for the first time,
a feeling of illimitable and exultant power, evoking for him the
huge mystery of the night and darkness, and the image of ten
thousand lonely little towns like this across the continent.

Then the train slides by the darkened vacant-looking little station
and for a moment one has a glimpse of the town's chief square and
business centre.  And as he sees it he is filled again with the
same feeling of loneliness, instant familiarity, and departure.
The square is one of those anomalous, shabby-ornate, inept, and
pitifully pretentious places that one finds in little towns like
these.  But once seen, if only for this fraction of a moment, from
the windows of a train, the memory of it will haunt one for ever
after.

And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the
combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life
and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence
of life itself.  The impression one gets, in fact, from that brief
vision is one of frozen cataleptic silence in a world from which
all life has recently been extinguished by some appalling
catastrophe.  The lights burn, the electric signs wink and flash,
the place is still horribly intact in all its bleak prognathous
newness, but all the people are dead, gone, vanished.  The place is
a tomb of frozen silence, as terrifying in its empty bleakness as
those advertising backdrops one saw formerly in theatres, where the
splendid buildings, stores, and shops of a great street are painted
in the richest and most flattering colours, and where there is no
sign of life whatever.

So was it here, save that here the illusion of the dead world
gained a hideous physical reality by its stark, staring, nakedly
concrete dimensions.

All this the boy had seen, or rather sensed, in the wink of an eye,
a moment's vision of a dusty little street, a fleeting glimpse of a
silent little square, a few hard lights, and then the darkness of
the earth again--these half-splintered glimpses were all the boy
could really see in the eye-wink that it took the train to pass the
town.  And yet, all these fragmentary things belonged so completely
to all the life of little towns which he had known, that it was not
as if he had seen only a few splintered images, but rather as if
the whole nocturnal picture of the town was instantly whole and
living in his mind.

Beyond the station, parked in a line against the curb, is a row of
empty motor cars, and he knows instantly that they have been left
there by the patrons of the little moving-picture theatre which
explodes out of the cataleptic silence of the left-hand side of the
square into a blaze of hard white and flaming posters which seem to
cover the entire façade.  Even here, no movement of life is
visible, but one who has lived and known towns like these feels for
the first time an emotion of warmth and life as he looks at the
gaudy, blazing bill-beplastered silence of that front.

For suddenly he seems to see the bluish blaze of carbon light that
comes from the small slit-like vent-hole cut into the wall and can
hear again--one of the loneliest and most haunting of all sounds--
the rapid shuttering sound of the projection camera late at night,
a sound lonely, hurried, unforgettable, coming out into those
cataleptic squares of silence in the little towns--as if the
operator is fairly racing through the last performance of the night
like a weary and exhausted creature whose stale, over-driven life
can find no joy in what is giving so much joy to others, and who is
pressing desperately ahead toward the merciful rewards of food,
sleep, and oblivion which are already almost in his grasp.

And as he remembers this, he also suddenly sees and knows the
people in the theatre, and in that instant greets them, feels his
lonely kinship with them, with the whole family of the earth, and
says farewell.  Small, dark, lonely, silent, thirsty, and
insatiate, the people of the little town are gathered there in that
one small cell of radiance, warmth, and joy.  There for a little
space they are united by the magic spell the theatre casts upon
them.  They are all dark and silent leaning forward like a single
mind and congeries of life, and yet they are all separate too.

Yes, lonely, silent, for a moment beautiful, he knows the people of
the town are there, lifting the small white petals of their faces,
thirsty and insatiate, to that magic screen: now they laugh
exultantly as their hero triumphs, weep quietly as the mother dies,
the little boys cheer wildly as the rascal gets his due--they are
all there in darkness, under immense immortal skies of time, small
nameless creatures in a lost town on the mighty continent, and for
an instant we have seen them, known them, said farewell.

Around the four sides of the square at even intervals, the new
standards of the five-bulbed lamps cast down implacably upon those
cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence of their hard white
light.  And this, he knows, is called "the Great White Way," of
which the town is proud.  Somehow the ghastly, lifeless silence of
that little square is imaged nowhere else so cruelly as in the
harsh, white silence of these lights.  For they evoke terribly, as
nothing else can do, the ghastly vacancy of light without life.
And poignantly, pitifully, and unutterably their harsh, white
silence evokes the moth-like hunger of the American for hard,
brilliant, blazing incandescence.

It is as if there may be in his soul the horror of the ancient
darkness, the terror of the old immortal silences, which will not
down and must be heard.  It is as if he feels again the ancient
fear of--what?  Of the wilderness, the wet and lidless eye of shame
and desolation feeding always on unhoused and naked sides.  It is
as if he fears the brutal revelation of his loss and loneliness,
the furious, irremediable confusion of his huge unrest, his
desperate and unceasing flight from the immense and timeless skies
that bend above him, the huge, doorless and unmeasured vacancies of
distance, on which he lives, on which, as helpless as a leaf upon a
hurricane, he is driven on for ever, and on which he cannot pause,
which he cannot fence, wall, conquer, make his own.

Then the train, running always with its smooth, powerful, almost
noiseless movement, has left the station and the square behind it.
The last outposts of the town appear and vanish in patterns of
small, lonely light, and there is nothing but huge and secret night
before us, the lonely, everlasting earth, and presently Virginia.

And surely, now, there is little more to be seen.  Surely, now,
there is almost nothing that by day would be worthy of more than a
glance from those great travellers who have ranged the earth, and
known all its wild and stormy seas, and seen its rarest glories.
And by night, now, there is nothing, nothing by night but darkness
and a space we call Virginia through which the huge projectile of
the train is hurtling onward in the dark.

Field and fold and gulch and hill and hollow, forest and stream and
bridge and bank and cut, the huge earth, the rude earth, the wild,
formless, infinitely various, most familiar, ever-haunting earth,
the grand and casual earth that is so brown, so harsh, so dusty, so
familiar, the strange and homely earth wrought in our blood, our
brain, our heart, the earth that can never be forgotten or
described, is flowing by us, by us, by us in the night.

What is it that we know so well and cannot speak?  What is it that
we want to say and cannot tell?  What is it that keeps swelling in
our hearts its grand and solemn music, that is aching in our
throats, that is pulsing like a strange wild grape through all the
conduits of our blood, that maddens us with its exultant and
intolerable joy and that leaves us tongueless, wordless, maddened
by our fury to the end?

We do not know.  All that we know is that we lack a tongue that
could reveal, a language that could perfectly express the wild joy
swelling to a music in our heart, the wild pain welling to a strong
ache in our throat, the wild cry mounting to a madness in our
brain, the thing, the word, the joy we know so well, and cannot
speak!  All that we know is that the little stations whip by in the
night, the straggling little towns whip by with all that is casual,
rude, familiar, ugly, and unutterable.  All that we know is that
the earth is flowing by us in the darkness, and that this is the
way the world goes--with a field and a wood and a field!  And of
the huge and secret earth all we know is that we feel with all our
life its texture with our foot upon it.

All that we know is that having everything we yet hold nothing,
that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we
have no words to give it utterance.  All that we know is that here
the passionate enigma of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the
furious hunger that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately
felt--that being rich, we all are yet so poor, that having an
incalculable wealth we have no way of spending it, that feeling an
illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.

Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across Virginia, we hurtle
onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle onward
driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten
thousand furious and kaleidoscopic days, the victims of the cruel
impulse of a million chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at
which to thrust the shoulder of our strength, a roof to hide us in
our nakedness, a place to build in, or a door.



IV


As the boy entered the smoking compartment, the men who were
talking together paused, and looked up at him briefly with the
intent, curious, momentary stare of men interrupted in a
conversation.  The boy, a leggy creature racing into unfledged
lengths of shank and arm and shoulder, fumbled nervously in his
coat pocket for a package of cigarettes and then sat down abruptly
on the upholstered leather seat beside one of the men.

The boy's manner betrayed that mixture of defiance and diffidence
which a young man going out into the world for the first time feels
in the presence of older and more experienced men.  And this was
the way he felt.  And for this reason in the sharp and casual stare
which the men fixed briefly on him there may have been unconsciously
something affectionate and tender as each one recalled a moment of
his own lost youth.

The boy felt the powerful movement of the train beneath him and the
lonely austerity and mystery of the dark earth outside that swept
past for ever with a fanlike stroke, an immortal and imperturbable
stillness.  It seemed to him that these two terrific negatives of
speed and stillness, the hurtling and projectile movement of the
train and the calm silence of the everlasting earth, were poles of
a single unity--a unity coherent with his destiny, whose source was
somehow in himself.

It seemed to him that this incredible and fortunate miracle of his
own life and fate had ordered all these accidental facts into
coherent and related meanings.  He felt that everything--the
powerful movement of the train, the infinite mystery and lonely
wildness of the earth, the feeling of luxury, abundance, and
unlimited wealth that was stimulated by the rich furnishings of the
Pullman, and the general air of affluence of these prosperous men--
belonged to him, had come out of his own life, and were ready to
serve him at his own behest and control.

It seemed to him that the glorious moment for which his whole life
had been shaped, and toward which every energy and desire in his
spirit had been turned, was now here.

As that incredible knowledge came to him, a fury, wild, savage,
wordless, pulsed through his blood and filled him with such a
swelling and exultant joy as he has never known before.  He felt
the savage tongueless cry of pain and joy swell up and thicken in
his throat, he felt a rending and illimitable power in him as if he
could twist steel between his fingers, and he felt an almost
uncontrollable impulse to yell into the faces of the men with a
demonic glee.

Instead he just sat down quickly with an abrupt, half-defiant
movement, lit his cigarette, and spoke to one of the men quickly
and diffidently, saying:

"Hello, Mr. Flood."

For a moment, the man thus addressed said nothing, but sat staring
at the boy stupidly with an expression of heavy surprise.  He was a
well-dressed but bloated-looking man in his fifties whose gross
figure even in repose betrayed a gouty tendency.  His face, which
had the satiny rosy texture, veinous and tender, that alcoholism
and a daily massage can give, was brutally coarse and sensual, but
was given a disturbing and decisive character by his bulging yellow
eyeballs and the gross lewd mouth which, because of several large
buck teeth whose discoloured surfaces protruded under the upper
lip, seemed always to be half opened and half smiling.  And it was
not a pleasant smile.  It was a smile, faint, unmistakably sensual,
and rather sly.  It seemed to come from some huge choking secret
glee and there was in it a quality that was jubilantly obscene.

For a moment more Mr. Flood stared through his bulging eyes at the
boy who had just spoken to him, with an air of comical and stupid
surprise.  Then amiably, but with a puzzled undertone, he said
gruffly:

"Hello.  Oh, hello, son!  How are you?"

And after looking at the boy a moment longer, he turned his
attention to the other men again.

It was at just that season of the year when two events which are
dear to the speculations of the American had absorbed the public
interest.  These events were baseball and politics, and at that
moment both were thrillingly imminent.  The annual baseball
contests for "the championship of the world" were to begin within
another day or two, and the national campaign for the election of
the American president, which would be held in another month, was
moving daily to its furious apogee of speeches, accusations, dire
predictions, and impassioned promises.  Both events gave the
average American a thrill of pleasurable anticipation: his approach
to both was essentially the same.  It was the desire of a man to
see a good show, to "take sides" vigorously in an exciting contest--
to be amused, involved as an interested spectator is involved, but
not to be too deeply troubled or concerned by the result.

It was just natural, therefore, that at the moment when the boy
entered the smoking compartment of the train, the conversation of
the men assembled there should be chiefly concerned with these twin
sports.  As he came in, there was a hum of voices, a sound of
argument, and then he could see the hearty red-faced man--the
politician--shaking his head dubiously and heard him say, with a
protesting laugh:

"Ah-h, I don't know about that.  From what I hear it's just the
other way.  I was talking to a man from Tennessee the other day,
and from what he says, Cox is gaining everywhere.  He said that a
month ago he wouldn't have given two cents for his chances, but now
he thinks he's going to carry the State."

"It's going to be close," another conceded.  "He may win yet--but
it looks to me as if he's got a hard uphill fight on his hands.
Tennessee always polls a big Republican vote--in some of those
mountain districts they vote two to one Republican--and this year
it looks as if they're all set for a change. . . .  What do you
think about it, Emmet?" he said, appealing to the small, swarthy
and important-looking little man, who sat there, swinging his short
little legs and chewing on a fat cigar with an air of wise
reflection.

"Well," that person answered slowly after a thoughtful moment,
taking his cigar in his pudgy fingers and looking at it studiously--
"it may be--it may be--that the country's ready for a change--now
don't misunderstand me," he went on hastily, as if eager to set
their perturbed minds at rest--"I'm not saying that I want to see
Harding elected--that I'm going to cast my vote for him--as you
know, I'm a party man and have voted the Democratic ticket ever
since I came of age--but," again he paused, frowned importantly at
his cigar, and spoke with careful deliberation--"it may just be
that we are due for a change this year--that the country is ready
for it--that we need it. . . .  Now, I supported Wilson twice, in
1912, when he got elected to his first term of office, and again in
1916--"

"The time he kept us out of war," some one said ironically.

"And," the little man said deliberately--"if he was running again--
if he was well enough to run--if he wanted a third term--(although
I'm against the third term in principle)," he amended hastily
again--"why, I believe I'd go ahead and vote for him.  That's how
much I think of him.  But," again he paused, and meditated his
chewed cigar profoundly--"it may be we're due now for a change.
Wilson was a great president--in my opinion, the greatest man we've
had since Lincoln--I don't believe any other man could have done
the job he did as well as he--BUT," the word came out impressively,
"the job is done!  The war is over--"

"Yes, thank God!" some one murmured softly but fervently.

"The people want to forget about the war--they want to forget all
their sacrifices and suffering--" said this little man who had
sacrificed and suffered nothing--"they are looking forward to
better times. . . .  And in my opinion," he spoke again with his
air of slow deliberation, important carefulness--"in my opinion,
better times are before us.  I think that after this election we
are going to witness one of the greatest periods of national
development and expansion that the world has ever known. . . .
Why, we haven't begun yet!  We haven't even started!" he cried
suddenly, with a note of passionate conviction in his voice--"Do
you realize that this country is only a little more than a hundred
years old?  Why, we haven't even begun to show what we can do yet!
We've spent all that time in getting started--in building cities--
settling the country--building railroads and factories--developing
the means of production--making the tools with which to work. . . .
The resources of this country are scarcely tapped as yet.  And in
my opinion we are on the eve of the greatest period of prosperity
and growth the world has ever known. . . .  Look at Altamont, for
example," he went on cogently.  "Ten years ago, in 1910, the census
gave us a population of 18,000. . . .  Now, we have thirty,
according to government figures, and that doesn't begin to take the
whole thing in: it doesn't take in Biltburn, Lunn's Cove, Beaver
Hills, Sunset Parkway--a dozen other places I can mention, all
really part of the town but not included in the census figures. . . .
If all the suburbs were included we'd have a population of at
least 40,000 inhabitants--"

"I'd call it nearer fifty," said another patriot.

"And within another ten years we'll go to seventy-five, perhaps a
hundred. . . .  Why, that town hasn't begun to grow yet!" he said,
bending his short body forward in his enthusiasm and tapping his
fat knee--"It has been less than eight years since we established
the Citizen's Bank and Trust Company with a capital of $25,000 and
capital stock at $100 a share. . . .  Now," he paused a moment, and
looked around him, his swarthy face packed with strong conviction--
"NOW, we have a capital of $2,000,000--deposits totalling more than
$18,000,000--and as for the stock--" for a moment the little man's
swarthy face was touched with a faint complacent smile, he said
smugly, "I don't know exactly how much stock you gentlemen may hold
among you, but if any of you wants to sell what he has, I will pay
you $1000 a share--here and now," he slapped a fat small hand down
upon a fat small knee--"here and now! for every share you own."

And he looked at them steadily for a moment with an air of
challenge.

"Not for mine!" the florid heavy man cried heartily.  "No, sir!
I've only got ten shares, Emmet, but you can't buy it from me at
any price!  I won't sell!"

And the swarthy little man, pleased by the answer, smiled
complacently about him before he spoke again.

"Yes, sir!" he said.  "That's the way it is.  And the thing that's
begun to happen at home already is going to happen everywhere--all
over the country.  From now on you're going to see a period of
rising prices and high wages--increased production, a boom in real
estate, stocks, investments, business of all kinds--rising values
everywhere such as you never saw before and never hoped to see."

"And where is it going to stop?"

"Stop!" the swarthy little man spoke almost curtly, and then
barked, "It's not going to stop!  Not during OUR lifetime, anyway!
I tell you, man, we're just beginning!  How can there be any talk
of stopping when we haven't STARTED yet? . . .  There's been
nothing like it before," he cried with passionate earnestness--
"nothing to match it in the history of the world.  We've had wars,
booms, good times, hard times, slumps, periods of prosperity--but,
I tell you, gentlemen!" and here he smote himself sharply on the
knee and his voice rose with the strength of an unshakable
conviction--"this thing is different!  We have reached a stage in
our development that no other country in the world has ever known--
that was never dreamed of before--a stage that is beyond booms,
depressions, good times, hard times--anything--"

"You mean that after this we shall never be affected by those
things?"

"Yes, sir!" he cried emphatically.  "I mean just that!  I mean that
we have learned the causes for each of those conditions.  I mean
that we have learned how to check them, how to control them.  I
mean that so far as we are concerned they don't EXIST any more!"
His voice had become almost shrill with the force of his persuasive
argument, and suddenly whipping a sheaf of envelopes, tied with a
rubber band, out of his inner pocket, and gripping a stub of pencil
in his stubby hand, he crossed his short fat legs with an energetic
movement, bent forward poised above the envelopes, and said quietly
but urgently:

"See here, now!--I'd like to show you a few figures!  My business,
as you know, is to look after other people's money--your money, the
town's money, everybody's money--I've got to keep my fingers on the
pulse of business at every moment of the day--my business is to
KNOW--to KNOW--and let me tell you something," he said quietly,
looking directly in their eyes, "I DO know,--so pay attention just
a moment while I show these figures to you."

And for some moments he spoke quietly, persuasively, his dark
features packed with an energy of powerful conviction, while he
rapidly jotted figures down upon the backs of the soiled envelopes,
and they bent around him--their medicine-man of magic numerals--in
an attitude of awed and rapt attentiveness.  And when he had
finished, there was silence for a moment, save for the rhythmic
clack of wheels, the rocketing sound of the great train.  Then one
of the men, stroking his chin thoughtfully, and with an impressed
air, said:

"I see. . . .  And you think, then, that in view of these
conditions it would be better for the country if Harding is
elected."

The little man's manner became instantly cautious, non-committal,
"conservative":

"I don't say that," he said, shaking his head in a movement of
denial--"I only say that whoever gets elected we're in for a period
of unparalleled development. . . .  Now both of them are good men--
as I say, I shall probably vote for Cox--but you can rest assured,"
he spoke deliberately and looked around him in his compelling way--
"you can rest assured that no matter which one gets elected the
country will be in good hands.  There's no question about that."

"Yes, sir," said the florid-faced politician in his amiable and
hearty way.  "I agree with you. . . .  I'm a Democrat myself, both
in practice and in principle.  I'm going to vote for Cox, but if
Harding gets elected I won't shed any tears over his election.
We'll have to give the Republicans credit for a good deed this
time--they couldn't have made a wiser or a better decision.  He has
a long and honourable career in the service of his country,"--as he
spoke his voice unconsciously took on the sententious ring and lilt
of the professional politician--"no breath of scandal has ever
touched his name: in public and in private life he has remained as
he began--a statesman loyal to the institutions of his country, a
husband devoted to his family life, a plain American of simple
tastes who loves his neighbours as himself, and prefers the quiet
life of a little town, the democracy of the front porch, to the
marble arches of the Capitol--so, whatever the result may be," the
orator concluded, "this nation need fear nothing: it has chosen
well and wisely in both cases, its future is secure."

Mr. Flood, during the course of this impassioned flight, had
remained ponderously unmoved.  In the pause that followed, he sat
impassively, his coarse-jowled face and bulging yellowed eyes fixed
on the orator in their customary expression of comic stupefaction.
Now, breathing hoarsely and stertorously, he coughed chokingly and
with an alarming rattling noise into his handkerchief, peered
intently at his wadded handkerchief for a moment, and then said
coarsely:

"Hell!  What all of you are saying is that you are goin' to vote
for Cox but that you hope that Harding wins."

"No, now, Jim--" the politician, Mr. Candler, said in a protesting
tone--"I never said--"

"Yes, you did!" Mr. Flood wheezed bluntly.  "You meant it, anyhow,
every one of you is sayin' how he always was a Democrat and what
a great man Wilson is, and how he's goin' to vote for Cox--and
every God-damn one of you is praying that the other feller gets
elected. . . .  Why?  I'll tell you why," he wheezed coarsely,
"--it's because we're sick an' tired of Woodrow, all of us--we want
to put the rollers under him an' see the last of him!  Oh, yes, we
are," he went on brutally as some one started to protest--"we're
tired of Woodrow's flowery speeches, an' we're tired of hearin' about
wars an' ideals an' democracy an' how fine an' noble we all are an'
'Mister won't you please subscribe?'  We're tired of hearin' bunk
that doesn't pay an' we want to hear some bunk that does--an' we're
goin' to vote for the crook that gives it to us. . . .  Do you know
what we all want--what we're lookin' for?" he demanded, glowering
brutally around at them.  "We want a piece of the breast with lots
of gravy--an' the boy that promises us the most is the one we're
for! . . .  Cox!  Hell!  All of you know Cox has no more chance of
getting in than a snowball has in hell.  When they get through with
him he won't know whether he was run over by a five-ton truck or
chewed up in a sausage mill. . . .  Nothing has changed, the
world's no different, we're just the same as we always were--and
I've watched 'em come an' go for forty years--Blaine, Cleveland,
Taft, McKinley, Roosevelt--the whole damned lot of 'em--an' what we
want from them is just the same: all we can get for ourselves, a
free grab with no holts barred, and to hell with the other fellow."

"So whom are you going to vote for, Jim?" said Mr. Candler smiling.

"Who?  Me?" said Mr. Flood with a coarse grin.  "Why, hell, you
ought to know that without asking.  Me--I'm a Democrat, ain't I?--
don't I publish a Democratic newspaper?  I'm going to vote for Cox,
of course."

And, in the burst of laughter that followed, some one could be
heard saying jestingly:

"And who's going to win the Series, Jim?  Some one told me you're
for Brooklyn!"

"Brooklyn!" Mr. Flood jeered wheezingly.  "Brooklyn has just the
same kind of chance Cox has--the chance a snowball has in hell!
Brooklyn!  They're in just the same fix the Democrats are in--
they've got nothing on the ball.  When Speaker and that Cleveland
gang get through with them, Brooklyn is going to look just like Cox
the day after the election.  Brooklyn," he concluded with brutal
conviction, "hasn't got a chance."

And again the debate between the men grew eager, animated and
vociferous: they shouted, laughed, denied, debated, jeered good-
naturedly, and the great train hurtled onward in the darkness, and
the everlasting earth was still.

And other men, and other voices, words, and moments such as these
would come, would pass, would vanish and would be forgotten in the
huge record and abyss of time.  And the great trains of America
would hurtle on through darkness over the lonely, everlasting
earth--the earth which only was eternal--and on which our fathers
and our brothers had wandered, their lives so brief, so lonely, and
so strange--into whose substance at length they all would be
compacted.  And the great trains would hurtle on for ever over the
silent and eternal earth--fixed in that design of everlasting
stillness and unceasing change.  The trains would hurtle onward
bearing other lives like these, all brought together for an instant
between two points of time--and then all lost, all vanished, broken
and forgotten.  The trains would bear them onward to their million
destinations--each to the fortune, fame, or happiness he wished,
whatever it was that he was looking for--but whether any to a sure
success, a certain purpose, or the thing he sought--what man could
say?  All that he knew was that these men, these words, this moment
would vanish, be forgotten--and that great wheels would hurtle on
for ever.  And the earth be still.



Mr. Flood shifted his gouty weight carefully with a movement of his
fat arm, grunting painfully as he did so.  This delicate operation
completed, he stared sharply and intently at the boy again and at
length said bluntly:

"You're one of those Gant boys, ain't you?  Ain't you Ben's
brother?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  "That's right."

"Which one are you?" Mr. Flood said with this same brutal
directness.  "You ain't the one that stutters, are you?"

"No," one of the other men interrupted with a laugh, but in a
decided tone.  "He's not the one.  You're thinking of Luke."

"Oh," said Mr. Flood stupidly.  "Is Luke the one that stutters?"

"Yes," the boy said, "that's Luke.  I'm Eugene."

"Oh," Mr. Flood said heavily.  "I reckon you're the youngest one."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.

"Well," said Mr. Flood with an air of finality, "I didn't know
which one you were, but I knew you were one of them.  I knew I'd
seen you somewhere."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  He was about to go on, hesitated for
a moment, and suddenly blurted out:  "I used to carry a route on
The Courier when you owned it.  I guess that's how you remembered
me."

"Oh," said Mr. Flood stupidly, "you did?  Yes, that's it, all
right.  I remember now."  And he continued to look at the boy with
his bulging stare of comic stupefaction and for a moment there was
silence save for the pounding of the wheels upon the rail.

"How many of you boys are there?"  The swarthy and important-
looking man who had previously been addressed as Emmet now spoke
curiously:  "There must be five or six in all."

"No," the boy said, "there's only three now.  There's Luke and
Steve and me."

"Oh, Steve, Steve," the little man said with an air of crisp
finality, as if this was the name that had been at the tip of his
tongue all the time.  "Steve was the oldest, wasn't he?"

"Yes, sir," said the boy.

"Whatever became of Steve, anyway?" the man said.  "I don't believe
I've seen him in ten or fifteen years.  He doesn't live at home any
more, does he?"

"No, sir," the boy said.  "He lives in Indiana."

"Does he for a fact?" said the little man, as if this was a rare
and curious bit of information.  "What's Steve doing out there?  Is
he in business?"

For a moment the boy was going to say, "No, he runs a pool room and
lives up over it with his wife and children," but feeling ashamed
to say this, he said:

"I think he runs some kind of cigar store out there."

"Is that so?" the man answered with an air of great interest.
"Well," he went on in a moment in a conciliatory tone, "Steve was
always smart enough.  He had brains enough to do almost anything if
he tried."

Emmet Wade, the man who had asked the boy all these questions, was
a quick, pompous little figure, corpulently built, but so short in
stature as to be almost dwarfish-looking.  His skin was curiously
and unpleasantly swarthy, and save for a fringe of thin black hair
at either side, his head was completely bald.  In that squat
figure, the suggestion of pompous authority and mountainous conceit
was so pronounced that even in repose, as now, the whole man seemed
to strut.  He was, by virtue of that fortuitous chance and
opportunity which has put so many small men in great positions, the
president of the leading bank of the community.  Even as he sat
there in the smoking compartment, with his short fat legs crossed,
the boy could see him sitting at his desk in the bank, swinging
back and forth in his swivel chair thoughtfully, his pudgy hands
folded behind his head as he dictated a letter to his obsequious
secretary.

"Where's old Luke?  What's he doing, anyway?" another of the men
demanded suddenly, beginning to chuckle even as he spoke.  The
speaker was the florid-faced, somewhat countrified-looking man
already noted, who wore the string neck-tie and spoke with the
rhetorical severity of the small-town politician.  He was one of
the town commissioners and in his hearty voice and easy manner
there was a more genial quality than any of the others had.  "I
haven't seen that boy in years," he continued.  "Some one was
asking me just the other day what had become of him."

"He's got a job selling farm machinery and lighting equipment," the
boy answered.

"Is that so?" the man replied with this same air of friendly
interest.  "Where is he located?  He doesn't get home very often,
does he?"

"No, sir," the boy said, "not very often.  He comes in every two or
three weeks, but he doesn't stay home long at a time.  His
territory is down through South Carolina and Georgia--all through
there."

"What did you say he was selling?" said Mr. Flood, who had been
staring at the boy fixedly during all this conversation with his
heavy expression of a slow, intent and brutal stupefaction.

"He sells lighting systems and pumps and farm equipment and
machinery--for farms," the boy said awkwardly.

"That's Luke--who does that?" said Mr. Flood after a moment, when
this information had had time to penetrate.

"Yes, sir.  That's Luke."

"And he's the one that stutters?"

"Yes, sir."

"The one that used to have the agency for The Saturday Evening Post
and did all that talking when he sold 'em to you?"

"Yes, sir.  That's Luke."

"And what d'you say he's doing now?" said Mr. Flood heavily.
"Selling farm machinery?"

"Yes, sir.  That's what he's doing."

"Then, by God," said Mr. Flood, with a sudden and explosive
emphasis which, after his former attitude of heavy, brutal
stupefaction, was startling, "he'll do it!"  The other men laughed
and Mr. Flood shook his ponderous, crimson head slowly from side to
side to emphasize his conviction in the matter.

"If any one can sell 'em, he'll do it," he said positively.  "That
boy could sell Palm Beach suits to the Esquimaux.  They'd have to
buy 'em just to keep him from talking them to death."

"I'll tell you what I saw him do one time," said the politician,
shifting his weight a little in order to accommodate himself more
comfortably to the motion of the train.  "I was standing in front
of the post office one day talking to Dave Redmond about some
property he owned out on the Haw Creek Road--oh, it must have been
almost fifteen years ago--when here he comes hustling along, you
know, with a big bundle of his papers under his arm.  Well, he
sails right into us, talking about a mile a minute and going so
fast neither of us had a chance to get a word in edgeways.  'Here
you are, gentlemen,' he says, 'hot off the press, just the thing
you've been waiting for, this week's edition of The Saturday
Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, the twentieth part of a
dollar.'  By that time," said Mr. Candler, "he had the thing all
opened up and shoved up right under Dave Redmond's nose, and he was
turning the pages and telling him all about the different pieces it
had in it and who wrote them and what was in them, and what a
bargain it was for five cents.  'W-w-w-why,' he says, 'if you b-b-
b-bought it in a book, why it'd cost you a d-d-d-dollar and a half
and then,' he says, 'it wouldn't be half as good.'  Well, Dave was
getting sort of red in the face by that time," Mr. Candler said,
"and I could see he was sort of annoyed at being interrupted, but
the boy kept right on with his spiel and wouldn't give up.  'I
don't want it,' says Dave, 'I'm busy,' and he tries to turn away
from him, but Luke moves right around to the other side and goes
after him about twice as hard as before.  'Go on, go on,' says
Dave.  'We're busy!  I don't want it!  I can't read!' he says.
'All right,' says Luke, 'then you can look at the p-p-p-pictures.
Why, the pictures alone,' he says, 'are w-w-w-worth a half a
dollar.  It's the b-b-b-bargain of a lifetime,' he says.  Well, the
boy was pressing him pretty hard and I guess Dave lost his temper.
He sort of knocked the magazine away from him and shouted, 'Damn
it, I told you that I didn't want it, and I mean it!  Now go on!
We're busy.'  Well," said Mr. Candler, "Luke didn't say a word for
a moment.  He took his magazine and put it under his arm again, and
he just stood there looking at Dave Redmond for a moment, and then
he said, just as quiet as you please, 'All right, sir.  You're the
doctor.  But I think you're going to regret it!'  And then he
turned and walked away from us.  Well, sir," said Mr. Candler,
laughing, "Dave Redmond's face was a study.  You could see he felt
pretty small to think he had shouted at the boy like that, and
acted as he did.  And Luke hadn't gone twenty feet before Dave
Redmond called him back.  'Here, son,' he says, diving his hand
down into his pocket, 'give me one of those things!  I may never
read it but it's worth a dollar just to hear you talk.'  And he
gave him a dollar, too, and made him take it," Mr. Candler said,
"and from that day on Dave Redmond was one of the biggest boosters
that Luke had. . . .  'I think you're going to regret it,'" said
Mr. Candler again, laughing at the memory.  "That's the thing that
did it--that's what got him--the way the boy just looked at him and
said, 'All right, sir, but I think you're going to regret it.'
That did the trick, all right."  And pleased with his story and the
memory it evoked, Mr. Candler looked mildly out of the window for a
moment, smiling.

"That was Luke that done that?" Mr. Flood demanded hoarsely after a
moment, with his air of brutal and rather stunned surprise.  "The
one that stutters?"

"Yes, that's the one all right," said Mr. Candler.  "That's who it
was."

Mr. Flood pondered this information for a moment with his bulging
eyes still fastened on Mr. Candler in their look of stupefied
curiosity.  Then, as the full import of what he had heard at length
soaked into his intelligence, he shook his great coarse head once,
slowly, in a movement of ponderous but emphatic satisfaction, and
said with hoarse conviction:

"Well, he's a good 'un!  If any one can sell 'em, he's the one."

This judgment was followed by a brief but heavy pause, which was
broken in a moment by the voice of the pompous, swarthy little man
who, in a tone of detached curiosity, said:

"Whatever became of that other boy--the one who used to work there
in The Courier office when you owned it?  What was his name,
anyway?"

"Ben," said Mr. Flood heavily, but without hesitation.  "That was
Ben."  Here he coughed in an alarming, phlegmy sort of way, cleared
his throat and spat chokingly into the spittoon at his feet, wiped
his mouth with his wadded handkerchief and in a moment, panting for
breath, wheezed:

"Ben was the one that worked for me."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" the swarthy little man said rapidly, as if now
it all came back to him.  "Ben!  That was the one!  Whatever became
of him?  I haven't seen him recently."

"He's dead," said Mr. Flood, still wheezing rapidly for breath and
gazing at the spittoon.  "That's the reason you haven't seen him,"
he said seriously.  And suddenly, as if the long-awaited moment had
come, he bent over, torn by a fit of choking and phlegmy sounds of
really astounding proportions.  When it was over, he raised
himself, settled back slowly and painfully in his seat, and for a
moment, with closed eyes, did nothing but wheeze rapidly.  In a
moment, still with closed eyes, he gasped almost inaudibly:

"Ben was the one that died."

"Oh, yes!  I do remember now," the pompous little man declared,
nodding his head sharply with an air of conviction.  "That's been
some time ago, hasn't it?" he said to the boy.

"He died two years ago," the boy replied, "during the war."

"Oh, that's so, he did!  I remember now!" the man cried instantly,
with an air of recollection that somehow said that he remembered
nothing.  "He was overseas at the time, wasn't he?" he asked
smoothly.

"No, sir," the boy answered.  "He was at home.  He died of
pneumonia--during that big epidemic."

"I know," the man said regretfully.  "That got a lot of the boys.
Ben was in service at the time, wasn't he?"

"No," the boy answered.  "He never got in.  Luke was the one who
was in service.  Ben tried to get in twice but he couldn't pass the
examinations."

"Is that so?" the man said vaguely.  "Well, I was mighty sorry to
hear about his death.  Old Ben was one fine boy!"

Nothing was said for a moment.

"I'll tell you how fine he was," Mr. Flood, who had been wheezing
with closed eyes, now grunted suddenly, glaring solemnly about him
with an air of brutal earnestness.  "Now I think I knew that boy
about as well as any man alive--he worked for me for almost fifteen
years--started out when he was ten years old as a route-boy on The
Courier and kept right on working for my paper until just a year or
two before he died!  And I'm here to tell you," he wheezed
solemnly, "that they don't come any better than Ben!"  Here he
glowered around him pugnaciously as if the character of a dead
saint had been called in question.  "Now he wasn't one of your big
talkers who'd promise everything and know nothing.  Ben was a do-
er, not a talker.  You could depend on him," said Mr. Flood,
hoarsely and impressively.  "When he told you he'd do a thing,
you'd know it was going to get done!  As regular as a clock and as
steady as the day is long!  And as quiet a fellow as you ever saw,"
said Mr. Flood.  "That was Ben for you!  Am I right?" he demanded,
suddenly turning to the boy.  "Was that Ben?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  "That was Ben."

"And until you asked him something he'd go for days at a time
without speaking to you, but I knew he didn't mean anything by it,
it was just his way.  He believed in tending to his own business
and he expected every one else to do the same."  And for a moment,
exhausted by these eulogies, he wheezed rapidly.

"Well, the world would be a lot better off if there were more like
him," the pompous, swarthy little man now said virtuously, as if
this sentiment expressed his own pious belief and practice.  "There
are too many people sticking their noses in other people's
business, as it is."

"Well, they didn't stick their noses in Ben's business," said Mr.
Flood with grim emphasis, "not after the first time, anyway.  But
they didn't come any better than that boy.  I couldn't have thought
more of him if he'd been my own son," he concluded piously and then
gasped stertorously, lifted his cigar slowly to his lips with the
thick, gouty tenderness that characterized all his movements and
for a moment puffed slowly, wheezing reflectively over it.

"Not that he was ever much like a boy," he grunted suddenly, with a
surprising flash of insight.  "He was always more like an old man--
didn't ever seem to be a kid like the others.  Why," suddenly he
chuckled with a phlegmy hoarseness, "I remember when he first began
to come down there in the morning as a carrier, the other kids all
called him 'Pop.'  That was Ben for you.  Always had that scowl on
his face, even when he was laughing--as serious and earnest as an
old man.  But he was one of the best--as good as they come."  Again
he coughed chokingly, bent over with a painful grunt, and cleared
his throat phlegmily into the polished brass spittoon beside him.
Then, wheezing a little, he drew the wadded silk handkerchief from
a side-pocket, wiped his mouth with it, raised himself up in his
seat a little, and settled back slowly, tenderly, wheezing, with a
sigh!  Then for a moment he laboured painfully, eyes closed, with
his rapid wheezing breath and finally, when it seemed he must be
exhausted by his efforts and done with conversation for the
evening, he wheezed faintly and unexpectedly.

"That was Ben."

"Oh, I remember that boy now," the swarthy pompous-looking man
suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration--"Wasn't
Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices
when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on
the score-board as they phoned it in to him?"

"Yes," wheezed Mr. Flood, nodding heavily.  "You got him now, all
right.  That was Ben."

"I remember now," the swarthy little man said thoughtfully, with a
far-away look in his eye.  "I was thinking about him the other day
when I went by The Courier office.  They were playing the Series
then.  They had another fellow in the window and I wondered what
had become of him.  So that was Ben?"

"Yes," Mr. Flood wheezed hoarsely again.  "That was Ben."



For a moment as the gouty old rake had spoken of the boy's dead
brother, the boy had felt within him a sense of warmth: a wakening
of dead time, a stir of grateful affection for the gross old man as
if there might have been in this bloated carcass some trace of
understanding for the dead boy of whom he spoke--an understanding
faint and groping as a dog who bays the moon might have of the
sidereal universe, and yet genuine and recognizable.

And for a moment present time fades out and the boy sits there
staring blindly out at the dark earth that strokes for ever past
the train, and now he has the watch out and feels it in his
hands. . . .  And suddenly Ben is standing there before his vision,
smoking, and scowls down through the window of the office at the
boy.

He jerks his head in a peremptory gesture: the boy, obedient to his
brother's command, enters the office and stands there waiting at
the counter.  Ben steps down from the platform in the window, puts
the earphones on a table and walks over to the place where the boy
is standing.  For a moment, scowling fiercely, he stands there
looking at the boy across the counter.  The scowl deepens, he makes
a sudden threatening gesture of his hard white hand as if to strike
the boy, but instead he reaches across the counter quickly, seizes
the boy by the shoulders, pulls him closer, and with rough but
skilful fingers tugs, pulls and jerks the frayed string of neck-tie
which the boy is wearing into a more orderly and presentable shape.

The boy starts to go.

"Wait!" says Ben, quietly, in a deliberately off-hand kind of tone.
He opens a drawer below the counter, takes out a small square
package, and scowling irritably, and without looking at the boy, he
thrusts it at him.  "Here's something for you," he says, and walks
away.

"What is it?"  The boy takes the package and examines it with a
queer numb sense of expectancy and growing joy.

"Why don't you open it and see?" Ben says, his back still turned,
and scowling down into a paper on the desk.

"Open it?" the boy says, staring at him stupidly.

"Yes, open it, fool!" Ben snarls.  "It's not going to bite you!"

While the boy fumbles with the cords that tie the package, Ben
prowls over toward the counter with his curious, loping, pigeon-
toed stride, leans on it with his elbows and, scowling, begins to
look up and down the 'want-ad.' columns, while blue, pungent smoke
coils slowly from his nostrils.  By this time, the boy has taken
off the outer wrapping of the package, and is holding a small case,
beautifully heavy, of sumptuous blue velvet, in his hands.

"Well, did you look at it?" Ben says, still scowling up and down
the 'want-ads.' of the paper, without looking at the boy.

The boy finds the spring and presses it, the top opens, inside upon
its rich cushion of white satin is a gold watch, and a fine gold
chain.  It is a miracle of design, almost as thin and delicate as a
wafer.  The boy stares at it with bulging eyes and in a moment
stammers:

"It's--it's a watch!"

"Does it look like an alarm clock?" Ben jeers quietly, as he turns
a page and begins to scowl up and down the advertisements of
another column.

"It's--for me?" the boy says thickly, slowly, as he stares at it.

"No," Ben says, "it's for Napoleon Bonaparte, of course! . . .  You
little idiot!  Don't you know what day this is?  Have I got to do
all the thinking for you?  Don't you ever use your head for
anything except a hat-rack? . . .  Well," he goes on quietly in a
moment, still looking at his paper, "what do you think of it? . . .
There's a spring in the back that opens up," he goes on casually,
"Why don't you look at it?"

The boy turns the watch over, feels the smooth golden surface of
that shining wafer, finds the spring, and opens it.  The back of
the watch springs out, upon the inner surface is engraved, in
delicate small words, this inscription:


                      "To Eugene Gant
          Presented To Him On His Twelfth Birthday
                       By His Brother
                         B. H. Gant
                       October 3, 1912"


"Well," Ben says quietly in a moment.  "Did you read what it says?"

"I'd just like to say--" the boy begins in a thick, strange voice,
staring blindly down at the still open watch.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Ben says, lifting his scowling head in the
direction of his unknown demon, and jerking his head derisively
towards the boy.  "Listen to this, won't you? . . .  Now, for God's
sake, try to take good care of it and don't abuse it!" he says
quickly and irritably.  "You've got to look after a watch the same
as anything else.  Old man Enderby"--this is the name of the
jeweller from whom he has bought the watch--"told me that a watch
like that was good for fifty years, if you take care of it. . . .
You know," he goes on quietly, insultingly, "you're not supposed to
drive nails with it or use it for a hammer.  You know that, don't
you?" he says, and for the first time turns and looks quietly at
the boy.  "Do you know what a watch is for?"

"Yes."

"What is it for?"

"To keep time with," says the boy.

Ben says nothing for a moment, but looks at him.

"Yes," he says quietly at length, with all the bitter weariness of
a fathomless resignation and despair, the infinite revulsion,
scorn, disgust which life has caused in him.  "That's it.  That's
what it's for.  To keep time with."  The weary irony in his voice
had deepened to a note of passionate despair.  "And I hope to God
you keep it better than the rest of us!  Better than Mama or the
old man--better than me!  God help you if you don't! . . .  Now go
on home," he says quietly in a moment, "before I kill you."



"To keep time with!"

What is this dream of time, this strange and bitter miracle of
living?  Is it the wind that drives the leaves down bare paths
fleeing?  Is it the storm-wild flight of furious days, the storm-
swift passing of the million faces, all lost, forgotten, vanished
as a dream?  Is it the wind that howls above the earth, is it the
wind that drives all things before its lash, is it the wind that
drives all men like dead ghosts fleeing?  Is it the one red leaf
that strains there on the bough and that for ever will be fleeing?
All things are lost and broken in the wind; the dry leaves scamper
down the path before us, in their swift-winged dance of death the
dead souls flee along before us driven with rusty scuffle before
the fury of the demented wind.  And October has come again, has
come again.

What is this strange and bitter miracle of life?  Is it to feel,
when furious day is done, the evening hush, the sorrow of lost,
fading light, far sounds and broken cries, and footsteps, voices,
music, and all lost--and something murmurous, immense and mighty in
the air?

And we have walked the pavements of a little town and known the
passages of barren night, and heard the wheel, the whistle and the
tolling bell, and lain in the darkness waiting, giving to silence
the huge prayer of our intolerable desire.  And we have heard the
sorrowful silence of the river in October--and what is there to
say?  October has come again, has come again, and this world, this
life, this time are stranger than a dream.

May it not be that some day from this dream of time, this chronicle
of smoke, this strange and bitter miracle of life in which we are
the moving and phantasmal figures, we shall wake?  Knowing our
father's voice upon the porch again, the flowers, the grape-vines,
the low rich moons of waning August, and the tolling bell--and
instantly to know we live, that we have dreamed and have awakened,
and find then in our hands some object, like this real and
palpable, some gift out of the lost land and the unknown world as
token that it was no dream--that we have really been there?  And
there is no more to say.

For now October has come back again, the strange and lonely month
comes back again, and you will not return.

Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep, in the hill,
Ben--cold, cold, cold.

"To keep time with!"

And suddenly the scene, the shapes, the voices of the men about him
swam back into their focus, and he could hear the rhythmed pounding
of the wheels below him, and in his palm the frail-numbered visage
of the watch stared blank and plain at him its legend.  It was one
minute after twelve o'clock, Sunday morning, October the third,
1920, and he was hurtling across Virginia, and this world, this
life, this time were stranger than a dream.



The train had halted for a moment at one of the Virginia towns, and
for a moment the people were conscious of the strange yet casual
familiarity of all those sounds which suddenly will intercept the
rhythmic spell of time and memory which a journey in a train can
cast upon its passengers.  Suddenly this spell was broken by the
intrusion of peculiar things--of sounds and voices--the sense of
instant recognition, union to a town, a life which they had never
known, but with which they now felt immediately familiar.  A
railwayman was coming swiftly down the station platform beneath the
windows of the train, pausing from time to time to hammer on the
car-wheels of each truck.  A negro toiled past below them with a
heavy rattling truck in tow, piled high with baggage.

And elsewhere there were the casual voices of the railwaymen--
conductors, porters, baggage masters, station men--greeting each
other with friendly words, without surprise, speaking of weather,
work, plans for the future, saying farewell in the same way.  Then
the bell tolled, the whistle blew, the slow panting of the engine
came back to them, the train was again in motion; the station, and
the station lights, a glimpse of streets, the thrilling, haunting,
white-glazed incandescence of a cotton mill at night, the hard last
lights of town, slid past the windows of the train.  The train was
in full speed now, and they were rushing on across the dark and
lonely earth again.

Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had
been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station
scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:

"Your father's in Baltimore now, isn't he, son?" he said.

"Yes, sir.  He's at Hopkins.  Luke's up there with him."

"Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back
about his being there," said the man with the florid face.

"What's wrong with him?" Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment,
after he had absorbed this information.  "Ain't he feeling good?"

The boy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered.  His
father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem
possible or proper for him to say this to these men.  He said:

"He's got some kind of kidney trouble, I think.  He goes up there
for radium treatments."

"It's the same thing John Rankin had," the florid-faced man glibly
interposed at this moment.  "Some sort of prostate trouble, isn't
it?" he said.

"Yes, sir, that's it," the boy said.  For some reason he felt a
sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid
face.  The easy, glib and false assurance that his father's
"trouble" was "the same thing John Rankin had" seemed to give the
disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its
fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.

"I know what it is," the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his
head in a confident manner.  "It's the same thing John Rankin had.
A lot of men get it after they're fifty.  John told me he went
through agony with it for ten years.  Said he used to be up with it
a dozen times a night.  It got so he couldn't sleep, he couldn't
rest, he couldn't do anything but walk the floor with it.  It got
him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking
around like a dead man.  Then he went up there and had that
operation and he's been a new man ever since.  He looks better than
he's looked in twenty years.  I was talking to him the other day
and he told me he didn't have an ache or a pain in the world.  He
said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it--the
picture of health.

"Well," he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy,
"remember me to your father when you see him.  Tell him Frank
Candler asked to be remembered to him."

"Are you and him good friends?" Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after
another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow
formidable curiosity which belonged to him.  "You know him well?"

"Who?  Mr. Gant?" Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of
the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well
that the very question was amusing to him.  "Why, I've known him
all my life--I've known him ever since he first came to Altamont--
let's see, that's all of forty years ago when he first came here?"
Mr. Candler went on reflectively, "or no, maybe a little less than
that.  Wait a minute."  He considered seriously for a moment.  "The
first time I ever saw your father," said Mr. Candler very slowly
and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any
one, but staring straight before him, "was in October, 1882--and I
believe--I believe," he said strongly, "that was the very year he
came to town--yes, sir!  I'm positive of it!" he cried.  "For
Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days--I
don't believe we had 2,000 people there--why, that's all in the
world it was."  Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily.  "The
courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it--when
you got two blocks away you were right out in the country.  Didn't
Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on
Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars,
and didn't I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a
price as that and expect to get it!  Why!" Mr. Candler declared,
with a full countrified laugh, "it was nothing but a mud-hole down
in the holler.  I've seen old Captain Porter's hawgs wallerin'
around in it many's the time.  'And you,' I said to him, 'you--do
you think I'd pay you a price like that for a mud-hole?  Why, you
must think I'm crazy, sure enough.'  'All right,' he says, 'have it
your own way, but you'll live to see the day you'll regret not
buying it.  You'll live to see the day when you can't buy ONE of
those lots for a thousand dollars!'  ONE of them!" Mr. Candler now
cried in hearty self-derision.  "Why, if I owned one of those lots
to-day, I'd be a rich man!  I don't believe you could buy a foot of
that land to-day for less than a thousand dollars, could you,
Bruce?" he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking
man who sat beside the boy.

"Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should
think," the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and
almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and
gestures.  He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as
he uttered these words and then sat there "all reared back" as the
saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little
legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding conceit and
strutting self-satisfaction from every pore.  "Yes, sir!" the
swarthy little man continued, pompously, "I should doubt very much
if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000
today!"

"Well," said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air.  "That's what I
thought!  I knew it would be way up there somewheres.  But I could
have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars.  I've kicked
myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think
what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance!  I'd be
a rich man to-day if I had!  It just goes to show you, doesn't it?"
he concluded indefinitely.

"Yes, sir," the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry,
briskly assured tones, "it goes to show that our hindsight is
usually a great deal better than our foresight!"  And he glanced
about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and
convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and
original.

"It was about that time when I first met your father," said Mr.
Candler, turning to the boy again.  "Along there in the fall of
'82--that's when it was all right--and I don't think he'd been in
town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I'd have
known if he'd been there longer.  And yes, of course!" he cried
sharply, struck by sudden recollection, "that very first day I saw
him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men,
unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I
reckon, and moving them back into his shop.  I guess he was just
moving in at the time.  He'd rented an old shack over there at the
north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now.
That's where it was, all right.  I was working for old man Weaver
at the time--he had a grocery and general-goods store there
opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice
Company is now.  I was going back to work after dinner and had just
turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I
saw your father.  I remember stopping to watch him for a moment
because there was something about his appearance--I don't know what
it was, but if you saw him once you'd never forget him--there was
something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was
different from any one I'd ever seen.  Of course, he was an awful
tall, big-boned, powerful-looking sort of man--how tall is your
father, son?"

"He was about six feet five," the boy answered, "but I guess he's
not that much now--he's stooped over some since he got old."

"Well, he didn't stoop in those days," said Mr. Candler.  "He
always carried himself as straight as an arrow.  I noticed that.
He was an awful big man--not that he had much weight on him--he was
always lean and SKINNY like--but he LOOKED big--he had big bones--
his FRAME was big!" cried Mr. Candler.  "You'll make a big man too
when you fill out," he continued, giving the boy an appraising
look.  "Of course, you look like your mother's people, you're a
Pentland and they're fleshy people, but you've got the old man's
frame.  You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight
and widen out--but it wasn't that your father was so big--I think
he looked bigger than he really was--it was something else about
him--about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his
work," said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone.  "I don't know
what it was, but I'd never seen any one like him before.  For one
thing he was dressed so good!" he said suddenly.  "He always wore
his good clothes when he worked--I'd never seen a man who did hard
labour with his hands who dressed that way.  Here he was, you know,
sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and
wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in.  Of
course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was
wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up
across the shoulders--but you could see his clothes were GOOD,"
said Mr. Candler.  "Looked like black broadcloth that had been made
by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those
wing collars with a black silk neck-tie--and not afraid to work,
either!  Why, the first thing I saw him do," said Mr. Candler,
laughing, "he let out a string of words at those niggers you could
have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and
straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they
hadn't been able to budge an inch.  'Merciful God,' he says, that's
just the way he talked, you know--'Merciful God!  Has it come to
this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there
gloating at my agony?  I could as soon look for help from a couple
of God-damned wooden Indians!  In the name of God, stand back.
I'll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!'  Well," said Mr.
Candler, chuckling with the recollection, "with that he reaches
down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave
and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as
anything you ever saw.  Well, sir, you should have seen the look
upon those niggers' faces--I thought their eyes were going to pop
out of their heads.  And that's the first time I ever spoke to him,
you know.  I can remember the very words I said.  I said to him,
'Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up
in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.'"

The man's story had stirred in the boy's mind a thousand living
memories of his father.  For a moment it seems to him that the lost
world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the
radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud,
dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy.
Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him.  There
are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand
strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his
blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory.  They are the
lives of the lost wilderness, his mother's people; they are the
tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart's
desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.

He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the
dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg.  He smells the sweet
fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the
jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the
cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes,
secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises.  He feels the
brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the
distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace
and silence of the dusk.

And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room
upstairs.  He is there beside his father and his father's brothers
in the darkness--waiting, silent, waiting--with an unspoken single
question in their hearts.  They are thinking of an older brother
who that night is lying twelve miles away, shot through the lungs.
He sees his father's gaunt, long form in darkness, the big-boned
hands, the gaunt, long face, the cold, green-grey, restless and
weary eyes, so deep and untelling, so strangely lonely, and the
slanting, almost reptilian large formation of the skull that has,
somehow, its own strange dignity--as of some one lost.  And the
great stars of America blaze over them, the vast and lonely earth
broods round them, then as now, with its secret and mysterious
presences, and then as now the million-noted ululation of the night
throngs up from silence the song of all its savage, dark and
measureless fecundity.  And he lies there in the darkness with his
father and the brothers--silent, waiting--their cold, grey eyes
turned upward to the loneliness of night, the blazing stars, having
no words to say the thing they feel, the dream of time and the dark
wonder of man's destiny which has drenched with blood the old
earth, the familiar wheat, and fused that day the image of immortal
history in a sleepy country town twelve miles away.

He sees the gaunt figure of the stone-cutter coming across the
square at his earth-devouring stride.  He hears him muttering
underneath his breath the mounting preludes of his huge invective.
He sees him striding on for ever, bent forward in his haste,
wetting his thumb and clearing his throat with an infuriated and
anticipatory relish as he comes.  He sees him striding round the
corner, racing up-hill towards the house, bearing huge packages of
meat beneath his arm.  He sees him take the high front steps four
at a time, hasten like a hurricane into the house, lay down the
meat upon the kitchen table, and then without a pause or
introduction, comes the storm--fire, frenzy, curses, woes and
lamentations, and then news out of the streets, the morning's joy,
the smoking and abundant dinner.

A thousand memories of that life of constant and unresting fury
brim in the boy's mind in an instant.  At this moment, with
telescopic force, all of these memories of his father's life become
fused and blurred to one terrific image, in which it seems that the
whole packed chronicle, from first to last, is perfectly comprised.



At the same moment the boy became conscious that the men were
getting up around him, preparatory to departure, and that the
florid-faced man, who had been speaking of his father, had laid his
hand upon his shoulder in a friendly gesture, and was speaking to
him.

"Good night, son," the man was saying.  "I'm getting off at
Washington.  If I don't see you again, good luck to you.  I suppose
you'll be getting off at Baltimore to see your father before you go
on, won't you?"

"Yes.  Yes, sir," the boy stammered confusedly, getting to his
feet.

"Remember me to him, won't you?  Tell him you saw Frank Candler on
the train and he sent his best regards."

"Yes, sir--thank you--I will," the boy said.

"All right.  And good luck to you, boy," the politician said,
giving him his broad, fleshy and rather tender hand.  "Give 'em
hell when you get up there," he said quietly, with a firm, friendly
clasp and a good-natured wink.

"Yes--I certainly will--thank you--" the boy stammered, flaming in
the face, with a feeling of proud hope, and with affection for the
man who had spoken to him.

Then the man had gone, but his words had brought back to the boy
suddenly the knowledge that in the morning he was to see his
father.  And that knowledge instantly destroyed all the exultancy
of flight and darkness, the incredible realization of his escape,
the image of new lands, the new life, and the shining city that had
been swelling in his spirit all night long.  It had interposed its
leaden face between him and this image of wild joy towards which he
was rushing onward in the darkness, and its grey oppressive cloud
weighed down upon him suddenly a measureless weight of dull
weariness, horror and disgust.

He knew that next day he must meet his brother and his father, he
knew that the dreaded pause and interruption of his flight would
last but two short days, and that in this brief time he might see
and know for the last time all that was living of his father, and
yet the knowledge of this hated meeting filled him with loathing, a
terrible desire to get away from it as quickly as possible, to
forget it, to escape from it for ever.

He knew in his heart that for the wretched, feeble, whining old man
whom he must meet next day, he felt no love whatever.  He knew,
indeed, that he felt instead a kind of hate--the wretched kind of
hatred that comes from intolerable pity without love, from
suffering and disgust, from the agony of heart and brain and
nerves, the poisonous and morbid infection of our own lives, which
a man dying of a loathsome disease awakes in us, and from the self-
hate, the self-loathing that it makes us feel because of our
terrible desire to escape him, to desert him, to blot out the
horrible memory we have for him, utterly to forget him.

Now the three men remaining in the compartment were rising to
depart.  Old Flood got up with a painful grunt, carefully dropped
the chewed butt of his cigar into the brass spittoon, and walked
tenderly with a gouty and flat-footed shuffle across the little
room to the mirrored door of the latrine.  He opened it, entered,
and closed it behind him.  The pompous swarthy little man got up,
stretched his short fat arms out stiffly, and said, "Well, I'll be
turning in.  I'll see you in the morning, won't I, Jim?"

The man with the thin, tight, palely freckled face, to whom these
words had been addressed, looked up quickly from the magazine he
was reading, and said sharply, in a rather cold, surprised and
distant tone:

"What? . . .  Oh!  Yes.  Good night, Wade."

He got up then, carefully detached the horn-rimmed spectacles from
his long, pointed nose, folded them carefully and put them in the
breast pocket of his coat, and then took up the brief-case at his
side.  At this moment, a man, accompanied by Robert Weaver and by
another youth who was about the same age as the boy, entered the
smoking-room.

The man, who was in his middle thirties, was a tall lean
Englishman, already bald, with bitten and incisive features, a
cropped moustache, and the high hard flush of the steady drinker.

His name was John Hugh William Macpherson Marriott.  He was the
youngest son of an ancient family of the English nobility and just
a year or two before he had married the great heiress, Virginia
Willets.  To the boy, and to all the other men in the train, except
the man with the cold thin face and pointed nose, the Englishman
was known only by sight and rumour, and his sudden entrance into
the smoking-room had much the same effect as would the appearance
of a figure from some legendary world of which they had often
heard, but which they had never seen.

The reason for this feeling was that the Englishman and his wife
lived on the great estate near town which her father had built and
left to her.  All the people in the town had seen this immense
estate, had driven over some of its 90,000 acres, had seen its
farms, its fields, its pastures, and its forests, its dairies,
buildings, and its ranges of wild, smoke-blue mountains.  And
finally they had all seen from a distance its great mansion house,
the gables, roof, and spires of a huge stone structure modelled on
one of the great châteaux of France.  But few of them had ever been
inside the place or known the wonderful people who lived there.

All the lives of these fortunate people had become, therefore, as
strange and wonderful to the people of the town as the lives of
legendary heroes.  And in a curious way that great estate had
shaped the whole life of the town.  To be a part of that life, to
be admitted there, to know the people who belonged to it would have
been the highest success, the greatest triumph that most of the
people in the town could imagine.  They could not admit it, but it
was the truth.  At the heart of the town's desire was the life of
that great house.

The Englishman had entered the smoking compartment with the driving
movement of a man who has been drinking hard, but is used to it.
The moment that he entered, however, and saw the other people there
he stopped short, with a kind of stunned abruptness.  In a moment,
after an astounded silence, he spoke to them, greeting them with
the rough, brief, blurted-out friendliness of a shy and reticent
man:

"Hello! . . .  Oh, hello! . . .  How do?"  He grinned formally and
suddenly began to stare with an astounded expression at the gouty
figure of old Flood who at just this moment had opened the door of
the latrine and was shuffling painfully out into the compartment.
Mr. Flood stopped and returned his look in kind, with his bulging
and bejowled stare of comic stupefaction.

In a moment more the Englishman recovered himself, grimaced with
his shy, quick, toothy grin, and blurted out at Flood, as to the
other men:

"Oh, hello!  Hello!  How d'ye do?"

"I'm pretty good, thank you!" old Flood said hoarsely and slowly,
after a heavy pause.  "How are you?" and continued to stare heavily
and stupidly at him.

But already the Englishman had turned abruptly from him, his face
and lean neck reddening instantly and fiercely with the angry
embarrassment of a shy man.  And with the same air of astonished
discovery he now addressed himself to the man with the long thin
nose and palely freckled face, blurting his words out rapidly and
by rushes as before, but somehow conveying to the others the sense
of his intimacy and friendship with this man and of their own
exclusion.

"Oh! . . .  There you are, Jim!" he was saying in his astounded and
explosive fashion.  "Where the devil have you been all night? . . .
I say!" he went on rapidly without waiting for an answer, "won't
you come in and have a spot with me before you turn in?"

Every suggestion of the disdain and cold aloofness which had
characterized the other man's manner towards his fellow-passengers
had now vanished at the Englishman's words.  Indeed, in the way he
now came forward, smiling, and put his hand in a friendly manner on
the Englishman's arm, there was something almost scrambling in its
effusive eagerness.  "Why yes, Hugh," he said hastily.  "I'd be
delighted, of course! . . .  Just a minute," he said in an almost
confused tone of voice, "till I get my brief-case. . . .  Where did
I leave it?  Oh, here it is!" he cried, picking it up, and making
for the door with his companion, "I'm all ready now!  Let's go!"

"Hugh!  Hugh!" cried Robert who had accompanied the Englishman when
he entered the compartment, and whom the Englishman now seemed to
have forgotten entirely, "will I see you to-morrow before you get
off?"  The words were spoken in a deep, rapid, eager tone of voice,
and in the tone and manner of the youth who spoke them there was
the same suggestion of almost fawning eagerness that had
characterized the older man.

"Eh!  What's that?" the Englishman cried in a startled tone,
turning abruptly and staring at the young man who had addressed
him.  "Oh!  Yes, Robert!  I'm stopping at Washington!  Look in for
a moment, won't you, if you're up!"

Something in his tone and manner plainly and definitely said that
the young man's company was no longer wanted for the evening, but
the youth immediately nodded his head energetically and decisively,
saying in a satisfied manner:

"Good!  Good!  I'll do that!  I'll be in to say good-bye to-morrow
morning."

"Right!" the Englishman said curtly.  "Good night! . . .  Good
night! . . .  Good night!" he blurted out, turning round and
addressing every one, yet seeing no one, in a series of toothy
grimaces.  "Oh--good night!" he said suddenly, before going out,
grinning and shaking hands briefly, in a gesture of permanent
dismissal, with the other young man, who was a blond insignificant-
looking youth, obviously a "hanger-on," with whom the Englishman
evidently cared to have no further acquaintance.  Then, pushing his
companion before him through the green curtain, he went out
suddenly with the same desperate shy abruptness, and in a moment
the other men, saying good night all around, had followed him, and
the three young men were left alone in the compartment.  It was now
after one o'clock.  Outside, the moon was up, flooding the dark
earth of Virginia with a haunting light.  That grand, moon-haunted
earth stroked calmly past and, through the media of its changeless
and unceasing change, the recession and recurrent movement of the
enchanted scene, the train made on for ever its tremendous monotone
that was itself the rhythm of suspended time, the sound of silence
and for ever.



For a moment, after the men had gone, Robert stared down sternly
and quizzically at the boy, with an expression of mock gravity, and
then, in his rapid, eager, deep-toned and rather engaging voice,
said:

"Well, Colonel? . . .  What have you to say for yourself? . . .
Was there grass on the back of her back, or was the foul deed
perpetrated in your Hudson Super Six? . . .  Come, sir!  Explain
yourself!  Were you drunk or sober?"  And suddenly lifting his
thin, young, yet almost tortured-looking face and his restless
eyes, which were inflamed with drink, and in whose haggard depths
the incipient flashes of the madness which later would destroy him
were already visible, he laughed suddenly, a strange, small,
hoarsely falsetto kind of laugh, jerking his head towards the boy,
and saying in an annoying and indefinite way:

"Crazy!  Crazy!  Crazy! . . .  The craziest man I ever saw!"  He
stopped suddenly and, looking down at the boy for a moment with
this same expression of haggard, over-driven restlessness, demanded
impatiently:

"What have you been doing by yourself all night?  Just sitting
there all alone and doing nothing? . . .  I'll swear, I don't see
how you do it! . . .  I'd go crazy sitting in one place like that
without any one to talk to!" he said in an accusing and impatient
tone of voice, as if the other youth had really done some
extraordinary and unreasonable thing.  He thrust one hand quickly
and impatiently into the trousers pocket of his well-cut clothes in
such a way that his Delta Kappa Epsilon pin was for a moment
visible.  Then he stood there, jingling some coins about in his
pocket and looking at the boy with his inflamed, restless,
furiously desperate eyes.  Turning away suddenly, with a movement
of impatience, he shook his head in a gesture of astounded
disbelief, laughed his little hoarse falsetto laugh again, and
said:

"It beats me! . . .  Don't see how he does it! . . .  Damnedest man
I ever saw! . . .  It'd drive me crazy to be alone like that!"

He turned abruptly again, thrust both hands into his pockets, and
for a moment stood looking at the boy with the old expression of
mock gravity, and with a faintly malicious smile hovering about the
edges of his thin, nervous, strongly modelled mouth.

"Do you know what they're saying about you at home? . . .  Do you
know what those people think of you? . . .  Do you know what all
those old women up there are doing now?" he said hoarsely and
accusingly, in his deep, sonorous, and rapid tone.

"Now, Robert!" the boy suddenly shouted, in a choking and furious
tone, getting to his feet.  "Don't you start that stuff!  I'm not
going to listen to it!  You can't fool me!  They're not saying
anything!"

Robert lifted his thin, finely drawn face and laughed again, his
little annoying hoarse falsetto laugh, in which a note of malice
and triumph was audible.

"Why, they ARE!" he said solemnly.  "It's the truth! . . .  I think
you ought to know about it! . . .  I heard it everywhere, all over
town!"

"Oh, Robert, you're a liar!" the boy cried furiously.  "WHAT did
you hear all over town?  You heard nothing!"

"Why, I DID!" said Robert solemnly, as before.  "I'll swear it to
you. . . .  Do you know what I heard the other day?" he went on in
a blunt, accusing tone.  "I heard that one of those women up there--
some old sister in the Baptist Church--said she grew up with your
mother and has known her all her life--well, she's praying for
you!" said Robert solemnly.  "I'll swear she is!"

"Praying for me!" the boy cried in an exasperated tone, but at the
same time, feeling the numb white nauseous sickness of the heart
which the intolerable thought that people are talking in a
disparaging manner about him, his talents, or the success or
failure of his life, can always bring to a young man.  "Praying for
me!" he fiercely shouted.  "Why the hell should any one pray for
me?"

"I know!  I know!" said Robert, nodding his head vigorously, and
speaking with grave agreement.  "That's what I told them.  That's
just the way I felt about it! . . .  But some of those people down
there think you've gone to hell for good. . . .  Do you know what I
heard a woman say the other day?  She said that Eugene Gant had
gone straight to the devil since he went away to the State
University--"

"Robert, I don't believe you!" the boy shouted.  "You're making all
this up!"

"Why, she did!  So help me, God!  I heard her say it, as sure as
I'm standing here," swore Robert solemnly.  "She said you'd gone
down there and taken Vergil Weldon's courses in philosophy and that
you were ruined for life!  She said you had turned into a regular
infidel--didn't believe in God or anything any more. . . .  Said
she certainly did feel sorry for your mother," said Robert
maliciously.

"Feel sorry for my mother!" the boy fairly howled, dancing around
now like a maniac.  "Why the hell should the old bitch feel sorry
for my mother!  My mother can take care of herself; she doesn't
need any one to feel sorry for her! . . .  All right, then!" he
cried bitterly, with sudden acceptation of the other's story.  "Let
'em pray!  If that's the way they feel, let 'em pray till they wear
corns on their God-damned knees!  The dirty hypocrites!" he cried
bitterly.  "I'll show them!  Sneaking around behind your back to
tell their rotten lies about you--and their talk of praying for
your soul!  I'm glad I'm out of that damned town!  The two-faced
bastards!  I wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw an
elephant by his tail!"

"I know!  I know!" said Robert, wagging his head in solemn
agreement.  "I agree with you absolutely.  It's awful--that's what
it is."

It was extraordinary that this absurd story, whether true or not,
should have had such a violent effect on the emotions of the boy.
Yet now that he had been told of some unknown woman's concern for
the salvation of his soul, and that certain people of the praying
sort already thought that he was "lost," the words were fastened in
his flesh like rankling and envenomed barbs.  And instantly, the
moment that he heard this story and had cursed it, he thought that
it was true.  Now, his mind could no longer remember the time just
a moment before when Robert's words had seemed only an idle and
malicious fabrication, probably designed to goad him, or, even if
true, of no great importance.

But now, as if the idle gossip of the other youth had really
pronounced some fatal and inexorable judgment against his whole
life, the boy's spirit was set against "them" blindly, as against a
nameless and hostile antagonist.  Plunged suddenly into a dark
weather of fatality and grim resolution, something in him was
saying grimly and desperately:

"All right, then.  If that's the way they feel about me, I'll show
them."  And seeing the lonely earth outside that went stroking past
the windows of the train, he suddenly felt the dark and brooding
joy of desperation and escape, and thought again:  "Thank God, I've
got away at last.  Now there's a new land, a new life, new people
like myself who will see and know me as I am and value me--and, by
God, I'll show them!  I'll show THEM, all right."

And at just this moment of his gloomy thoughts, he muttered
sombrely, aloud, with sullen face:

"All right!  To hell with them!  I'll show them!"

--And was instantly aware that Robert was looking at him, laughing
his little, malicious, hoarse, falsetto laugh, and that the other
youth, who was a fair-haired, red-cheeked and pleasant-featured boy
named Creasman, obviously somewhat inflamed by drink and by his
social triumphs of the evening, was now, with an eager excessiveness
of good-fellowship, slapping him on the back and saying boisterously:

"Don't let him kid you, Gene!  To hell with them!  What do you care
what they say, anyway?"

With these words, he produced from his pocket a flask of the raw,
colourless, savagely instant corn whisky, of which both of them
apparently had been partaking pretty freely, and tendering it to
the boy, said:

"Here, take a drink!"

The boy took the flask, pulled out the cork, and putting the bottle
to his lips, instantly gulped down two or three powerful swallows
of the fiery stuff.  For a moment, he stood there blind and
choking, instantly robbed of breath, his throat muscles swelling,
working, swallowing convulsively in an aching struggle to keep down
the revolting and nauseous tasting stuff, and on no account to show
the effort it was costing him.

"Is that the kick of the mule, or not?" said the Creasman boy,
grinning and taking back his flask.  "How is it?"

"Good!" the boy said hoarsely, gasping.  "Fine!  Best I ever
tasted!"  And he blinked his eyes rapidly to keep the tears from
coming.

"Well, there's lots more where that came from, boy," said Creasman.
"I've got two pint jars of it in my berth.  Let me know when you
want some more."  And putting the bottle to his lips with a smile,
he tilted his head, and drank in long easy swallows which showed he
was no novice to the act.

"Damn!" cried Robert, staring at him, in his familiar tone of
astounded disbelief.  "Do you mean to tell me you can stand there
drinking that stuff straight!  Phew!" he said, shuddering, and
making a face.  "That old pukey stuff!  Why, it'd rot the guts of a
brass monkey! . . .  I don't see how you people do it!" he cried
protestingly, as he took the bottle.  In three gulps he had drained
it to the last drop, and even as he was looking around for a place
to throw the empty flask, he shuddered convulsively again, made a
contracted grimace of disgust, and said to the others accusingly,
with his small falsetto laugh of astounded protest:

"Why, you'll kill yourself drinking that stuff raw!  Don't you know
that?  You must be crazy! . . .  Wait a minute," he muttered
suddenly, comically, dropping the bottle deftly into his pocket, as
the swarthy, pompous little man named Wade entered, attired in blue
pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and holding a tooth-brush and a tube
of tooth-paste in his hand:

"Good evening, sir! . . .  Ah-hah! . . .  How d'ye do?" said
Robert, bowing slightly and stiffly, and speaking in his grave,
staccato, curiously engaging tone.

"Still up, are you, boys?" the pompous little man remarked, with
his usual telling aptness.

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert appreciatively.  "Yes, sir! . . .  Just
fixin' to go! . . .  Come on," he muttered to the others, jerking
his head towards the little man warningly.  "Not here! . . .  Well,
good night, sir! . . .  Goin' now."

"Good night, boys," said the little man, who now had his back
turned to them, and was standing at the silvery basin with his
tooth-brush held in readiness.  "See you in the morning."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "Yes, sir.  That's right.  Goodnight."

And frowning in a meaningful way at his companions, he jerked his
head toward the corridor, and, with an air of great severity, led
them out.

"Didn't want him to see us with that bottle," he muttered when they
were outside in the corridor.  "Hell!  He's got the biggest bank in
town!  Where'd you be if Emmet Wade ever got the idea you're a
liquor-head! . . .  Wait a minute!" he said, with the dissonant
abruptness that characterized so much of his speech and action.
"Come outside here--on the platform: nobody to see you there!"

"I'll meet you out there.  I'll go and get another bottle,"
whispered Creasman, and disappeared along the darkened corridor in
the direction of his berth.  In a moment he returned, and the three
of them went out upon the platform at the car-end, closed the door
behind them and there, among the rocking and galloping noises of
the pounding wheels, they took another long drink of the savage
liquor.  By this time the fiery stuff was leaping, pulsing,
pounding the mounting and exuberant illusions of its power and
strength through every tissue of their blood and life.

And outside, floating past their vision the huge pageant of its
enchanted and immortal stillness, the old earth of Virginia now lay
dreaming in the moon's white light.



So here they are now, three atoms on the huge breast of the
indifferent earth, three youths out of a little town walled far
away within the great rim of the silent mountains, already a
distant, lonely dot upon the immense and sleeping visage of the
continent.  Here they are--three youths bound for the first time
towards their image of the distant and enchanted city, sure that
even though so many of their comrades had found there only dust and
bitterness, the shining victory will be theirs.  Here they are
hurled onward in the great projectile of the train across the
lonely visage of the everlasting earth.  Here they are--three
nameless grains of life among the man-swarm ciphers of the earth,
three faces of the million faces, three drops in the unceasing
flood--and each of them a flame, a light, a glory, sure that his
destiny is written in the blazing stars, his life shone over by the
fortunate watches of the moon, his fame nourished and sustained by
the huge earth, whose single darling charge he is, on whose
immortal stillness he is flung onward in the night, his glorious
fate set in the very brain and forehead of the fabulous, the
unceasing city, of whose million-footed life he will to-morrow be a
part.

Therefore they stand upon the rocking platform of the train, wild
and dark and jubilant from the fierce liquor they have drunk, but
more wild and dark and jubilant from the fury swelling in their
hearts, the mad fury pounding in their veins, the savage, exultant
and unutterable fury working like a madness in the adyts of their
soul.  And the great wheels smash and pound beneath their feet, the
great wheels pound and smash and give a rhyme to madness, a tongue
to hunger and desire, a certitude to all the savage, drunken, and
exultant fury that keeps mounting, rising, swelling in them all the
time!



Click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; click,
clack, clackety-clack; clackety-clackety-clack!

Hip, hop, hackety-hack; stip, step, rackety-rack; come and fetch
it, come and fetch it, hickety-hickety-hack!

Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve;
steady, steady, does the trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the
earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let her
whir-r, and let her pur-r, at eighty per-r!

--Whew-w!

--Wow!

--God-dam!

--Put 'er there, boy!

--Put 'er there--whah!--WHAH-H! you ole long-legged frowsle-headed
son-of-a-bitch!

--Whoop-ee!  Whah--WHAH-H!  Why, Go-d-d-dam!

--Whee!  Vealer rog?

--Wadja say?  Gant hearya!

--I say 'ja vealer rog?  Wow!  Pour it to her, son!  Give 'er the
gas!  We're out to see the world!  Run her off the god-damn track,
boy!  We don't need no rail, do we?

--Hell no!  Which way does this damn train go, anyway, after it
leaves Virginia?

--Maryland.

--Maryland my--!  I don't want to go to Maryland!  To hell with
Mary's land!  Also to hell with Mary's lamb and Mary's calf and
Mary's blue silk underdrawers!  Good old Lucy's the girl for me--
the loosier the better!  Give me Lucy any day!  Good old Lucy
Bowles, God bless her--she's the pick of the crowd, boys!  Here's
to Lucy!

--Robert!  Art there, boy?

--Aye, aye, sir!  Present!

--Hast seen the damsel down in Lower Seven?

--I' sooth, sir, that I have!  A comely wench, I trow!

--Peace, fool!  Don't think, proud Princocke, thou canst snare this
dove of innocence into the nets of infamous desire with stale
reversions of thy wit!  Out, out, vile lendings!  An but thou
carried'st at thy shrunken waist that monstrous tun of guts thou
takest for a brain 'twould so beslubber this receiving earth with
lard as was not seen twixt here and Nottingham since butter shrove!
Out, out upon you, scrapings of the pot!  A dove, a doe, it is a
faultless swan, I say, a pretty thing!



Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight.  In Louisiana bayous
the broken moonlight shivers the broken moonlight quivers the light
of many rivers lay dreaming in the moonlight beaming in the
moonlight dreaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight seeming in
the moonlight moonlight moonlight to be gleaming to be streaming in
the moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight
moonlight moonlight

--Mo-hoo-oonlight-oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight
oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight

--To be seeming to be dreaming in the moonlight!



WHAM!

SMASH!

--Now!  God-dam, let her have it!  Wow-w!

With slamming roar, hoarse waugh, and thunderbolted light, the
southbound train is gone in one projectile smash of wind-like fury,
and the open empty silence of its passing fills us, thrills us,
stills us with the vision of Virginia in the moonlight, with the
dream-still magic of Virginia in the moon.

And now, as if with recollected force, the train gains power from
the train it passed, leaps, gathers, springs beneath them, smashes
on with recollected demon's fury in the dark . . .

With slam-bang of devil's racket and God-dam of curse--give us the
bottle, drink, boys, drink!--the power of Virginia lies compacted
in the moon.  To you, God-dam of devil's magic and slam-bang of
drive, fire-flame of the terrific furnace, slam of rod, storm-
stroke of pistoned wheel and thunderbolt of speed, great earth-
devourer, city-bringer--hail!

To you, also, old glint of demon hawk-eyes on the rail and the dark
gloved hand of cunning--you, there, old bristle-crops!--Tom Wilson,
H. F. Cline, or T. J. Johnson--whatever the hell your name is--

CASEY JONES!  Open the throttle, boy, and let her rip!  Boys, I'm a
belly-busting bastard from the State of old Catawba--a rootin'
tootin' shootin' son-of-a-bitch from Saw Tooth Gap in Buncombe--
why, God help this lovely bastard of a train--it is the best damned
train that ever turned a wheel since Casey Jones's father was a
pup--why, you sweet bastard, run!  Eat up Virginia!--Give her the
throttle, you old goggle-eyed son-of-a-bitch up there!--Pour it to
her!  Let 'er have it, you nigger-Baptist bastard of a shovelling
fireman--let 'er rip!--Wow!  By God, we'll be in Washington for
breakfast!

--Why, God bless this lovely bastard of a train!  It is the best
damned train that ever pulled a car since Grant took Richmond!--
Which way does the damn thing go?--Pennsylvania?--Well, that's all
right!  Don't you say a word against Pennsylvania!  My father came
from Pennsylvania, boys, he was the best damned man that ever
lived--He was a stone-cutter and he's better than any son-of-a-
bitch of a plumber you ever saw--He's got a cancer and six doctors
and they can't kill him!--But to hell with going where we go!--
We're out to see the world, boy!--To hell with Baltimore, New York,
Boston!  Run her off the God-damn rails!  We're going West!  Run
her through the woods--cross fields--rivers, through the hills!
Hell's pecker!  But I'll shove her up the grade and through the
gap, no double-header needed!--Let's see the world now!  Through
Nebraska, boy!  Let's shove her through, now, you can do it!--Let's
run her through Ohio, Kansas, and the unknown plains!  Come on, you
hogger, let's see the great plains and the fields of wheat--Stop
off in Dakota, Minnesota, and the fertile places--Give us a minute
while you breathe to put our foot upon it, to feel it spring back
with the deep elastic feeling, 8,000 miles below, unrolled and
lavish, depthless, different from the East.



Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight!  And on Florida's
bright waters the fair and lovely daughters of the Wilsons and the
Potters; the Cabots and the Lowells; the Weisbergs and O'Hares; the
Astors and the Goulds; the Ransoms and the Rands; the Westalls and
the Pattons and the Webbs; the Reynolds and McRaes; the Spanglers
and the Beams; the Gudgers and the Blakes; the Pedersons and
Craigs--all the lovely daughters, the Robinsons and Waters, the
millionaires' sweet daughters, the Boston maids, the Beacon Slades,
the Back Bay Wades, all of the merchant, lawyer, railroad and well-
moneyed grades of Hudson River daughters in the moon's bright
living waters--lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the
moonlight, seeming in the moonlight, to be dreaming to be gleaming
in the moon.

--Give 'em hell, son!

--Here, give him another drink!--Attaboy!  Drink her down!

--Drink her down--drink her down--drink her down--damn your soul--
drink her down!

--By God, I'll drink her down and flood the whole end of Virginia,
I'll drown out Maryland, make a flood in Pennsylvania--I tell you
boys I'll float 'em, I'll raise 'em up, I'll bring 'em down stream,
now--I mean the Potters and the Waters, the rich men's lovely
daughters, the city's tender daughters, the Hudson river daughters--

Lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the moonlight, to be
seeming to be beaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight oonlight
oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight.

And Virginia lay dreaming in the moon.



Then the moon blazed down upon the vast desolation of the American
coasts, and on all the glut and hiss of tides, on all the surge and
foaming slide of waters on lone beaches.  The moon blazed down on
18,000 miles of coast, on the million sucks and scoops and hollows
of the shore, and on the great wink of the sea, that ate the earth
minutely and eternally.  The moon blazed down upon the wilderness,
it fell on sleeping woods, it dripped through moving leaves, it
swarmed in weaving patterns on the earth, and it filled the cat's
still eye with blazing yellow.  The moon slept over mountains and
lay like silence in the desert, and it carved the shadows of great
rocks like time.  The moon was mixed with flowing rivers, and it
was buried in the heart of lakes, and it trembled on the water like
bright fish.  The moon steeped all the earth in its living and
unearthly substance, it had a thousand visages, it painted
continental space with ghostly light; and its light was proper to
the nature of all the things it touched: it came in with the sea,
it flowed with the rivers, and it was still and living on clear
spaces in the forest where no men watched.

And in woodland darkness great birds fluttered to their sleep--in
sleeping woodlands strange and secret birds, the teal, the
nightjar, and the flying rail went to their sleep with flutterings
dark as hearts of sleeping men.  In fronded beds and on the leaves
of unfamiliar plants where the tarantula, the adder, and the asp
had fed themselves asleep on their own poisons, and on lush jungle
depths where green-golden, bitter red and glossy blue proud tufted
birds cried out with brainless scream, the moonlight slept.

The moonlight slept above dark herds moving with slow grazings in
the night, it covered lonely little villages; but most of all it
fell upon the unbroken undulation of the wilderness, and it blazed
on windows and moved across the face of sleeping men.

Sleep lay upon the wilderness, it lay across the faces of the
nations, it lay like silence on the hearts of sleeping men; and low
upon lowlands, and high upon hills, flowed gently sleep, smooth-
sliding sleep--sleep--sleep.



--Robert--

--Go on to bed, Gene, go to bed now, go to bed.

--There's shump'n I mush shay t'you--

--Damn fool!  Go to bed!

--Go to bed!  I'll go to bed when I'm God-damn good and ready!
I'll not go to bed when there's shump'n I mush shay t'you--

--Go on to bed now, Gene.  You've had enough.

--Creasman, you're a good fellow maybe but I don't know you. . . .
You keep out of this. . . .  Robert. . . .  I'm gonna tell y'
shump'n. . . .  You made a remark t'night I didn' like--Prayin' for
me, are they, Robert?

--You damn fool!--You don't know what you're talkin' 'bout!  Go on
to bed!--

--I'll go to bed, you bastard--I got shump'n to shay t'you!--
Prayin.' for me, are yuh?--Pray for yourself, y' bloody little
Deke!

--Damn fool's crazy!  Go on to bed now--

--I'll bed yuh, you son-of-a-bitch!  What was it that y' said that
day?--

--What day?  You damned fool, you don't know what you're saying!

--I'll tell yuh what day!--Coming along Chestnut Street that day
after school with you and me and Sunny Jim Curtis and Ed Petrie and
Bob Pegram and Carl Hartshorn and Monk Paul--and the rest of those
boys--

--You damn fool!  Chestnut Street!  I don't know what you're
talking about!

--Yes, you do!--You and me and Bob and Carl and Irwin and Jim Homes
and some other boys--'Member what y' said, yuh son-of-a-bitch?  Old
man English was in his yard there burning up some leaves and it was
October and we were comin' along there after school and you could
smell the leaves and it was after school and you said, "Here's Mr.
Gant, the tombstone-cutter's son."

--You damn fool!  I don't know what you're talking about!--

--Yes, you do, you cheap Deke son-of-a-bitch--Too good to talk to
us on the street when you were sucking around after Bruce Martin or
Steve Patton or Jack Marriott--but a lifelong brother--oh! couldn't
see enough of us, could you, when you were alone?

--The damn fool's crazy!

--Crazy, am I?--Well, we never had any old gummy grannies tied down
and hidden in the attic--which is more than some people that I know
can say!--you son-of-a-bitch--who do you think you are with your
big airs and big Deke pin!--My people were better people than your
crowd ever hoped to be--we've been here longer and we're better
people--and as for the tombstone-cutter's son, my father was the
best damned stone-cutter that ever lived--he's dying of cancer and
all the doctors in the world can't kill him--he's a better man than
any little ex-police court magistrate who calls himself a judge
will ever be--and that goes for you too--you--

Why, you crazy fool!  I never said anything about your father--

To hell with you, you damn little bootlicking--

Come on Gene come on you've had enough you're drunk now come on.

Why God-damn you to hell, I hate your guts you--

All right, all right--He's drunk!  He's crazy--Come on, Bill!
Leave him alone!--He don't know what he's doing--

All right.  Good night, Gene. . . .  Be careful now--See you in the
morning, boy.

All right, Robert, I mean nothing against you--you--

All right!--All right!--Come on, Bill.  Let him alone!  Good night,
Gene--Come on--let's go to bed!--

To bed to bed to bed to bed to bed!  So, so, so, so, so!  Make no
noise, make no noise, draw the curtains; so, so, so.  We'll go to
supper i' the morning: so, so, so.

And Ile goe to bedde at noone.



Alone, alone now, down the dark, the green, the jungle aisle
between the dark drugged snorings of the sleepers.  The pause, the
stir, the sigh, the sudden shift, the train that now rumbles on
through the dark forests of the dream-charged moon-enchanted mind
its monotone of silence and for ever:  Out of these prison bands of
clothes, now, rip, tear, toss, and haul while the green-curtained
sleepers move from jungle depths and the even-pounding silence of
eternity--into the stiff white sheets, the close, hot air, his long
body crookedly athwart, lights out, to see it shining faintly in
the coffined under-surface of the berth above--and sleepless,
Virginia floating, dreamlike, in the still white haunting of the
moon--

--At night, great trains will pass us in the timeless spell of an
unsleeping hypnosis, an endless and unfathomable stupefaction.
Then suddenly in the unwaking never-sleeping century of the night,
the sensual limbs of carnal whited nakedness that stir with drowsy
silken warmth in the green secrecies of Lower Seven, the slow-
swelling and lonely and swarm-haunted land--and suddenly, suddenly,
silence and thick hardening lust of dark exultant joy, the
dreamlike passage of Virginia!--Then in the watches of the night a
pause, the sudden silence of up-welling night, and unseen faces,
voices, laughter, and farewells upon a lonely little night-time
station--the lost and lonely voices of Americans:--"Good-bye!
Good-bye, now!  Write us when you get there, Helen!  Tell Bob he's
got to write!--Give my love to Emily!--Good-bye, good-bye now--
write us, soon!"--And then the secret, silken and subdued rustling
past the thick green curtains and the sleepers, the low respectful
negroid tones of the black porter--and then the whistle cry, the
tolling bell, the great train mounting to its classic monotone
again, and presently the last lights of a little town, the floating
void and loneliness of moon-haunted earth--Virginia!

Also, in the dream--thickets of eternal night--there will be huge
steamings on the rail, the sudden smash, the wall of light, the
sudden flarings of wild, roaring light upon the moon-haunted and
dream-tortured faces of the sleepers!

--And finally, in that dark jungle of the night, through all the
visions, memories, and enchanted weavings of the timeless and
eternal spell of time, the moment of for ever--there are two
horsemen, riding, riding, riding in the night.

Who are they?  Oh, we know them with our life and they will ride
across the land, the moon-haunted passage of our lives for ever.
Their names are Death and Pity, and we know their face: our brother
and our father ride ever beside us in the dream-enchanted spell and
vista of the night; the hooves keep level time beside the rhythms
of the train.

Horsed on the black and moon-maned steeds of fury, cloaked in the
dark of night, the spell of time, dream-pale, eternal, they are
rushing on across the haunted land, the moon-enchanted wilderness,
and their hooves make level thunder with the train.

Pale Pity and Lean Death their names are, and they will ride for
evermore the moon-plantations of Virginia keeping time time time to
the level thunder of the train pounding time time time as with
four-hooved thunder of phantasmal hooves they pound for ever level
with the train across the moon-plantations of Virginia.

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum as with storm-
phantasmal hooves Lean Death and Pale Pity with quadrupedante
putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum . . . campum . . . quadrupedante
. . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem as with sonitu
quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem
putrem putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem
quadrupedante quadrupedante quadrupedante putrem putrem as with
sonitu quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . .
putrem putrem putrem . . . as with sonitu quatit ungula campum
quadrupedante putrem . . . ungula campum . . . campum . . . ungula
. . . ungula campum . . .



V


At day-break suddenly, he awoke.  The first light of the day,
faint, grey-white, shone through the windows of his berth.  The
faint grey light fell on the stiff white linen, feverishly scuffed
and rumpled in the distressful visions of the night, on the hot
pillows and on the long cramped figure of the boy, where dim
reflection already could be seen on the polished surface of the
berth above his head.  Outside, that smoke-grey light had stolen
almost imperceptibly through the darkness.  The air now shone grey-
blue and faintly luminous with day, and the old brown earth was
just beginning to emerge in that faint light.  Slowly, the old
brown earth was coming from the darkness with that strange and
awful stillness which the first light of the day has always
brought.

The earth emerged with all its ancient and eternal quality: stately
and solemn and lonely-looking in that first light, it filled men's
hearts with all its ancient wonder.  It seemed to have been there
for ever, and, though they had never seen it before, to be more
familiar to them than their mother's face.  And at the same time it
seemed they had discovered it once more, and if they had been the
first men who ever saw the earth, the solemn joy of this discovery
could not have seemed more strange or more familiar.  Seeing it,
they felt nothing but silence and wonder in their hearts, and were
naked and alone and stripped down to their bare selves, as near to
truth as men can ever come.  They knew that they would die and that
the earth would last for ever.  And with that feeling of joy,
wonder, and sorrow in their hearts, they knew that another day had
gone, another day had come, and they knew how brief and lonely are
man's days.

The old earth went floating past them in that first gaunt light of
the morning, and it seemed to be the face of time itself, and the
noise the train made was the noise of silence.  They were fixed
there in that classic design of time and silence.  The engine smoke
went striding out upon the air, the old earth--field and wood and
hill and stream and wood and field and hill--went stroking,
floating past with a kind of everlasting repetitiveness, and the
train kept making on its steady noise that was like silence and for
ever--until it almost seemed that they were poised there in that
image of eternity for ever--in moveless movement, unsilent silence,
spaceless flight.

All of the noises, rhythms, sounds and variations of the train
seemed to belong to all the visions, images, wild cries and oaths
and songs and haunting memories of the night before, and now the
train itself seemed united to this infinite monotone of silence,
and the boy felt that this land now possessed his life, that he had
known it for ever, and could now think only with a feeling of
unbelief and wonder that yesterday--just yesterday--he had left his
home in the far mountains and now was stroking eastward, northward
towards the sea.

And against the borders of the East, pure, radiant, for the first
time seen in the unbelievable wonder of its new discovery, bringing
to all of us, as it had always done, the first life that was ever
known on this earth, the golden banner of the day appeared.



VI


In morning sunlight on a hospital porch, five flights above the
ground, an old dying spectre of a man was sitting, looking
mournfully out across the sun-hazed sweep of the city he had known
in his youth.  He sat there, a rusty, creaking hinge, an almost
severed thread of life, a shockingly wasted integument of skin and
bone, of which every fibre and sinew was almost utterly rotted out,
consumed and honeycombed by the great plant of the cancer which
flowered from his entrails and had now spread its fibrous roots to
every tissue of his life.  Everything was gone: everything was
wasted from him: the face was drawn tight and bony as a beak, the
skin was clean, tinged with a fatal cancerous yellow, and almost
delicately transparent.  The great thin blade of nose cut down
across the face with knife-like sharpness and in the bony,
slanting, almost reptilian cage-formation of the skull, the
smallish cold-grey-green eyes were set wearily, with a wretched and
enfeebled dullness, out across the great space of the city which
swept away and melted at length into the sun-hazed vistas of
October.

Nothing was left but his hands.  The rest of the man was dead.  But
the great hands of the stone-cutter, on whose sinewy and bony
substance there was so little that disease or death could waste,
looked as powerful and living as ever.  Although one of his hands--
the right one--had been stiffened years before by an attack of
rheumatism, they had lost none of their character of power and
massive shapeliness.

In the huge shapely knuckles, in the length and sinewy thickness of
the great fingers--which were twice the size of an ordinary man's--
and in the whole length and sinewy contour of the hand, there was a
quality of sculptural design which was as solid and proportionate
as any of the marble hands of love and grace which the stone-cutter
had so often carved upon the surface of a graveyard monument.

Thus, as he sat there now, staring dully out across the city, an
emaciated and phantasmal shadow of a man, there was, in the
appearance of these great living hands of power (one of which lay
with an enormous passive grace and dignity across the arm of his
chair and the other extended and clasped down upon the handle of a
walking-stick), something weirdly incongruous, as if the great
strong hands had been unnaturally attached to the puny lifeless
figure of a scarecrow.

Now, wearily, desperately, the old enfeebled mind was trying to
grope with the strange and bitter miracle of life, to get some
meaning out of that black, senseless fusion of pain and joy and
agony, that web that had known all the hope and joy and wonder of a
boy, the fury, passion, drunkenness, and wild desire of youth, the
rich adventure and fulfilment of a man, and that had led him to
this fatal and abominable end.

But that fading, pain-sick mind, that darkened memory could draw no
meaning and no comfort from its tragic meditation.

The old man's land of youth was far away in time, yet now only the
magic lonely hills of his life's journey, his wife's people, seemed
sorrowful, lonely, lost, and strange to him.  Now he remembered all
places, things, and people in his land of youth as if he had known
them instantly and for ever!

Oh, what a land, a life, a time was that--that world of youth and
no return.  What colours of green-gold, magic, rich plantations,
and shining cities were in it!  For now when this dying man thought
about this vanished life that tragic quality of sorrow and
loneliness had vanished instantly.  All that he had read in books
about old wars seemed far and lost and in another time, but when he
thought about these things that he had known as a boy, he saw them
instantly, knew them, breathed them, heard them, felt them, was
there beside them, living them with his own life.  He remembered
now his wife's people!--tramping in along the Carlisle Pike on that
hot first morning in July, as they marched in towards Gettysburg.
He had been standing there with his next older brother Gil, beside
the dusty road, as they came by.

And he could see them now, not as shadowy, lost, phantasmal figures
of dark time, the way they were in books; he saw them, heard them,
knew them again as they had been in their shapeless rags of
uniforms, their bare feet wound in rags, their lank disordered
hair, sometimes topped by stove-pipe hats which they had looted out
of stores.

"God!" the old man thought, wetting his great thumb briefly,
grinning thinly, as he shook his head, "What a scarecrow crew that
was!  In all my days I never saw the like of it!  A bum-looking
lot, if ever there was one!--And the bravest of the brave, the
finest troops that ever lived!"--his mind swung upward to its tide
of rhetoric--"Veterans all of them, who had been through the
bloodiest battles of the war, they did not know the meaning of the
word 'fear,' and they would have gone into the valley of death, the
jaws of hell, at a word from their Commander!"  His mind was alive
again, in full swing now, the old voice rose and muttered on the
tides of rhetoric, the great hand gestured, the cold-grey, restless
eyes glared feverishly about--and all of it began to live for him
again.

He remembered how he and Gil had been standing there beside the
road, two barefoot farmer boys, aged thirteen and fifteen, and he
remembered how the rebels would halt upon their march, and shout
jesting remarks at the two boys standing at the road.  One shouted
out to Gil:

"Hi, there, Yank!  You'd better hide!  Jeb Stuart's on the way an'
he's been lookin' fer you!"

And Gil, older, bolder, more assured than he, quick-tempered,
stubborn, fiercely partisan, had come back like a flash:

"He'll be lookin' fer YOU when we get through with you!" said Gil
and the rebels had slapped their ragged thighs and howled with
laughter, shouting at their crestfallen, grinning comrade:

"'Y, God!  I reckon you'll be quiet now!  He shore God put it on ye
that time!"

And he was there beside his brother, seeing, hearing, living it
again, as he remembered his strange first meeting with the Pentland
tribe, the haunting miracle of that chance meeting.  For among that
ragged crew he had first seen his wife's uncle, the prophet,
Bacchus Pentland, and he had seen him, heard him that hot morning,
and had never been able to forget him, although it would be twenty
years, after many strange turnings of the roads of destiny and
wandering, before he was to see the man again, and know his name,
and join together the two halves of fated meeting.

Yes, there had been one among the drawling and terrible mountaineers
that day who passed there on that dusty road, and paused, and
talked, and waited in the heat, one whose face he had never been
able to forget--one whose full, ruddy face and tranquil eyes were
lighted always by a smile of idiot and beatific saintliness, whose
powerful fleshy body gave off a stench that would have put a goat to
shame, and who on this account was called by his jesting comrades,
"Stinking Jesus."  Yes, he had been there that morning, Bacchus
Pentland, the fated and chosen of God, the supernatural appearer on
roads at nightfall, the harbinger of death, the prophet, chanting
even then his promises of Armageddon and the Coming of the Lord,
speaking for the first time to the fascinated ears of those two
boys, the full, drawling, unctuous accents of the fated, time-
triumphant Pentlands.

They came, they halted in the dust before the two young brothers,
the lewd tongues mocked and jested, but that man of God, the
prophet Bacchus Pentland, was beautifully unmoved by their unfaith,
and chanted, with a smile of idiot beatitude, his glorious
assurances of an end of death and battle, everlasting peace:

"Hit's a-comin'!" cried the prophet with the sweet purity of his
saintly smile.  "Hit's a-comin'!  Accordin' to my figgers the Great
Day is almost here!  Oh, hit's a-comin', boys!" he sweetly,
cheerfully intoned, "Christ's kingdom on this airth's at hand!
We're marchin' in to Armageddon now!"

"Hell, Back!" drawled one, with a slow grin of disbelief.  "You
said the same thing afore Chancellorsville, an' all I got from it
was a slug of canister in my tail!"--and the others slapped their
ragged thighs and shouted.

"Hit's a-comin'!" Bacchus cried, with a brisk wink, and his
seraphic smile, unmoved, untouched, by their derision.  "He'll be
here a-judgin' an' decreein' afore the week is over, settin' up His
Kingdom, an' sortin' us all out the way it was foretold--the sheep
upon His right hand an' the goats upon His left."

"An' which side are you goin' to be on, Back, when all this sortin'
starts?" one drawled with evil innocence.  "Are you goin' to be
upon the sheep-side or the goat-side?" he demanded.

"Oh," cried Bacchus cheerfully, with his seraphic smile, "I'll be
upon the sheep-side, brother, with the Chosen of the Lord."

"Then, Back," the other slowly answered, "you'd shore God better
begin to smell a whole lot better than you do right now, for if the
Lord starts sortin' in the dark, Back, He's goin' to put you where
you don't belong--He'll have you over thar among the goats!"--and
the hot brooding air had rung then with their roars of laughter.
Then a word was spoken, an order given, the ragged files trudged on
again, and they were gone.

Now this was lost, a fume of smoke, the moment's image of a fading
memory, and he could not say it, speak it, find a word for it--but
he could see that boy of his lost youth as he sat round the kitchen
table with the rest of them.  He could see his cold-grey, restless,
unhappy eyes, the strange, gaunt, almost reptilian conformation of
his staring face, his incredibly thin, blade-like nose, as he
waited there in silence, looking uneasily at the others with his
cold-grey, shallow, most unhappy eyes.  And the old man seemed to
be the spy of destiny, to look at once below the roofs of a million
little houses everywhere and on the star-shone, death-flung mystery
of the silent battlefield.

He seemed to be a witness of the secret weavings of dark chance
that threads our million lives into strange purposes that we do not
know.  He thought of those dead and wounded men upon the
battlefield whose lives would touch his own so nearly, the wounded
brother that he knew, the wounded stranger he had seen that day by
magic chance, whom he could not forget, and whose life, whose
tribe, in the huge abyss and secret purpose of dark time would one
day interweave into his own.

Oh, he could not find a word, a phrase to utter it, but he seemed
to have the lives not only of those people in him, but the lives of
millions of others whose dark fate is thus determined, interwove,
and beyond their vision or their knowledge, foredone and made
inevitable in the dark destiny of unfathomed time.  And suddenly it
seemed to him that all of it was his, even as his father's blood
and earth were his, the lives and deaths and destinies of all his
people.  He had been a nameless atom in the great family of earth,
a single, unknown thread in the huge warp of fate and chance that
weaves our lives together and because of this he had been the
richest man that ever lived; the power, grandeur, glory of this
earth and all its lives of men were his.

And for a moment he forgot that he was old and dying, and pride,
joy, pain, triumphant ecstasy that had no tongue to utter it rose
like a wordless swelling pæan in his throat because it seemed to
him that this great familiar earth on which his people lived and
wrought was his, that all the mystery, grandeur and beauty in the
lives of men were his, and that he must find a word, a tongue, a
door to utter what was his, or die!

How could he say it!  How could he ever find a word to speak the
joy, the pain, the grandeur bursting in the great vine of his
heart, swelling like a huge grape in his throat--mad, sweet, wild,
intolerable with all the mystery, loneliness, wild secret joy, and
death, the ever-returning and renewing fruitfulness of the earth!

A cloud-shadow passed and left no light but loneliness on the
massed green of the wilderness!  A bird was calling in a secret
wood!  And there was something going, coming, fading there across
the sun--oh, there was something lonely and most sorrowful, his
mother's voice, the voices of lost men long, long ago, the flowing
of a little river in the month of April--and all, all of it was
his!

A man had passed at sunset on a lonely road and vanished unknown
years ago!  A soldier had toiled up a hill at evening and was gone!
A man was lying dead that day upon a bloody field!--and all, all,
all of it was his!

He had stood beside a dusty road, feet bare, his gaunt boy's face
cold-eyed, staring, restless, and afraid.  The ragged jesting
rebels passed before him in the dusty heat, the huge drowse and
cricketing stitch of noon was rising from the sweet woods and nobly
swelling, fertile fields of Pennsylvania and all, all, all of it
was his!

A prophet passed before him in the road that day with the familiar
haunting unction of an unmet, unheard tribe; a wounded prophet lay
that night below the stars and chanted glory, peace, and
Armageddon; the boy's brother lay beside the prophet bleeding from
the lungs; the boy's people grimly waited all night long in a
little house not fourteen miles away; and all, all, all of it was
his!

Over the wild and secret earth, the lonely, everlasting, and
unchanging earth, under the huge tent of the all-engulfing night,
amid the fury, chaos, blind confusions of a hundred million lives,
something wild and secret had been weaving through the generations,
a dark terrific weaving of the threads of time and destiny.

But it had come to this: an old man dying on a porch, staring
through the sun-hazed vistas of October towards the lost country of
his youth.

This was the end of man, then, end of life, of fury, hope, and
passion, glory, all the strange and bitter miracle of chance, of
history, fate, and destiny, which even a stone-cutter's life could
include.  This was the end, then:--an old man, feeble, foul,
complaining and disease-consumed who sat looking from the high
porch of a hospital at the city of his youth.  This was the
sickening and abominable end of flesh, which infected time and all
man's living memory of morning, youth, and magic with the death-
putrescence of its cancerous taint, and made us doubt that we had
ever lived, or had a father, known joy: this was the end, and the
end was horrible in ugliness.  At the end it was not well.



On the last morning when his sons came, Gant was there on the high
porch of the hospital, among the other old men who were sitting
there.  All of the old men looked very feeble, shrunk, and wasted,
their skins had the clear and frail transparency that men get in
hospitals, and in the bright tremendous light of morning and
October, the old men looked forlorn.

Some looked out wearily and vacantly across the sun-hazed vistas of
the city, with the dull and apathetic expression of men who are
tired of pain and suffering and disease, and who wish to die.
Others, who were in a state of convalescence after operations,
looked out upon the sun-lit city with pleased, feeble smiles,
awkwardly holding cigars in their frail fingers, putting them in
their mouths with the uncertain and unaccustomed manner which a
convalescent has, and looking up slowly, questioningly, with a
feeble and uncertain smile into the faces of their relatives,
wives, or children, as if to ask if it could really be true that
they were going to live instead of die.

Their smiles and looks were pitiful in their sense of childish
trust, of growing hopefulness, of wondering disbelief, but there
was something shameful in them, too.  In these feeble smiles of the
old men there was something pleased and impotent, as if they had
been adroitly castrated in the hospital and shorn of their manhood.
And for some reason, one felt suddenly a choking anger and
resentment against some force in life which had betrayed these old
men and made them impotent--something unspeakably ruthless, cruel,
and savage in the world which had made these old and useless
capons.  And this anger against this unknown force suddenly took
personal form in a blind resentment against doctors, nurses,
internes, and the whole sinister and suave perfection of the
hospital which under glozing words and cynical assurances, could
painlessly and deftly mutilate a living man.

The great engine of the hospital, with all its secret, sinister,
and inhuman perfections, together with its clean and sterile smells
which seemed to blot out the smell of rotting death around one,
became a hateful presage of man's destined end.  Suddenly, one got
an image of his own death in such a place as this--of all that
death had come to be--and the image of that death was somehow
shameful.  It was an image of a death without man's ancient pains
and old gaunt ageing--an image of death drugged and stupefied out
of its ancient terror and stern dignities--of a shameful death that
went out softly, dully in anæsthetized oblivion, with the fading
smell of chemicals on man's final breath.  And the image of that
death was hateful.



Thus, as Gant sat there, his great figure wasted to the bone, his
skin yellow and transparent, his eyes old and dead, his chin
hanging loose and petulant, as he stared dully and unseeingly out
across the great city of his youth, his life seemed already to have
been consumed and wasted, emptied out into the void of this cruel
and inhuman space.  Nothing was left, now, to suggest his life of
fury, strength and passion except his hands.  And the hands were
still the great hands of the stone-cutter, powerful, sinewy, and
hairy as they had always been, attached now with a shocking
incongruity to the wasted figure of a scarecrow.

Then, as he sat there staring dully and feebly out upon the city,
his great hairy hands quietly at rest upon the sides of his chair,
the door opened and his two sons came out upon the porch.

"W-w-w-well, Papa," Luke sang out in his rich stammering tones.
"Wy-wy wy, wy, I fought we'd just c-c-c-come by for a m-m-m-moment
to let Gene say g-g-good-bye to you."  In a low tone to his younger
brother he added nervously, "Wy, I fink, I fink I'd m-m-make it
short and snappy if I were you.  D-d-don't say anyf'ing to excite
him, wy, wy, wy, I'd just say good-bye."

"Hello, son," said Gant quietly and dully, looking up at him.  For
a moment his great hand closed over the boy's, and he said quietly:

"Where are you going?"

"Wy, wy, wy, he's on his way up Norf . . . wy . . . he's g-g-going
to Harvard, Papa."

"Be a good boy, son," Gant said gently.  "Do the best you can.  If
you need anything let your mother know," he said wearily and
indifferently, and turned his dead eyes away across the city.

"Wy . . . wy . . . wy he'd like to tell you--"

"Oh, Jesus. . . .  I don't want to hear about it," Gant began to
sniffle in a whining tone. . . .  "Why must it all be put on me . . .
sick and old as I am? . . .  If he wants anything let him ask his
mother for it . . . it's fearful, it's awful, and it's cruel that
you should afflict a sick man in this way."  He was sniffling
petulantly and his chin, on which a wiry stubble of beard was
growing, trembled and shook like that of a whining child.

"I . . . I . . . I fink I'd just say g-g-good-bye now, Gene . . .
m-m-make it, wy make it quick if you can: he's not f-f-feeling good
today."

"Good-bye, Papa," the boy said, and, bending, took his father's
great right hand.

"Good-bye, son," Gant now said quietly as before, looking up at
him.  He presented his grizzled moustache, and the boy kissed him
briefly, feeling the wiry bristles of the moustache brush his cheek
as they had always done.

"Take care of yourself, son," said Gant kindly.  "Do the best you
can."  And for a moment he covered the boy's hand with one great
palm, and gestured briefly across the city:  "I was a boy here,"
Gant said quietly, "over fifty years ago . . . old Jeff Streeter's
hotel where I lived was there," he pointed briefly with his great
forefinger.  ". . . . I was alone in this great city like the city
you are going to--a poor friendless country boy who had come here
to learn his trade as apprentice to a stone-cutter . . . and I had
come from . . . THERE!" as he spoke these words, a flash of the old
power and life had come into Gant's voice, and now he was pointing
his great finger strongly towards the sun-hazed vistas of the North
and West.

"There!" cried Gant, strongly now, his eye bright and shining as he
followed the direction of his pointing finger.  "Do you see,
son? . . .  Pennsylvania . . . Gettysburg . . . Brant's Mill . . .
the country that I came from is THERE! . . .  Now I shall never see
it any more," he said.  "I'm an old man and I'm dying. . . .  The
big farms . . . the orchards . . . the great barns bigger than
houses. . . .  You must go back, son, someday to see the country
that your father came from. . . .  I was a boy there," the old man
muttered.  "Now I'm an old man. . . .  I'll come back no more. . . .
No more . . . it's pretty strange when you come to think of it," he
muttered, "by God it is!"

"Wy, wy, P-p-p-papa," Luke said nervously, "I . . . I fink if he's
g-g-going to get his train wy we'd better--"

"Good-bye, son," Gant said quietly again, giving the boy the
pressure of his great right hand.  "Be a good boy, now."

But already all the fires of life, so briefly kindled by this
memory of the past, had died away: he was an old sick man again,
and he had turned his dead eyes away from his son and was staring
dully out across the city.

"Good-bye, Papa," the boy said, and then paused uncertainly, not
knowing further what to say.  From the old man there had come
suddenly the loathsome stench of rotting death, corrupt mortality,
and he turned swiftly away with a feeling of horror in his heart,
remembering the good male smell of childhood and his father's
prime--the smell of the old worn sofa, the chairs, the sitting-
room, the roaring fires, the plug tobacco on the mantelpiece.

At the screen door he paused again and looked back down the porch.
His father was sitting there as he had left him, among the other
old dying men, his long chin loose, mouth half open, his dead dull
eye fixed vacantly across the sun-hazed city of his youth, his
great hand of power quietly dropped upon his cane.

Down in the city's central web, the boy could distinguish faintly
the line of the rails, and see the engine smoke above the railroad
yards, and as he looked, he heard far off that haunting sound and
prophecy of youth and of his life--the bell, the wheel, the wailing
whistle--and the train.

Then he turned swiftly and went to meet it--and all the new lands,
morning, and the shining city.  Upon the porch his father had not
moved or stirred.  He knew that he should never see him again.




BOOK II



YOUNG FAUSTUS



VII


The train rushed on across the brown autumnal land, by wink of
water and the rocky coasts, the small white towns and flaming
colours and the lonely, tragic and eternal beauty of New England.
It was the country of his heart's desire, the dark Helen in his
blood forever burning--and now the fast approach across October
land, the engine smoke that streaked back on the sharp grey air
that day!

The coming on of the great earth, the new lands, the enchanted
city, the approach, so smoky, blind and stifled, to the ancient
web, the old grimed thrilling barricades of Boston.  The streets
and buildings that slid past that day with such a haunting strange
familiarity, the mighty engine steaming to its halt, and the great
train-shed dense with smoke and acrid with its smell and full of
the slow pantings of a dozen engines, now passive as great cats,
the mighty station with the ceaseless throngings of its illimitable
life, and all of the murmurous, remote and mighty sounds of time
for ever held there in the station, together with a tart and nasal
voice, a hand's-breadth off that said:  "There's hahdly time, but
try it if you want."

He saw the narrow, twisted, age-browned streets of Boston, then,
with their sultry fragrance of fresh-roasted coffee, the sight of
the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the distant drone
and murmur of the great mysterious city all about him, the shining
water of the Basin, and the murmur of the harbour and its ships,
the promise of glory and of a thousand secret, lovely and
mysterious women that were waiting somewhere in the city's web.

He saw the furious streets of life with their unending flood-tide
of a million faces, the enormous library with its million books; or
was it just one moment in the flood-tide of the city, at five
o'clock, a voice, a face, a brawny lusty girl with smiling mouth
who passed him in an instant at the Park Street station, stood
printed in the strong October wind a moment--breast, belly, arm,
and thigh, and all her brawny lustihood--and then had gone into the
man-swarm, lost for ever, never found?

Was it at such a moment--engine-smoke, a station, a street, the
sound of time, a face that came and passed and vanished, could not
be forgot--HERE or HERE or HERE, at such a moment of man's
unrecorded memory, that he breathed fury from the air, that fury
came?

He never knew; but now mad fury gripped his life, and he was
haunted by the dream of time.  Ten years must come and go without a
moment's rest from fury, ten years of fury, hunger, all of the
wandering in a young man's life.  And for what?  For what?

What is the fury which this youth will feel, which will lash him on
against the great earth for ever?  It is the brain that maddens
with its own excess, the heart that breaks from the anguish of its
own frustration.  It is the hunger that grows from everything it
feeds upon, the thirst that gulps down rivers and remains
insatiate.  It is to see a million men, a million faces and to be a
stranger and an alien to them always.  It is to prowl the stacks of
an enormous library at night, to tear the books out of a thousand
shelves, to read in them with the mad hunger of the youth of man.

It is to have the old unquiet mind, the famished heart, the
restless soul; it is to lose hope, heart, and all joy utterly, and
then to have them wake again, to have the old feeling return with
overwhelming force that he is about to find the thing for which his
life obscurely and desperately is groping--for which all men on
this earth have sought--one face out of the million faces, a wall,
a door, a place of certitude and peace and wandering no more.  For
what is it that we Americans are seeking always on this earth?  Why
is it we have crossed the stormy seas so many times alone, lain in
a thousand alien rooms at night hearing the sounds of time, dark
time, and thought until heart, brain, flesh and spirit were sick
and weary with the thought of it:  "Where shall I go now?  What
shall I do?"

He did not know the moment that it came, but it came instantly, at
once.  And from that moment on mad fury seized him, from that
moment on, his life, more than the life of any one that he would
ever know, was to be spent in solitude and wandering.  Why this was
true, or how it happened, he would never know; yet it was so.  From
this time on--save for two intervals in his life--he was to live
about as solitary a life as a modern man can have.  And it is meant
by this that the number of hours, days, months, and years--the
actual time he spent alone--would be immense and extraordinary.

And this fact was all the more astonishing because he never seemed
to seek out solitude, nor did he shrink from life, or seek to build
himself into a wall away from all the fury and the turmoil of the
earth.  Rather, he loved life so dearly that he was driven mad by
the thirst and hunger which he felt for it.  Of this fury, which
was to lash and drive him on for fifteen years, the thousandth part
could not be told, and what is told may seem unbelievable, but it
is true.  He was driven by a hunger so literal, cruel and physical
that it wanted to devour the earth and all the things and people in
it, and when it failed in this attempt, his spirit would drown in
an ocean of horror and desolation, smothered below the overwhelming
tides of this great earth, sickened and made sterile, hopeless,
dead by the stupefying weight of men and objects in the world, the
everlasting flock and flooding of the crowd.

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling
books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the
more he read, the less he seemed to know--the greater the number of
the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of
those which he could never read would seem to be.  Within a period
of ten years he read at least 20,000 volumes--deliberately the
number is set low--and opened the pages and looked through many
times that number.  This may seem unbelievable, but it happened.
Dryden said this about Ben Jonson:  "Other men read books, but he
read libraries"--and so now was it with this boy.  Yet this
terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom
of the mind and heart.  Instead, his fury and despair increased
from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate.

He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten
thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could
describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly: a ravening
appetite to him demanded that he read everything that had ever been
written about human experience.  He read no more from pleasure--the
thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart for
ever.  He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as
from a fowl.  At first, hovering over bookstalls, or walking at
night among the vast piled shelves of the library, he would read,
watch in hand, muttering to himself in triumph or anger at the
timing of each page:  "Fifty seconds to do that one.  Damn you,
we'll see!  You will, will you?"--and he would tear through the
next page in twenty seconds.

This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to
do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honours, nothing
to do with formal learning.  He was not in any way a scholar and
did not want to be one.  He simply wanted to know about everything
on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when
he saw he could not do this.  And it was the same with everything
he did.  In the midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous
library, the thought of the streets outside and the great city all
around him would drive through his body like a sword.  It would now
seem to him that every second that he passed among the books was
being wasted--that at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable
was happening in the streets, and that if he could only get to it in
time and see it, he would somehow get the knowledge of the whole
thing in him--the source, the well, the spring from which all men
and words and actions, and every design upon this earth proceeds.

And he would rush out in the streets to find it, be hurled through
the tunnel into Boston and then spend hours in driving himself
savagely through a hundred streets, looking into the faces of a
million people, trying to get an instant and conclusive picture of
all they did and said and were, of all their million destinies, and
of the great city and the everlasting earth, and the immense and
lonely skies that bent above them.  And he would search the furious
streets until bone and brain and blood could stand no more--until
every sinew of his life and spirit was wrung, trembling, and
exhausted, and his heart sank down beneath its weight of desolation
and despair.

Yet a furious hope, a wild extravagant belief, was burning in him
all the time.  He would write down enormous charts and plans and
projects of all that he proposed to do in life--a programme of work
and living which would have exhausted the energies of 10,000 men.
He would get up in the middle of the night to scrawl down insane
catalogues of all that he had seen and done:--the number of books
he had read, the number of miles he had travelled, the number of
people he had known, the number of women he had slept with, the
number of meals he had eaten, the number of towns he had visited,
the number of states he had been in.

And at one moment he would gloat and chuckle over these stupendous
lists like a miser gloating over his hoard, only to groan bitterly
with despair the next moment, and to beat his head against the
wall, as he remembered the overwhelming amount of all he had not
seen or done, or known.  Then he would begin another list filled
with enormous catalogues of all the books he had not read, all the
food he had not eaten, all the women that he had not slept with,
all the states he had not been in, all the towns he had not
visited.  Then he would write down plans and programmes whereby all
these things must be accomplished, how many years it would take to
do it all, and how old he would be when he had finished.  An
enormous wave of hope and joy would surge up in him, because it now
looked easy, and he had no doubt at all that he could do it.

He never asked himself in any practical way how he was going to
live while this was going on, where he was going to get the money
for this gigantic adventure, and what he was going to do to make it
possible.  If he thought about it, it seemed to have no importance
or reality whatever--he just dismissed it impatiently, or with a
conviction that some old man would die and leave him a fortune,
that he was going to pick up a purse containing hundreds of
thousands of dollars while walking in the Fenway, and that the
reward would be enough to keep him going, or that a beautiful and
rich young widow, true-hearted, tender, loving, and voluptuous, who
had carrot-coloured hair, little freckles on her face, a snub nose
and luminous grey-green eyes with something wicked, yet loving and
faithful in them, and one gold filling in her solid little teeth,
was going to fall in love with him, marry him, and be for ever true
and faithful to him while he went reading, eating, drinking,
whoring, and devouring his way around the world; or finally that he
would write a book or play every year or so, which would be a great
success, and yield him fifteen or twenty thousand dollars at a
crack.  Thus, he went storming away at the whole earth about him,
sometimes mad with despair, weariness, and bewilderment; and
sometimes wild with a jubilant and exultant joy and certitude as
the conviction came to him that everything would happen as he
wished.  Then at night he would hear the vast sounds and silence of
the earth and of the city, he would begin to think of the dark
sleeping earth and of the continent of night, until it seemed to
him it all was spread before him like a map--rivers, plains, and
mountains and 10,000 sleeping towns; it seemed to him that he saw
everything at once.



VIII


One morning, a few days after his arrival in Cambridge, he had
received a letter, written on plain but costly paper in a fine but
almost feminine hand.  The letter read as follows:


"Dear Sir:  I should be pleased to have your company for dinner
Wednesday evening at eight-thirty at the 'Cock House Tavern' on
Brattle Street.  In case of your acceptance will you kindly call at
my rooms in Holyoke House, opposite the Widener Library, at seven-
fifteen?

"Sincerely yours,

"FRANCIS STARWICK."


He read that curt and cryptic note over and over with feelings
mixed of astonishment and excitement.  Who was Francis Starwick?
Why should Francis Starwick, a stranger of whom he had never heard,
invite him to dinner?  And why was that laconic note not
accompanied by a word of explanation?

It is likely he would have gone anyway, from sheer curiosity, and
because of the desperate eagerness with which a young man, alone
in a strange world for the first time, welcomes any hope of
friendship.  But before the day was over, he had learned from
another student in Professor Hatcher's celebrated course for
dramatists, of which he himself was now a member, that Francis
Starwick was Professor Hatcher's assistant; and correctly inferring
that the invitation had some connection with this circumstance, he
resolved to go.

In this way, his acquaintance began with that rare and tragically
gifted creature who was one of the most extraordinary figures of
his generation and who, possessing almost every talent that an
artist needs, was lacking in that one small grain of common earth
that could have saved him, and brought his work to life.

No fatality rested on that casual meeting.  He could not have
foreseen in what strange and sorrowful ways his life would weave
and interweave with this other one, nor could he have known from
any circumstance of that first meeting that this other youth was
destined to be that triune figure in his life, of which each man
knows one and only one, in youth, and which belongs to the weather
of man's life, and to the fabric of his destiny: his friend, his
brother--and his mortal enemy.  Nor was there, in the boy he met
that night, any prefigurement of the tragic fatality with which
that brilliant life was starred, the horrible end toward which,
perhaps, it even then was directed.

They were both young men, and both filled with all the vanity,
anguish and hot pride of youth, and with its devotion and humility;
they were both strong in their proud hope and faith and untried
confidence; they both had shining gifts and powers and they were
sure the world was theirs; they were splendid and fierce and weak
and strong and foolish; the prescience of wild swelling joy was in
them; and the goat cry was still torn from their wild young
throats.  They knew that the most fortunate, good and happy life
that any man had ever known was theirs, if they would only take it;
they knew that it impended instantly--the fortune, fame, and love
for which their souls were panting; neither had yet turned the dark
column, they knew that they were twenty, and that they could never
die.

Francis Starwick, on first sight, was a youth of medium height and
average weight, verging perhaps toward slenderness, with a pleasant
ruddy face, brown eyes, a mass of curly auburn-reddish hair, and a
cleft chin.  The face in its pleasant cast and healthy tone, and
spacious, quiet intelligence was strikingly like those faces of
young Englishmen which were painted by Hoppner and Sir Henry
Raeburn towards the beginning of the nineteenth century.  It was an
attractive, pleasant immensely sensitive and intelligent face, but
when Starwick spoke this impression of warmth and friendliness was
instantly destroyed.

He spoke in a strange and rather disturbing tone, the pitch and
timbre of which it would be almost impossible to define, but which
would haunt one who had heard it for ever after.  His voice was
neither very high nor low, it was a man's voice and yet one felt it
might almost have been a woman's; but there was nothing at all
effeminate about it.  It was simply a strange voice compared to
most American voices, which are rasping, nasal, brutally coarse or
metallic.  Starwick's voice had a disturbing lurking resonance, an
exotic, sensuous, and almost voluptuous quality.  Moreover, the
peculiar mannered affectation of his speech was so studied that it
hardly escaped extravagance.  If it had not been for the dignity,
grace, and intelligence of his person, the affectation of his
speech might have been ridiculous.  As it was, the other youth felt
the moment's swift resentment and hostility that is instinctive
with the American when he thinks some one is speaking in an
affected manner.

As Starwick welcomed his guest his ruddy face flushed brick-red
with the agonizing embarrassment of a shy and sensitive person to
whom every new meeting is an ordeal; his greeting was almost
repellently cold and formal, but this, too, with the studied
affectation of his speech, was protective armour for his shyness.

"A-d'ye-do?" he said, shaking hands, the greeting coming from his
throat through lips that scarcely seemed to move.  "It was good of
you to come."

"It was good of you to ask me," the other boy said awkwardly,
fumbled desperately for a moment, and then blurted out--"I didn't
know who you were at first--when I got your note--but then somebody
told me:--you're Professor Hatcher's assistant, aren't you?"

"Ace," said Starwick, this strange sound which was intended for
"yes" coming through his lips in the same curious and almost
motionless fashion.  The brick-red hue of his ruddy face deepened
painfully, and for a moment he was silent--"Look!" he said
suddenly, yet with a casualness that was very warm and welcome
after the stilted formality of his greeting, "would you like a
drink?  I have some whisky."

"Why, yes--sure--certainly," the other stammered, almost feverishly
grateful for the diversion--"I'd like it."

Starwick opened the doors of a small cupboard, took out a bottle, a
siphon, and some glasses on a tray, and placed them on a table.

"Help yourself," he said.  "Do you like it with soda--or plain
water--or how?"

"Why--any way you do," the other youth stammered.  "Aren't you
going to drink?  I don't want to unless you do."

"Ace," said Starwick again, "I'll drink with you.  I like the
soda," he added, and poured a drink for himself and filled it with
the siphon.  "Go on.  Pour your own. . . .  Look," he said abruptly
again, as the other youth was awkwardly manipulating the
unaccustomed siphon.  "Do you mind if I drink mine while I'm
shaving?  I just came in.  I'd like to shave and change my shirt
before we go out.  Do you mind?"

"No, of course not," the other said, grateful for the respite thus
afforded.  "Go ahead.  Take all the time you like.  I'll drink my
drink and have a look at your books, if you don't mind."

"Please do," said Starwick, "if you find anything you like.  I
think this is the best chair."  He pushed a big chair up beneath a
reading lamp and switched the light on.  "There are cigarettes on
the table," he said in his strange mannered tone, and went into the
bathroom, where, after a moment's inspection of his ruddy face, he
immediately began to lather himself and to prepare for shaving.

"This is a nice place you have here," the visitor said presently,
after another awkward pause, during which the only sound was the
minute scrape of the razor blade on Starwick's face.

"Quite," he answered concisely, in his mannered tone, and with that
blurred sound of people who try to talk while they are shaving.
For a few moments the razor scraped on.  "I'm glad you like it,"
Starwick said presently, as he put the razor down and began to
inspect his work in the mirror.  "And what kind of place did you
find for yourself?  Do you like it?"

"Well, it will do, I guess," the other boy said dubiously.  "Of
course, it's nothing like this--it's not an apartment; it's just a
room I rented."

"Ace," said Starwick from the bathroom.  "And where is that?"

"It's on a street called Buckingham Road.  Do you know where that
is?"

"Oh," said Starwick coldly, and he craned carefully with his neck,
and was silent a moment as he did a little delicate razor-work
around the Adam's apple.  "Ace," he said at length as he put the
razor down again.  "I think I do. . . .  And how did you happen to
go out there?" he inquired coldly as he began to dry his face on a
towel.  "Did some one tell you about the place?"

"Well--yes.  I knew about it before I came.  It's a room in a house
that some people I know have rented."

"Oh," said Starwick coldly, formally again, as he thrust his arms
into a fresh shirt.  "Then you do know people here in Cambridge?"

"Well, no: they are really people from home."

"Home?"

"Yes--from my own state, the place I came from, where I went to
school before I came here."

"Oh," said Starwick, buttoning his shirt, "I see.  And where was
that?  What state are you from?"

"Catawba."

"Oh. . . .  And you went to school down there?"

"Yes.  To the State University."

"I see. . . .  And these people who have the house where you are
living now--what are they doing here?"

"Well, the man--he's a professor at the State University down
there--he's up here getting some sort of degree in education."

"In what?"

"In education."

"Oh.  I see. . . .  And what does his wife do; has he got a wife?"

"Yes; and three children. . . .  Well," the other youth said
uncertainly, and then laughed suddenly, "I haven't seen her do
anything yet but sit on her tail and talk."

"Ace?" said Starwick, knotting his tie very carefully.  "And what
does she talk about?"

"Of people back home, mostly--the professors at the University, and
their wives and families."

"Oh," said Starwick gravely, but there was now lurking in his voice
an indefinable drollery of humour.  "And does she say nice things
about them?"  He looked out towards his guest with a grave face,
but a sly burble in his voice now escaped him and broke out in an
infectious chuckling laugh.  "Or is she--" for a moment he was
silent, trembling a little with secret merriment, and his pleasant
face reddened with laughter--"or is she," he said with sly
insinuation--"bitter?"

The other, somehow conquered by the sly yet broad and vulgar humour
in Starwick's tone, broke out into a loud guffaw, and said:

"God! she's bitter--and nothing but!  That's just the word for it."

"Has anyone escaped yet?" said Starwick slyly.

"Not a damned one of them," the other roared.  "She's worked her
way from the President and his family all the way down to the
instructors.  Now she's started on the people of the town.  I've
heard about every miscarriage and every dirty pair of drawers that
ever happened there.  We've got a bet on, a friend of mine from
home who's also staying there--he's in the Law School--whether
she's going to say anything good about anyone before the year is
over."

"And which side have you?" said Starwick.

"I say she won't--but Billy Ingram says she will.  He says that the
last time she said anything good about anyone was when someone died
during the influenza epidemic in 1917; and he claims she's due
again."

"And what is the lady's name?" said Starwick.  He had now come out
into the living room and was putting on his coat.

"Trotter," the other said, feeling a strange convulsive humour
swelling in him.  "Mrs. Trotter."

"What?" said Starwick, his face reddening and the sly burble
appearing in his voice again.  "Mrs.--who?"

"Mrs. Trotter!" the other choked, and the room rang suddenly with
their wild laughter.  When it had subsided, Starwick blew his nose
vigorously, and his pleasant face still reddened with laughter, he
asked smoothly:

"And what does Professor Trotter say while this is going on?"

"He doesn't say anything," the other laughed.  "He can't say
anything.  He just sits there and listens. . . .  The man's all
right.  Billy and I feel sorry for him.  He's got this damned old
shrew of a wife who sits there talking ninety to the minute, and
three of the meanest, dirtiest, noisiest little devils you ever saw
falling over his feet and raising hell from morning to night, and
this sloppy nigger wench they brought up with them from the South--
the place looks like an earthquake hit it, and the poor devil is up
here trying to study for a degree--it's pretty hard on him.  He's a
nice fellow, and he doesn't deserve it."

"God!" said Starwick frankly and gravely, "but it sounds dreary!
Why did you ever go to such a place?"

"Well, you see, I didn't know anyone in Cambridge--and I had known
these people back home."

"I should think that would have made you anxious to avoid them,"
Starwick answered.  "And it's most important that you have a
pleasant place to work in.  It really is, you know," he said
earnestly and with a note of reproof in his mannered tone.  "You
really should be more careful about that," he said.

"Yes, I suppose it is.  You certainly have a good place here."

"Ace," said Starwick.  "It is very pleasant.  I'm glad you like
it."

He came out, with his drink in his hand, put the drink down on a
table and sat down beside it, crossing his legs and reaching for
one of the straw-tipped cigarettes in a small and curiously carved
wooden box.  The impression he made on the other youth was one of
magnificence and luxury.  The boy's rooms seemed to fit his
sensuous and elegant personality like a glove: he was only twenty-
two years old, but his distinctive and incomparable quality was
everywhere about him in these two rooms.

To the unaccustomed eyes of the younger boy, these modest rooms
seemed to be the most magnificent apartment he had seen.  For a
moment he thought that Starwick must be an immensely wealthy person
to live in such a way.  The fact that a man so young should live in
such splendid and luxurious independence--that he should "have his
own place," an apartment of his own, instead of a rented room, the
thrilling solitudes of midnight privacy to himself, the freedom to
come and go as he pleased, to do as he wished, to invite to his
place whoever he chose, "to bring a girl there" whenever he wanted,
without fear or the need for stealth--all these simple things which
are just part of the grand and hopeful joy of youth, which the
younger boy had never known, but to which he had aspired, as every
youth aspires, in many a thrilling fantasy--now made Starwick's
life seem almost impossibly fortunate, happy and exciting.

And yet it was not merely his own inexperience that made Starwick
seem so wealthy.  Starwick, although he had no regular income save
a thousand dollars a year which he received for his work as
Professor Hatcher's assistant, and small sums he got from time to
time from his family--he was, incredibly enough, the youngest of a
middle-western family of nine children, small business and farming
people in modest circumstances--gave the impression of wealth
because he really was a wealthy person: he had been born wealthy,
endowed with wealth by nature.  In everything he did and said and
was, in all he touched, in the whole quality of his rare and
sensuous personality there was an opulence of wealth and luxury
such as could not be found in a hundred millionaires.  He had that
rare and priceless quality that is seldom found in anyone, and
almost never in Americans, of being able to give to any simple act
or incident a glamour of luxury, pleasure, excitement.  Thus, when
he smoked a cigarette, or drank a drink, or invited someone to go
with him to the theatre, or ordered a meal in a shabby Italian
restaurant, or made coffee in his rooms, or talked of something he
had read in a book, or tied his neck-tie--all these things had a
rare, wonderful and thrilling quality in them that the richest
millionaire in the world could not have bought for money.  And for
this reason, people were instantly captivated by the infinite grace
and persuasiveness of Starwick's personality: he had the power, as
few people in the world have ever had the power, instantly to
conquer and command the devotion of people because, while they were
with him, everything in the world took on a freshness, wonder, joy
and opulence it had never had before, and for this reason people
wanted to be near him, to live in this thrilling enchantment that
he gave to everything.

Even as he sat there smoking, drinking and talking with his guest,
he did a simple and characteristic thing that yet seemed wonderful
and thrilling to the other boy.

"Look," said Starwick suddenly, getting up, going over to one of
his bookshelves and switching on a light.  "Look," he said again,
in his strangely fibred voice, "did you ever read this?"

As he uttered these words he took a book from one of the shelves
and put on his spectacles.  There was something strange and
wonderful about the spectacles, and in the way he put them on,
quietly, severely, plainly; the spectacles had thick old-fashioned
silver rims, and silver handles.  Their plain, honest and old-
fashioned sobriety was somehow remarkable, and as he put them on,
with a patient and quiet movement, and turned his attention to the
pages of the book, the gravity and maturity of quiet and lonely
thought in the boy's face and head were, remarkably evident.

"Did you ever read this?" he said quietly, turning to the other
youth, and handing him the book.  It was a copy of George Moore's
Confessions of a Young Man: the other replied he had not read it.

"Then," said Starwick, "why don't you take it along with you?  It's
really quite amusing."  He switched off the light above the
bookshelves, took off his glasses with a quiet tired movement, and
folding them and putting them in his breast pocket, came back to
the table and sat down.

"I think it may interest you," he said.

Although the other boy had always felt an instinctive repulsion
towards books which someone else urged him to read, something in
Starwick's simple act had suddenly given the book a strange rare
value: he felt a strange and pleasurable excitement when he thought
about it, and was instantly eager and curious to read it.
Moreover, in an indefinable way, he had understood, the moment that
Starwick turned to him, that he was GIVING, and not LENDING him the
book; and this act, too, instantly was invested with a princely and
generous opulence.  It was this way with everything that Starwick
did: everything he touched would come instantly to life with grace
and joy; his was an incomparable, an enslaving power--a Midas-gift
of life and joy almost too fortunate and effortless for one man to
possess and in the end, like all his other gifts of life and joy, a
power that would serve death, not life, that would spread
corruption instead of health, and that finally would turn upon its
owner and destroy him.

Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the
sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation
which Starwick was somehow able to convey to everything he did and
give to everyone he knew and liked, was constantly apparent.  It
was a fine clear night in early October, crispness and an
indefinable smell of smoke were in the air, students were coming
briskly along the street, singly or in groups of two or three,
light glowed warmly in the windows of the book-shops, pharmacies,
and tobacco stores near Harvard Square, and from the enormous
library and the old buildings in the Harvard Yard there came a glow
of lights, soft, rich, densely golden, embedded in old red brick.

All of these things, vital, exciting, strangely, pleasurably
stirring as they were, gained a curious enhancement from Starwick's
presence until they gave to the younger boy not only a feeling of
sharp, mounting, strangely indefinable excitement, but a feeling of
power and wealth--a sense of being triumphant and having before him
the whole golden and unvisited plantation of the world to explore,
possess and do with as he would--the most fortunate and happy life
that any man had ever known.

Starwick went into a tobacco shop to cash a cheque and the whole
place, with its pungent smells of good tobacco, its idling
students, its atmosphere of leisure and enjoyment, became
incomparably wealthy, rich, exciting as it had never been before.

And later, when the two young men had gone into the "Cock House
Tavern" on Brattle Street, the prim and clean little rooms of the
old house, the clean starched waitresses and snowy tablecloth, the
good food, and several healthy and attractive-looking girls of the
New England type all gained an increased value.  He felt a thrill
of pleasurable anticipation and a feeling of unlimited wealth,
simply because Starwick was there ordering the meal, conferring on
everything around him the sense of wealth and ease and nameless joy
which his wonderful personality, with its magic touch, instantly
gave to anything on earth.

Yet during the meal the feeling of hostile constraint between the
two young men was not diminished, but grew constantly.  Starwick's
impeccable cold courtesy--really the armour of a desperately shy
person--his mannered tone, with its strange and disturbing accent,
the surgical precision of his cross-examination into the origin,
experience, and training of the other youth sharpened a growing
antagonism in the other's spirit, and put him on his guard.
Moreover, failure to give any information about himself--above all
his complete reticence concerning his association with Professor
Hatcher and the reason for his curt and brusquely-worded invitation
to dinner--all this began to bear now with oppressive weight upon
the other's spirit.  It seemed to him there was a deliberate
arrogance in this cold reticence.  He began to feel a sullen
resentment because of this secretive and mysterious conduct.  And
later that evening when the two young men parted, the manner of
each of them was cold and formal.  They bowed stiffly, shook hands
with each other coldly, and marched away.  It was several months
before the younger would again talk to Starwick, and during that
period he thought of him with a feeling of resentment, almost of
dislike.



IX


That first impact of the city had stunned him with its huge and
instant shock, and now, like a swimmer whelmed in a raging storm,
he sought desperately among that unceasing flood of faces for one
that he knew, one that he could call his own, and suddenly he
thought of Uncle Bascom.  When his mother had told him he should go
to see his uncle and his family as soon as he could he had nodded
his head mechanically and muttered a few words of perfunctory
assent, but so busy were his mind and heart with his shining vision
of the city and all the magic he was sure to find there that it had
never seriously occurred to him that he would turn eagerly to the
old man for companionship and help.

But now, the day after his arrival in the city, he found himself
pawing eagerly through the pages of the phone book for his uncle's
business address: he found it--the familiar words, "Bascom
Pentland" stared up out of the crowded page with a kind of unreal
shocking incandescence, and in another moment he heard himself
speaking across the wire to a puzzled voice that came to him with
its curious and unearthly remoteness as if from some planetary
distance--and suddenly the howling recognition of the words--words
whose unearthly quality now came back to him in a searing flash of
memory, although he had not heard his uncle's voice for eight
years, when he was twelve years old:

"Oh, hello! hello! hello!" that unearthly voice howled faintly at
him.  "How are you, my boy, how are you, how are you, how are
you? . . .  And say!" the voice yelled with a sudden comical
transition to matter of factness--"I had a letter from your mother
just this morning.  She told me you were on your way. . . .  I've
been expecting you."

"Can I come over to see you now, Uncle Bascom?"

"Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!" that unearthly and
passionate voice howled back at once enthusiastically.  "Come over
at once, my boy, at once!  Oh, by all means, by all means, by all
means! . . .  And now, my boy!" the voice became faintly and
comically precise, and he could hear his uncle smacking his large
rubbery lips with pedantic relish as he pronounced the words:
"Know-ing you are a young man alone in this great city for the
first time, I shall give you a few brief--and, I trust, reasonably
clear, di-rections," again Bascom smacked his lips with audible
relish as he pronounced this lovely word--"concerning your i-tin-
er-ary"--his joy as he smacked his lips over this last word was
almost indecently evident, and he went on with meticulous
elaboration through a bewildering labyrinth of instructions until
even he was satisfied at the confusion he had caused.  Then he said
good-bye, upon the assurance of his nephew that he would come at
once.  And it was in this way, after eight years of absence, that
the boy again met his uncle.

He found the old man hardly changed at all.  He was, indeed, a
member of that race of men who scarcely vary by a jot from one
decade to another; he was a trifle greyer, the stringy gauntness of
his tall stooped frame was perhaps a little more pronounced, his
eccentric tricks of speech and manner a little more emphatic--but
this was all.  In dress, speech, manner and appearance he was to an
amazing degree the same as he had been the last time that his
nephew saw him.

It is doubtful, in fact, if he had changed appreciably in thirty
years.  And certainly during the first twenty-five years of this
century, business people who had their offices in or near State
Street, Boston, and who had grown very familiar with that
cadaverous and extraordinary figure, could have testified that he
had not changed at all.  His daily appearances, indeed, had become
so much a part of the established process of events in that crowded
street, that they had attained a kind of ritualistic dignity, and
any serious alteration in their pattern would have seemed to
hundreds of people to whom his gaunt bowed figure had become
familiar, almost to constitute a serious disruption of the natural
order.

Shortly before nine o'clock of every working day he would emerge
from a subway exit near the head of the street and pause vaguely
for a moment, making a craggy eddy in the tide of issuing workers
that foamed swiftly about him while he stood with his enormous bony
hands clutched comically before him at the waist, as if holding
himself in, at the same time making the most horrible grimaces with
his lean and amazingly flexible features.  These grimaces were made
by squinting his small sharp eyes together, widening his mouth in a
ghastly travesty of a grin, and convolving his chin and cheek in a
rapid series of pursed lips and horrible squints as he swiftly
pressed his rubbery underlip against a few enormous horse-teeth
that decorated his upper jaw.  Having completed these facial
evolutions, he glanced quickly and, it must be supposed, blindly,
in every direction; for he then plunged heedlessly across the
street, sometimes choosing the moment when traffic had been halted,
and pedestrians were hurrying across, sometimes diving into the
midst of a roaring chaos of motor cars, trucks, and wagons, through
which he sometimes made his way in safety, accompanied only by a
scream of brake-bands, a startled barking of horns, and the hearty
curses of frightened drivers, or from which, howling with terror in
the centre of a web of traffic which he had snarled hopelessly and
brought to a complete standstill, he was sometimes rescued by a
red-faced and cursing young Irishman who was on point-duty at that
corner.

But Bascom was a fated man and he escaped.  Once, it is true, a
bright mindless beetle of machinery, which had no thought for fated
men, had knocked him down and skinned and bruised him; again, an
uninstructed wheel had passed across the soft toe-end of his shoe
and held him prisoner, as if he were merely some average son of
destiny--but he escaped.  He escaped because he was a fated man and
because the providence which guides the steps of children and the
blind was kind to him; and because this same policeman whose simian
upper lip had once been thick and twisted with its curses had long
since run the scale from anger to wild fury, and thence to madness
and despair and resignation, and had now come to have a motherly
affection for this stray sheep, kept his eye peeled for its
appearance every morning, or, failing this, at once shrilled hard
upon his whistle when he heard the well-known howl of terror and
surprise, plunged to the centre of the stalled traffic snarl,
plucked Bascom out to safety under curse and shout and scream of
brake, and marched him tenderly to the curb, gripping his brawny
hand around the old man's arm, feeling his joints, testing his
bones, massaging anxiously his sinewy carcass, and calling him
"bud"--although Bascom was old enough to be his grandfather.  "Are
you all right, bud?  You're not hurt, are you, bud?  Are you
O.K.?"--to which Bascom, if his shock and terror had been great,
could make no answer for a moment save to pant hoarsely and to howl
loudly and huskily from time to time, "Ow!  Ow!  Ow!  Ow!"

At length, becoming more coherent, if not more calm, he would
launch into an ecclesiastical indictment of motor cars and their
drivers delivered in a high, howling, and husky voice that
suggested the pronouncements of a prophet from a mountain.  This
voice had a quality of strange remoteness and, once heard, would
never be forgotten.  It actually had a howling note in it, and
carried to great distances, and yet it was not loud: it was very
much as if Mr. Bascom Pentland were standing on a mountain and
shouting to someone in a quiet valley below--the sounds came to one
plainly but as if from a great distance, and it was full of a
husky, unearthly passion.  It was really an ecclesiastical voice,
the voice of a great preacher; one felt that it should be heard in
churches, which was exactly where it once was heard, for Bascom had
at various times and with great conviction, in the course of his
long and remarkable life, professed and preached the faith of the
Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and
the Unitarians.

Quite often, in fact, as now, when he had narrowly escaped disaster
in the streets, Bascom still preached from the corner: as soon as
he recovered somewhat from his shock, he would launch forth into a
sermon of eloquent invective against any driver of motor cars
within hearing, and if any of them entered the fray, as sometimes
happened, a very interesting performance occurred.

"What happened to YOU?" the motorist might bitterly remark.  "Do
the keepers know you're out?"

Mr. Pentland would thereupon retort with an eloquent harangue,
beginning with a few well-chosen quotations from the more violent
prophets of the Old Testament, a few predictions of death,
destruction and damnation for the owners of motor cars, and a few
apt references to Days of Judgment and Reckoning, Chariots of
Moloch, and Beasts of the Apocalypse.

"Oh, for God's sake!" the exasperated motorist might reply.  "Are
you BLIND?  Where do you think you are?  In a cow-pasture?  Can't
you read the signals?  Didn't you see the cop put his hand up?
Don't you know when it says to 'Stop' or 'Go'?  Did you ever hear
of the traffic law?"

"The TRAFFIC law!" Bascom sneeringly exclaimed, as if the mere use
of the word by the motorist evoked his profoundest contempt.  His
voice now had a precise and meticulous way of speech, there was
something sneering and pedantic in the way he pronounced each word,
biting it off with a prim, nasal and heavily accented enunciation
in the manner of certain pedants and purists who suggest by their
pronunciation that language in the mouths of most people is vilely
and carelessly treated, that each word has a precise, subtle, and
careful meaning of its own, and that they--THEY alone--understand
these matters.  "The TRAFFIC law!" he repeated again: then he
squinted his eyes together, pursed his rubbery lip against the big
horsy upper teeth, and laughed down his nose in a forced, sneering
manner.  "The TRAFFIC law!" he said.  "Why, you pit-i-ful ig-no-
RAM-us!  You il-LIT-ter-ate ruffian!  You dare to speak to me--to
ME!" he howled suddenly with an ecclesiastical lift of his voice,
striking himself on his bony breast and glaring with a majestical
fury as if the word of a mighty prophet had been contradicted by an
upstart--"of the traffic law, when it is doubtful if you could READ
the law if you saw it,"--he sneered--"and it is obvious to anyone
with the perception of a schoolboy that you would not have
intelligence enough to understand it, and"--here his voice rose to
a howling emphasis and he held one huge bony finger up to command
attention--"AND to interpret it, if you could read."

"Is THAT so?" the motorist heavily remarked.  "A WISE guy, eh?  One
of these guys who knows it all, eh?  You're a PRETTY wise guy,
aren't you?" the motorist continued bitterly, as if caught up in
the circle of his refrain and unable to change it.  "Well, let me
tell YOU something.  You think you're pretty smaht, don't you?
Well, you're not.  See?  It's wise guys like you who go around
looking for a good bust on the nose.  See?  That's how smaht you
are.  If you wasn't an old guy I'd give you one, too," he said,
getting a moody satisfaction from the thought.

"Ow-w!  Ow-w!  Ow-w!" Bascom howled in sudden terror.

"If you know so much, if you're so smaht as you think you are, what
IS the traffic law?"

Then, assuredly, if there was a traffic law, the unfortunate
motorist was lost, for Uncle Bascom would deliver it to him
verbatim, licking his lips with joy over all the technicalities of
legal phrasing and pronouncing each phrase with a meticulous and
pedantic enunciation.

"And furthermore!" he howled, holding up his big bony finger, "the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decreed, by a statute that has
been on the books since 1856, by a statute that is irrevocably,
inexorably, ineluctably plain that any driver, director, governor,
commander, manager, agent or conductor, or any other person who
shall conduct or cause to be conducted any vehicular instrument,
whether it be of two, four, six, eight or any number of wheels
whatsoever, whether it be in the public service, or in the
possession of a private individual, whether it be--" but by this
time the motorist, if he was wise, had had enough and had escaped.

If, however, it had been one of his more fortunate mornings, if he
had blindly but successfully threaded the peril of roaring traffic,
Uncle Bascom proceeded rapidly down State Street, still clutching
his raw bony hands across his meagre waist, still contorting his
remarkable face in its endless series of pursed grimaces, and
presently turned in to the entrance of a large somewhat dingy-
looking building of blackened stone, one of those solid,
unpretentious, but very valuable properties which smell and look
like the early 1900's, and which belong to that ancient and
enormously wealthy corporation across the river known as Harvard
University.

Here, Uncle Bascom, still clutching himself together across the
waist, mounted a flight of indented marble entry steps, lunged
through revolving doors into a large marble corridor that was
redolent with vibrating waves of hot steamy air, wet rubbers and
galoshes, sanitary disinfectant and serviceable but somewhat old-
fashioned elevators and, entering one of the cars which had just
plunged down abruptly, banged open its door, belched out two or
three people and swallowed a dozen more, he was finally deposited
with the same abruptness on the seventh floor, where he stepped out
into a wide dark corridor, squinted and grimaced uncertainly to
right and left as he had done for twenty-five years, and then went
left along the corridor, past rows of lighted offices in which one
could hear the preliminary clicking of typewriters, the rattling of
crisp papers, and the sounds of people beginning their day's work.
At the end of the corridor Bascom Pentland turned right along
another corridor and at length paused before a door which bore this
inscription across the familiar glazed glass of American business
offices:  "The John T. Brill Realty Co.--Houses For Rent or Sale."
Below this bold legend in much smaller letters was printed:
"Bascom Pentland--Att'y at Law--Conveyancer and Title Expert."

The appearance of this strange figure in State Street, or anywhere
else, had always been sufficient to attract attention and to draw
comment.  Bascom Pentland, if he had straightened to his full
height, would have been six feet and three or four inches tall, but
he had always walked with a stoop and as he grew older the stoop
had become confirmed: he presented a tall, gnarled, bony figure,
cadaverous and stringy, but tough as hickory.  He was of that race
of men who seem never to wear out, or to grow old, or to die: they
live with almost undiminished vitality to great ages, and when they
die they die suddenly.  There is no slow wastage and decay because
there is so little to waste or decay: their mummied and stringy
flesh has the durability of granite.

Bascom Pentland clothed his angular figure with an assortment of
odd garments which seemed to have the same durability: they were
immensely old and worn, but they also gave no signs of ever wearing
out, for by their cut and general appearance of age, it seemed that
his frugal soul had selected in the 'nineties materials which it
hoped would last for ever.  His coat, which was originally of a
dark dull pepper-and-salt grey, had gone green at the seams and
pockets, and moreover it was a ridiculously short skimpy coat for a
gaunt big-boned man like this: it was hardly more than a jacket,
his great wristy hands burst out of it like lengths of cordwood,
and the mark of his high-humped narrow shoulders cut into it with a
knife-like sharpness.  His trousers were also tight and skimpy, of
a lighter grey and of a rough woolly texture from which all fuzz
and fluff had long ago been rubbed; he wore rough country brogans
with raw-hide laces, and a funny little flat hat of ancient black
felt, which had also gone green along the band.  One understands
now why the policeman called him "Bud": this great bony figure
seemed ruthlessly to have been crammed into garments in which a
country fledgling of the 'eighties might have gone to see his girl,
clutching a bag of gumdrops in his large red hand.  A stringy
little neck-tie, a clean but dilapidated collar which by its bluish
and softly mottled look Bascom Pentland must have laundered himself
(a presumption which is quite correct since the old man did all his
own laundry work, as well as his mending, repairing, and cobbling)--
this was his costume, winter and summer, and it never changed,
save that in winter he supplemented it with an ancient blue sweater
which he wore buttoned to the chin and whose frayed ends and cuffs
projected inches below the scanty little jacket.  He had never been
known to wear an overcoat, not even on the coldest days of those
long, raw, and formidable winters from which Boston suffers.

The mark of his madness was plain upon him: intuitively men knew he
was not a poor man, and the people who had seen him so many times
in State Street would nudge one another, saying:  "You see that old
guy?  You'd think he was waitin' for a hand-out from the Salvation
Army, wouldn't you?  Well, he's not.  He's GOT it, brother.
Believe me, he's GOT it good and plenty: he's GOT it salted away
where no one ain't goin' to touch it.  That guy's got a sock full
of dough!"

"Jesus!" another remarks.  "What good's it goin' to do an old guy
like that?  He can't take any of it with him, can he?"

"You said it, brother," and the conversation would become
philosophical.

Bascom Pentland was himself conscious of his parsimony, and
although he sometimes asserted that he was "only a poor man," he
realized that his exaggerated economies could not be justified to
his business associates on account of poverty: they taunted him
slyly, saying, "Come on, Pentland, let's go to lunch.  You can get
a good meal at the Pahkeh House for a couple of bucks."  Or:  "Say,
Pentland, I know a place where they're havin' a sale of winter
overcoats: I saw one there that would just suit you--you can get it
for sixty dollars."  Or:  "Do you need a good laundry, Reverend?  I
know a couple of Chinks who do good work."

To which Bascom, with the characteristic evasiveness of parsimony,
would reply, snuffling derisively down his nose:  "No, sir!  You
won't catch me in any of their stinking restaurants.  You never
know what you're getting: if you could see the dirty, nasty, filthy
kitchens where your food is prepared you'd lose your appetite quick
enough."  His parsimony had resulted in a compensating food mania:
he declared that "in his young days" he "ruined his digestion by
eating in restaurants," he painted the most revolting pictures of
the filth of these establishments, laughing scornfully down his
nose as he declared:  "I suppose you think it tastes better after
some dirty, nasty, stinking NIGGER has wiped his old hands all over
it" (phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)--here he would contort his face and
snuffle scornfully down his nose; and he was bitter in his
denunciation of "rich foods," declaring they had "destroyed more
lives than all the wars and all the armies since the beginning of
time."

As he had grown older he had become more and more convinced of the
healthy purity of "raw foods," and he prepared for himself at home
raw revolting messes of chopped-up carrots, onions, turnips, even
raw potatoes, which he devoured at table, smacking his lips with an
air of keen relish, and declaring to his wife: "You may poison
YOURSELF on your old roasts and oysters and turkeys if you please:
you wouldn't catch ME eating that stuff.  No, sir!  Not on your
life!  I think too much of my stomach!"  But his use of the pronoun
"you" was here universal rather than particular, because if that
lady's longevity had depended on her abstinence from "roasts and
oysters and turkeys" there was no reason why she should not have
lived for ever.

Or again, if it were a matter of clothing, a matter of fencing in
his bones and tallows against the frozen nail of Boston winter, he
would howl derisively:  "An overcoat!  Not on your life!  I
wouldn't give two cents for all the old overcoats in the world!
The only thing they're good for is to gather up germs and give you
colds and pneumonia.  I haven't worn an overcoat in thirty years,
and I've never had the VESTIGE--no! not the SEMBLANCE--of a cold
during all that time!"--an assertion that was not strictly
accurate, since he always complained bitterly of at least two or
three during the course of a single winter, declaring at those
times that no more hateful, treacherous, damnable climate than that
of Boston had ever been known.

Similarly, if it were a question of laundries he would scornfully
declare that he would not send "HIS shirts and collars to let some
dirty old Chinaman spit and HOCK upon them--YES!" he would
gleefully howl, as some new abomination of nastiness suggested
itself to his teeming brain--"YES! and iron it IN, too, so you can
walk around done up in old Chinaman's spit!"--(Phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-
phuh!)--here he would grimace, contort his rubbery lip, and laugh
down his nose in forced snarls of gratification and triumph.

This was the old man who, even now, as his nephew sped to meet him,
stood in his dusty little office clutching his raw and bony hands
across his waist.

In spite of the bewildering elaboration of his uncle's direction,
the boy found his offices without much trouble.  He went in and a
moment later, his hand was being vigorously pumped by his uncle's
great stiff paw, and he heard that instant howling voice of
welcome--the voice of a prophet calling from the mountain-tops--
coming to him without preliminary or introduction, as he had heard
it last eight years before.

"Oh, hello, hello, hello. . . .  How are you, how are you, how are
you? . . .  Say!" his uncle turned abruptly and in a high howling
tone addressed several people who were staring at the young man
curiously, "I want you all to meet my sister's youngest son--my
nephew, Mr. Eugene Gant . . . and say!" he bawled again, but in
remoter tone, in a strangely confiding and insinuating tone--"would
you know he was a Pentland by the look of him? . . .  Can you see
the family resemblance?"  He smacked his rubbery lips together with
an air of relish, and suddenly threw his great gaunt arms up and
let them fall with an air of ecstatic jubilation, squinted his
small sharp eyes together, contorted his rubbery lips in their
amazing and grotesque grimace, and stamping ecstatically at the
floor with one long stringy leg, taking random ecstatic kicks at
any object that was within reach, he began to snuffle with his
strange forced laughter, and howled deliriously, "Oh, MY, yes! . . .
The thing is evident. . . .  He is a Pentland beyond the shadow
of a vestige of a doubt! . . .  Oh, by all means, by all means, by
all means!" and he went on snuffling, stamping, howling, and
kicking at random objects in this way until the strange seizure of
his mirth had somewhat subsided.  Then, more quietly, he introduced
his nephew to his associates in the curious business of which he
was a partner.

And it was in this way that the boy first met the people in his
uncle's office--an office and people who were, during the years
that followed, and in the course of hundreds of visits, to become a
part of the fabric of his life--so hauntingly real, so strangely
familiar that in the years that followed he could forget none of
them, remember everything just as it was.

These offices, which he saw for the first time that day, were
composed of two rooms, one in front and one behind, L-shaped, and
set in the elbow of the building, so that one might look out at the
two projecting wings of the building and see lighted layers of
offices, in which the actors of a dozen enterprises "took"
dictation, clattered at typewriters, walked back and forth
importantly, talked into telephones or, what they did with amazing
frequency, folded their palms behind their skulls, placed their
feet restfully on the nearest solid object, and gazed for long
periods dreamily and tenderly at the ceilings.

Through the broad and usually very dirty panes of the window in the
front office one could catch a glimpse of Faneuil Hall and the
magnificent and exultant activity of the markets.

These dingy offices, however, from which a corner of this rich
movement might be seen and felt, were merely the unlovely
counterpart of millions of others throughout the country and, in
the telling phrase of Baedeker, offered "little that need detain
the tourist": a few chairs, two scarred roll-top desks, a typist's
table, a battered safe with a pile of thumb-worn ledgers on top of
it, a set of green filing cases, an enormous green, greasy water-
jar always half filled with a rusty liquid that no one drank, and
two spittoons, put there because Brill was a man who chewed and
spat widely in all directions--this, save for placards, each
bearing several photographs of houses with their prices written
below them--8 rooms, Dorchester, $6500; 5 rooms and garage,
Melrose, $4500, etc.--completed the furniture of the room, and the
second room, save for the disposition of objects, was similarly
adorned.

Such, then, was the scene in which the old man and his nephew met
again after a separation of eight years.



X


The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded,
ignorant of all defence in a tumultuous world.  The shell of
custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from
the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud.
He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him;
he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as
Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never
imagined the number of people that were in it.  And like most
people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of
occasional companionship, for ever tender and for ever true, which
might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a
sword.

There was, of course, among the members of the play-writing class
an energetic and calculated sociability.  The supposed advantages
of discussion with one another, the interplay of wit, and so on,
above all what was called "the exchange of ideas," but what most
often was merely the exchange of other people's ideas,--all these
were mentioned often; they were held in the highest esteem as one
of the chief benefits to be derived from the course.

Manifestly, one could write anywhere.  But where else could one
write with around one the constant stimulus of other people who
also wrote?  Where could one learn one's faults so well as before a
critical and serious congress of artists?  They were content with
it--they got what they wanted.  But the lack of warmth, the absence
of inner radial heat which, not being fundamental in the structure
of their lives, had never been wanted, filled him with horror and
impotent fury.

The critical sense had stirred in him hardly at all, the idea of
questioning authority and position had not occurred to him.

He was facing one of the oldest--what, for the creative mind, must
be one of the most painful--problems of the spirit--the search for
a standard of taste.  He had, at seventeen, as a sophomore,
triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert
Browning.  It had never occurred to him that there was a single
authoritatively beautiful thing in the world that might not be
agreed on, by a community of all the enlightened spirits of the
universe, as beautiful.  EVERYONE, of course, KNEW that King Lear
was one of the greatest plays that had ever been written.  Only, he
was beginning to find everyone didn't.

And now for the first time he began to worry about being "modern."
He had the great fear young people have that they will not be a
part of the most advanced literary and artistic movements of the
time.  Several of the young men he knew had contributed stories,
poems, and criticisms to little reviews, published by and for
small groups of literary adepts.  They disposed of most of the
established figures with a few well-chosen words of contempt, and
they replaced these figures with obscure names of their own who,
they assured him, were the important people of the future.

For the first time, he heard the word "Mid-Victorian" applied as a
term of opprobrium.  What its implications were he had no idea.
Stevenson, too, to him hardly more than a writer of books for boys,
books that he had read as a child with interest and delight, was a
symbol of some vague but monstrously pernicious influence.

But he discovered at once that to voice any of these questionings
was to brand oneself in the esteem of the group; intuitively he saw
that their jargon formed a pattern by which they might be placed
and recognized; that, to young men most of all, to be placed in
a previous discarded pattern was unendurable disgrace.  It
represented to them the mark of intellectual development, just as
in a sophomore's philosophy the belief that God is an old man with
a long beard brings ridicule and odium upon the believer but the
belief that God is an ocean without limit, or an all-pervasive and
inclusive substance, or some other equally naïve and extraordinary
idea, is regarded as a certain sign of bold enlightenment.  Thus it
often happens, when one thinks he has extended the limits of his
life, broken the bonds, and liberated himself in the wider ether,
he has done no more than to exchange a new superstition for an old
one, to forsake a beautiful myth for an ugly one.

The young men in Professor Hatcher's class were sorry for many
things and many people.

"Barrie?" began Mr. Scoville, an elegant and wealthy young dawdler
from Philadelphia, who, by his own confession, had spent most of
his life in France, "Barrie?" he continued regretfully, in answer
to a question.  For a moment, he drew deeply on his cigarette, then
raised sad, languid eyes.  "I'm sorry," he said gently, with a
slight regretful movement of his head--"I can't read him.  I've
tried it--but it simply can't be done."  They laughed, greatly
pleased.

"But it is a pity, you know, a GREAT pity," Francis Starwick
remarked languidly, using effectively his trick of giving a tired
emphasis to certain words which conveyed a kind of sad finality, a
weary earnestness to what he said.  He turned to go.

"But--but--but--how--how--how very interesting!  Why IS it, Frank?"
Hugh Dodd demanded with his earnest stammering eagerness.  He was
profoundly respectful of Starwick's critical ability.

"Why is what?" said Starwick in his curiously mannered voice, his
air of languid weariness.

"Why is it a great pity about Barrie?" knitting his bushy brows
together, and scowling with an air of intense concentration over
his words as he spoke.  "Because," said the appraiser of Values, as
he prepared to depart, arranging with feminine luxuriousness the
voluptuous folds of his blue silk scarf, "the man really had
something one time.  He really did.  Something strange and
haunting--the genius of the Celt."  Swinging his cane slowly,
acutely and painfully conscious that he was being watched, with the
agonizing stiffness that was at the bottom of his character, he
strolled off across the Yard, stark and lovely with the harsh white
snow and wintry branches of bleak winter.

"You know--you know--you know--that's very interesting," said Dodd,
intent upon his words.  "I'd--I'd--I'd never thought of it in JUST
that way."

"Barrie," drawled Wood, the maker of epigrams, "is a stick of
taffy, floating upon a sea of molasses."

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.

He did not notice any of this, it is not likely he would have cared
if he had, for, like most eccentrics, his thoughts were usually
buried in a world of his own creating to whose every fact and
feeling and motion he was the central actor.  Again, as much as any
of his extraordinary family, he had carried with him throughout his
life the sense that he was "fated"--a sense that was strong in all
of them--that his life was pivotal to all the actions of
providence, that, in short, the time might be out of joint, but not
himself.  Nothing but death could shake his powerful egotism, and
his occasional storms of fury, his railing at the world, his
tirades of invective at some motorist, pedestrian, or labourer
occurred only when he discovered that these people were moving in a
world at cross-purposes to his own and that some action of theirs
had disturbed or shaken the logic of his universe.

It was curious that, of all the people in the office, the person
who had the deepest understanding and respect for him was John T.
Brill.  Mr. Brill was a huge creature of elemental desires and
passions: a river of profanity rushed from his mouth with the
relentless sweep and surge of the Mississippi, he could no more
have spoken without swearing than a whale could swim in a frog-
pond--he swore at everything, at everyone, and with every breath,
casually and unconsciously, and yet when he addressed Bascom his
oath was always impersonal and tinged subtly by a feeling of
respect.

Thus, he would speak to Uncle Bascom somewhat in this fashion:
"God-damn it, Pentland, did you ever look up the title for that
stuff in Maiden?  That feller's been callin' up every day to find
out about it."

"Which fellow?" Bascom asked precisely.  "The man from Cambridge?'"

"No," said Mr. Brill, "not him, the other son of a bitch, the
Dorchester feller.  How the hell am I goin' to tell him anything if
there's no goddamn title for the stuff?"

Profane and typical as this speech was, it was always shaded nicely
with impersonality toward Bascom--conscious to the full of the
distinction between "damn IT" and "damn YOU."  Toward his other
colleagues, however, Mr. Brill was neither nice nor delicate.

Brill was an enormous man physically: he was six feet two or three
inches tall, and his weight was close to three hundred pounds.  He
was totally bald, his skull was a gleaming satiny pink; above his
great red moon of face, with its ponderous and pendulous jowls, it
looked almost egg-shaped.  And in the heavy, deliberate, and
powerful timbre of his voice there was always lurking this burble
of exultant, gargantuan obscenity: it was so obviously part of the
structure of his life, so obviously his only and natural means of
expression, that it was impossible to condemn him.  His epithet was
limited and repetitive--but so, too, was Homer's, and, like Homer,
he saw no reason for changing what had already been used and found
good.

He was a lewd and innocent man.  Like Bascom, by comparison with
these other people, he seemed to belong to some earlier, richer and
grander period of the earth, and perhaps this was why there was
more actual kinship and understanding between them than between any
of the other members of the office.  These other people--Friedman,
Brill's daughter Muriel, and Ward--belonged to the myriads of the
earth, to those numberless swarms that with ceaseless pullulation
fill the streets of life with their grey immemorable tides.  But
Brill and Bascom were men in a thousand, a million: if one had seen
them in a crowd he would have looked after them, if one had talked
with them, he could never have forgotten them.

It is rare in modern life that one sees a man who can express
himself with such complete and abundant certainty as Brill did--
completely and without doubt or confusion.  It is true that his
life expressed itself chiefly by three gestures--by profanity, by
his great roar of full-throated, earth-shaking laughter, and by
flatulence, an explosive comment on existence which usually
concluded and summarized his other means of expression.

Although the other people in the office laughed heartily at this
soaring rhetoric of obscenity, it sometimes proved too much for
Uncle Bascom.  When this happened he would either leave the office
immediately or stump furiously into his own little cupboard that
seemed silted over with the dust of twenty years, slamming the door
behind him so violently that the thin partition rattled, and then
stand for a moment pursing his lips, and convolving his features
with incredible speed, and shaking his gaunt head slightly from
side to side, until at length he whispered in a tone of passionate
disgust and revulsion:  "Oh, BAD!  BAD!  BAD!  By every GESTURE!
by every ACT! he betrays the BOOR, the VULGARIAN!  Can you
imagine"--here his voice sank even lower in its scale of passionate
whispering repugnance--"can you for one MOMENT imagine a man of
BREEDING and the social graces breaking wind publicly?--And before
his own daughter.  Oh, BAD!  BAD!  BAD!  BAD!"

And in the silence, while Uncle Bascom stood shaking his head in
its movement of downcast and convulsive distaste, they could hear,
suddenly, the ripping noise Brill would make as his pungent answer
to all the world--and his great bellow of throaty laughter.  Later
on, if Bascom had to consult him on any business, he would open his
door abruptly, walk out into Brill's office clutching his hands
together at his waist, and with disgust still carved upon his face,
say:  "Well, sir. . . .  If you have concluded your morning
devotions," here his voice sank to a bitter snarl, "we might get
down to the transaction of some of the day's business."

"Why, Reverend!" Brill roared.  "You ain't heard nothin' yet!"

And the great choking bellow of laughter would burst from him
again, rattling the windows with its power as he hurled his great
weight backward, with complete abandon, in his creaking swivel-
chair.



It was obvious that he liked to tease the old man, and never lost
an opportunity of doing so: for example, if anyone gave Uncle
Bascom a cigar, Brill would exclaim with an air of innocent
surprise:  "Why, REVEREND, you're not going to smoke that, are
you?"

"Why, certainly," Bascom said tartly.  "That is the purpose for
which it was intended, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," said Brill, "but you know how they make 'em, don't you?
I didn't think you'd touch it after some dirty old Spaniard has
wiped his old hands all over it--yes! an' SPIT upon it, too,
because that's what they do!"

"Ah!" Bascom snarled contemptuously.  "You don't know what you're
talking about!  There is nothing cleaner than good tobacco!  Finest
and healthiest plant on earth!  No question about it!"

"Well," said Brill, "I've learned something.  We live and learn,
Reverend.  You've taught me somethin' worth knowing: when it's free
it's clean; when you have to pay for it it stinks like hell!"  He
pondered heavily for a moment, and the burble began to play about
in his great throat:  "And by God!" he concluded, "tobacco's not
the only thing that applies to, either.  Not by a damned sight!"

Again, one morning when his nephew was there, Bascom cleared his
throat portentously, coughed, and suddenly said to him:  "Now,
Eugene, my boy, you are going to have lunch with me today.  There's
no question about it whatever!"  This was astonishing news, for he
had never before invited the youth to eat with him when he came to
his office, although the boy had been to his house for dinner many
times.  "Yes, sir!" said Bascom, with an air of conviction and
satisfaction.  "I have thought it all over.  There is a splendid
establishment in the basement of this building--small, of course,
but everything clean and of the highest order!  It is conducted by
an Irish gentleman whom I have known for many years.  Finest people
on earth: no question about it!"

It was an astonishing and momentous occasion; the boy knew how
infrequently he went to a restaurant.  Having made his decision,
Uncle Bascom immediately stepped into the outer offices and began
to discuss and publish his intentions with the greatest
satisfaction.

"Yes, sir!" he said in a precise tone, smacking his lips in a
ruminant fashion, and addressing himself to everyone rather than to
a particular person.  "We shall go in and take our seats in the
regular way, and I shall then give appropriate instructions to one
of the attendants--" again he smacked his lips as he pronounced
this word with such an indescribable air of relish that immediately
the boy's mouth began to water, and the delicious pangs of appetite
and hunger began to gnaw his vitals--"I shall say:  'This is my
nephew, a young man now enrolled at Harvard Un-i-ver-sit-tee!'"--
here Bascom smacked his lips together again with that same
maddening air of relish--"'Yes, sir' (I shall say!)--'You are to
fulfil his order without STINT, without DELAY, and without
QUESTION, and to the UTMOST of your ability'"--he howled, wagging
his great bony forefinger through the air--"As for myself," he
declared abruptly, "I shall take nothing.  Good Lord, no!" he said
with a scornful laugh.  "I wouldn't touch a thing they had to
offer.  You couldn't pay me to: I shouldn't sleep for a month if I
did.  But you, my boy!" he howled, turning suddenly upon his
nephew, "--are to have everything your heart desires!  Everything,
everything, everything!"  He made an inclusive gesture with his
long arms; then closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and began to
snuffle with laughter.

Mr. Brill had listened to all this with his great-jowled face
slack-jawed and agape with astonishment.  Now, he said heavily:
"He's goin' to have everything, is he?  Where are you goin' to take
him to git it?"

"Why, sir!" Bascom said in an annoyed tone, "I have told you all
along--we are going to the modest but excellent establishment in
the basement of this very building."

"Why, Reverend," Brill said in a protesting tone, "you ain't goin'
to take your nephew THERE, are you?  I thought you said you was
goin' to git somethin' to EAT."

"I had supposed," Bascom said with bitter sarcasm, "that one went
there for that purpose.  I had not supposed that one went there to
get shaved."

"Well," said Brill, "if you go there you'll git shaved, all right.
You'll not only git SHAVED, you'll git SKINNED alive.  But you
won't git anything to eat."  And he hurled himself back again,
roaring with laughter.

"Pay no attention to him!" Bascom said to the boy in a tone of
bitter repugnance.  "I have long known that his low and vulgar mind
attempts to make a joke of everything, even the most sacred
matters.  I assure you, my boy, the place is excellent in every
way:--do you suppose," he said now, addressing Brill and all the
others, with a howl of fury--"do you suppose, if it were not, that
I should for a single moment DREAM of taking him there?  Do you
suppose that I would for an instant CONTEMPLATE taking my own
nephew, my sister's son, to any place in which I did not repose the
fullest confidence?  Not on your life!" he howled.  "Not on your
life!"

And they departed, followed by Brill's great bellow, and a farewell
invitation which he shouted after the young man.  "Don't worry,
son!  When you git through with that cockroach stew, come back an'
I'll take you out to lunch with ME!"



Although Brill delighted in teasing and baiting his partner in this
fashion, there was, at the bottom of his heart, a feeling of deep
humility, of genuine respect and admiration for him: he respected
Uncle Bascom's intelligence, he was secretly and profoundly
impressed by the fact that the old man had been a minister of the
gospel and had preached in many churches.

Moreover, in the respect and awe with which Brill greeted these
evidences of Bascom's superior education, in the eagerness he
showed when he boasted to visitors, as he often did, of his
partner's learning, there was a quality of pride that was
profoundly touching and paternal: it was as if Bascom had been his
son and as if he wanted at every opportunity to display his talents
to the world.  And this, in fact, was exactly what he did want to
do.  Much to Bascom's annoyance, Brill was constantly speaking of
his erudition to strangers who had come into the office for the
first time, and constantly urging him to perform for them, to "say
some of them big words, Reverend."  And even when the old man
answered him, as he frequently did, in terms of scorn, anger, and
contempt, Brill was completely satisfied if Uncle Bascom would only
use a few of the "big words" in doing it.  Thus, one day, when one
of his boyhood friends, a New Hampshire man whom he had not seen in
thirty-five years, had come in to renew their acquaintance Brill,
in describing the accomplishments of his partner, said with an air
of solemn affirmation:  "Why, hell yes, Jim!  It'd take a college
perfesser to know what the Reverend is talkin' about half the time!
No ordinary son of a bitch is able to understand him!  So help me
God, it's true!" he swore solemnly, as Jim looked incredulous.
"The Reverend knows words the average man ain't never heard.  He
knows words that ain't even in the dictionary.  Yes, sir!--an' uses
'em, too--all the time!" he concluded triumphantly.

"Why, my dear sir!" Bascom answered in a tone of exacerbated
contempt, "What on earth are you talking about?  Such a man as you
describe would be a monstrosity, a heinous perversion of natural
law!  A man so wise that no one could understand him:--so literate
that he could not communicate with his fellow-creatures:--so
erudite that he led the inarticulate and incoherent life of a beast
or a savage!"--here Uncle Bascom squinted his eyes tightly shut,
and laughed sneeringly down his nose:  "Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!
phuh!--Why, you con-sum-mate fool!" he sneered, "I have long known
that your ignorance was bottomless--but I had never hoped to see it
equalled--Nay, surpassed!" he howled, "by your asininity."

"There you are!" said Brill exultantly to his visitor, "What did I
tell you?  There's one of them words, Jim: 'asserninity,' why, damn
it, the Reverend's the only one who knows what that word means--you
won't even find it in the dictionary!"

"Not find it in the dictionary!" Bascom yelled.  "Almighty God,
come down and give this ass a tongue as Thou didst once before in
Balaam's time!"

Again, Brill was seated at his desk one day engaged with a client
in those intimate, cautious, and confidential preliminaries that
mark the consummation of a "deal" in real estate.  On this occasion
the prospective buyer was an Italian: the man sat awkwardly and
nervously in a chair beside Brill's desk while the great man bent
his huge weight ponderously and persuasively toward him.  From time
to time the Italian's voice, sullen, cautious, disparaging,
interrupted Brill's ponderous and coaxing drone.  The Italian sat
stiffly, his thick, clumsy body awkwardly clad in his "good"
clothes of heavy black, his thick, hairy, blunt-nailed hands cupped
nervously upon his knees, his black eyes glittering with suspicion
under his knitted inch of brow.  At length, he shifted nervously,
rubbed his paws tentatively across his knees and then, with a smile
mixed of ingratiation and mistrust, said:  "How mucha you want,
eh?"

"How mucha we want?" Brill repeated vulgarly as the burble began to
play about within his throat.  "Why, how mucha you got? . . .  You
know we'll take every damn thing you got!  It's not how mucha we
want, it's how mucha you got!"  And he hurled himself backward,
bellowing with laughter.  "By God, Reverend," he yelled as Uncle
Bascom entered, "ain't that right?  It's not how mucha we want,
it's how mucha you got! 'od damn!  We ought to take that as our
motter.  I've got a good mind to git it printed on our letterheads.
What do you think, Reverend?"

"Hey?" howled Uncle Bascom absently, as he prepared to enter his
own office.

"I say we ought to use it for our motter."

"Your what?" said Uncle Bascom scornfully, pausing as if he did not
understand.

"Our motter," Brill said.

"Not your MOTTER," Bascom howled derisively.  "The word is NOT
motter," he said contemptuously.  "Nobody of any refinement would
say MOTTER.  MOTTER is NOT correct!" he howled finally.  "Only an
ig-no-RAM-us would say MOTTER.  No!" he yelled with final
conclusiveness.  "That is NOT the way to pronounce it!  That is ab-
so-lute-ly and em-phat-ic-ally NOT the way to pronounce it!"

"All right, then, Reverend," said Brill, submissively.  "You're the
doctor.  What is the word?"

"The word is MOTTO," Uncle Bascom snarled.  "Of course!  Any fool
knows that!"

"Why, hell," Mr. Brill protested in a hurt tone.  "That's what I
said, ain't it?"

"No-o!" Uncle Bascom howled derisively.  "No-o!  By no means, by no
means, by no means!  You said MOTTER.  The word is NOT motter.  The
word is motto: m-o-t-t-o!  M-O-T-T-O does NOT spell motter," he
remarked with vicious decision.

"What does it spell?" said Mr. Brill.

"It spells MOTTO," Uncle Bascom howled.  "It HAS always spelled
motto!  It WILL always spell motto!  As it was in the beginning, is
now, and ever shall be: A-a-men!" he howled huskily in his most
evangelical fashion.  Then, immensely pleased at his wit, he closed
his eyes, stamped at the floor, and snarled and snuffled down his
nose with laughter.

"Well, anyway," said Brill, "no matter how you spell it, it's not
how mucha we want, it's how mucha you got!  That's the way we feel
about it!"

And this, in fact, without concealment, without pretence, without
evasion, was just how Brill DID feel about it.  He wanted
everything that was his and, in addition, he wanted as much as he
could get.  And this rapacity, this brutal and unadorned gluttony,
so far from making men wary of him, attracted them to him, inspired
them with unshakable confidence in his integrity, his business
honesty.  Perhaps the reason for this was that concealment did not
abide in the man: he published his intentions to the world with an
oath and a roar of laughter--and the world, having seen and judged,
went away with the confidence of this Italian--that Brill was "one
fine-a man!"  Even Bascom, who had so often turned upon his
colleague the weapons of scorn, contempt, and mockery, had a
curious respect for him, an acrid sunken affection: often, when the
old man and his nephew were alone, he would recall something Brill
had said and his powerful and fluent features would suddenly be
contorted in that familiar grimace, as he laughed his curious laugh
which was forced out, with a deliberate and painful effort, through
his powerful nose and his lips, barred with a few large teeth.
"Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! . . .  Of course!" he said, with a
nasal rumination, as he stared over the apex of his great bony
hands, clasped in meditation--"of course, he is just a poor
ignorant fellow!  I don't suppose--no, sir, I really do not suppose
that Brill ever went to school over six months in his life!--Say!"
Bascom paused suddenly, turned abruptly with his strange fixed
grin, and fastened his sharp old eyes keenly on the boy: in this
sudden and abrupt change, this transference of his vision from his
own secret and personal world, in which his thought and feeling
were sunken, and which seemed to be so far away from the actual
world about him, there was something impressive and disconcerting.
His eyes were grey, sharp, and old, and one eyelid had a heavy
droop or ptosis which, although it did not obscure his vision, gave
his expression at times a sinister glint, a malevolent humour.
"--Say!" here his voice sank to a deliberate and confiding whisper,
"(Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!)  Say--a man who would--he told me--
Oh, vile! vile! vile! my boy!" his uncle whispered, shutting his
eyes in a kind of shuddering ecstasy as if at the memory of things
too gloriously obscene to be repeated.  "Can you IMAGINE, can you
even DREAM of such a state of affairs if he had possessed an atom,
a SCINTILLA of delicacy and good breeding!  Yes, sir!" he said with
decision.  "I suppose there's no doubt about it!  His beginnings
were very lowly, very poor and humble indeed! . . .  Not that that
is in any sense to his discredit!" Uncle Bascom said hastily, as if
it had occurred to him that his words might bear some taint of
snobbishness.  "Oh, by no means, by no means, by no means!" he sang
out, with a sweeping upward gesture of his long arm, as if he were
clearing the air of wisps of smoke.  "Some of our finest men--some
of the nation's LEADERS, have come from just such surroundings as
those.  Beyond a doubt!  Beyond a doubt!  There's no question about
it whatever!  Say!"--here he turned suddenly upon the boy again
with the ptotic and sinister intelligence of his eye.  "Was LINCOLN
an aristocrat?  Was he the issue of wealthy parents?  Was he
brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth?  Was our OWN former
governor, the Vice-President of the United States today, reared in
the lap of luxury!  Not on your life!" howled Uncle Bascom.  "He
came from frugal and thrifty Vermont farming stock, he has never
deviated a JOT from his early training, he remains today what he
has always been--one of the simplest of men!  Finest people on
earth, no question about it whatever!"

Again, he meditated gravely with lost stare across the apex of his
great joined hands, and the boy noticed again, as he had noticed so
often, the great dignity of his head in thought--a head that was
high-browed, lean and lonely, a head that not only in its cast of
thought but even in its physical contour, and in its profound and
lonely earnestness, bore an astonishing resemblance to that of
Emerson--it was, at times like these, as grand a head as the young
man had ever seen, and on it was legible the history of man's
loneliness, his dignity, his grandeur and despair.

"Yes, sir!" said Bascom, in a moment.  "He is, of course, a vulgar
fellow and some of the things he says at times are Oh, vile! vile!
vile!" cried Bascom, closing his eyes and laughing, "Oh, vile! MOST
vile! . . . but (phuh! phuh! phuh!) you can't help laughing at the
fellow at times because he is so. . . .  Oh, I could tell you
things, my boy! . . .  Oh, VILE! VILE!" he cried, shaking his head
downwards.  "What coarseness! . . .  What in-VECT-ive!" he
whispered, in a kind of ecstasy.



XII


Eugene was now a member of Professor Hatcher's celebrated course
for dramatists, and although he had come into this work by chance,
and would in the end discover that his heart and interest were not
in it, it had now become for him the rock to which his life was
anchored, the rudder of his destiny, the sole and all-sufficient
reason for his being here.  It now seemed to him that there was
only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this
work was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this
work he had better die, since any other life than the life of the
playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.

Accordingly every interest and energy of his life was now fastened
on this work with a madman's passion; he thought, felt, breathed,
ate, drank, slept, and lived completely in terms of plays.  He
learned all the jargon of the art-playwriting cult, read all the
books, saw all the shows, talked all the talk, and even became a
kind of gigantic eavesdropper upon life, prowling about the streets
with his ears constantly straining to hear all the words and
phrases of the passing crowd, as if he might hear something that
would be rare and priceless in a play for Professor Hatcher's
celebrated course.

Professor James Graves Hatcher was a man whose professional career
had been made difficult by two circumstances: all the professors
thought he looked like an actor and all the actors thought he
looked like a professor.  In reality, he was wholly neither one,
but in character and temper, as well as in appearance, he possessed
some of the attributes of both.

His appearance was imposing: a well-set-up figure of a man of
fifty-five, somewhat above the middle height, strongly built and
verging toward stockiness, with an air of vital driving energy that
was always filled with authority and a sense of sure purpose,
and that never degenerated into the cheap exuberance of the
professional hustler.  His voice, like his manner, was quiet,
distinguished, and controlled, but always touched with the
suggestions of great latent power, with reserves of passion,
eloquence, and resonant sonority.

His head was really splendid; he had a strong but kindly-looking
face touched keenly, quietly by humour; his eyes, beneath his
glasses, were also keen, observant, sharply humorous; his mouth was
wide and humorous but somewhat too tight, thin and spinsterly for a
man's; his nose was large and strong; his forehead shapely and
able-looking, and he had neat wings of hair cut short and sparse
and lying flat against the skull.

He wore eye-glasses of the pince-nez variety, and they dangled in a
fashionable manner from a black silk cord: it was better than going
to a show to see him put them on, his manner was so urbane, casual,
and distinguished when he did so.  His humour, although suave, was
also quick and rich and gave an engaging warmth and humanity to a
personality that sometimes needed them.  Even in his display of
humour, however, he never lost his urbane distinguished manner--for
example, when someone told him that one of his women students had
referred to another woman in the course, an immensely tall angular
creature who dressed in rusty brown right up to the ears, as "the
queen of the angleworms," Professor Hatcher shook all over with
sudden laughter, removed his glasses with a distinguished movement,
and then in a rich but controlled voice remarked:

"Ah, she has a very pretty wit.  A very pretty wit indeed!"

Thus, even in his agreeable uses of the rich, subtle and immensely
pleasant humour with which he had been gifted, Professor Hatcher
was something of an actor.  He was one of those rare people who
really "chuckle," and although there was no doubting the
spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably
true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.

The Hatcherian chuckle was just exactly what the word connotes: a
movement of spontaneous mirth that shook his stocky shoulders and
strong well-set torso with a sudden hearty tremor.  And although he
could utter rich and sonorous throat-sounds indicative of hearty
mirth while this chuckling process was going on, an even more
characteristic form was completely soundless, the tight lips firmly
compressed, the edges turned up with the convulsive inclination to
strong laughter, the fine distinguished head thrown back, while all
the rest of him, throat, shoulders, torso, belly, arms--the whole
man--shook in the silent tremors of the chuckle.

It could also be said with equal truth that Professor Hatcher was
one of the few men whose eyes could really "twinkle," and it is
likewise true that he probably fancied himself as somewhat of a
twinkler.

Perhaps one fact that made him suspect to professors was his air of
a distinguished and mature, but also a very worldly, urbanity.  His
manner, even in the class-room, was never that of the scholar or
the academician, but always that of the cultured man of the world,
secure in his authority, touched by fine humour and fine
understanding, able, knowing and assured.  And one reason that he
so impressed his students may have been that he made some of the
most painful and difficult labours in the world seem delightfully
easy.

For example, if there were to be a performance by a French club at
the university of a French play, produced in the language of its
birth, Professor Hatcher might speak to his class in his assured,
yet casual and urbanely certain tones, as follows:

"I understand Le Cercle Français is putting on De Musset's Il faut
qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée on Thursday night.  If you are
doing nothing else, I think it might be very well worth your while
to brush up on your French a bit and look in on it.  It is, of
course, a trifle and perhaps without great significance in the
development of the modern theatre, but it is De Musset in rather
good form and De Musset in good form is charming.  So it might
repay you to have a look at it."

What was there in these simple words that could so impress and
captivate these young people?  The tone was quiet, pleasant and
urbanely casual, the manner easy yet authoritative; what he said
about the play was really true.  But what was so seductive about it
was the flattering unction which he laid so casually to their young
souls--the easy off-hand suggestion that people "brush up on their
French a bit" when most of them had no French at all to brush up
on, that if they had "nothing else to do," they might "look in"
upon De Musset's "charming trifle," the easy familiarity with De
Musset's name and the casual assurance of the statement that it was
"De Musset in rather good form."

It was impossible for a group of young men, eager for sophistication
and emulous of these airs of urbane worldliness, not to be impressed
by them.  As Professor Hatcher talked they too became easy,
casual and urbane in their manners, they had a feeling of being
delightfully at ease in the world and sure of themselves, the words
"brush up on your French a bit" gave them a beautifully comfortable
feeling that they would really be able to perform this remarkable
accomplishment in an hour or two of elegant light labour.  And when
he spoke of the play as being "De Musset in rather good form" they
nodded slightly with little understanding smiles as if De Musset
and his various states of form were matters of the most familiar
knowledge to them.

What was the effect, then, of this and other such-like talk upon
these young men eager for fame and athirst for glory in the great
art-world of the city and the theatre?  It gave them, first of all,
a delightful sense of being in the know about rare and precious
things, of rubbing shoulders with great actors and actresses and
other celebrated people, of being expert in all the subtlest
processes of the theatre, of being travelled, urbane, sophisticated
and assured.

When Professor Hatcher casually suggested that they might "brush up
on their French a bit" before going to a performance of a French
play, they felt like cosmopolites who were at home in all the great
cities of the world.  True, "their French had grown a little
rusty"--it had been some time since they were last in Paris--a
member of the French Academy, no doubt, might detect a few slight
flaws in their pronunciation--but all that would arrange itself by
a little light and easy "polishing"--"tout s'arrange, hein?" as we
say upon the boulevards.

Again, Professor Hatcher's pleasant and often delightfully gay
anecdotes about the famous persons he had known and with whom he
was on such familiar terms--told always casually, apropos of some
topic of discussion, and never dragged in or laboured by pretence--
"The last time I was in London, Pinero and I were having lunch
together one day at the Savoy"--or "I was spending the week-end
with Henry Arthur Jones"--or "It's very curious you should mention
that.  You know, Barrie was saying the same thing to me the last
time I saw him"--or--"Apropos of this discussion, I have a letter
here from 'Gene O'Neill which bears on that very point.  Perhaps
you would be interested in knowing what he has to say about it."--
All this, of course, was cakes and ale to these young people--it
made them feel wonderfully near and intimate with all these
celebrated people, and with the enchanted world of art and of the
theatre in which they wished to cut a figure.

It gave them also a feeling of amused superiority at the posturings
and antics of what, with a slight intonation of disdain, they
called "the commercial producers"--the Shuberts, Belascos, and
others of this kind.  Thus, when Professor Hatcher told them how he
had done some pioneer service in Boston for the Russian Players and
had received a telegram from the Jewish producer in New York who
was managing them, to this effect:  "You are the real wonder boy"--
they were instantly able to respond to the sudden Hatcherian
chuckle with quiet laughter of their own.

Again, he once came back from New York with an amusing story of a
visit he had paid to the famous producer, David Belasco.  And he
described drolly how he had followed a barefoot, snaky-looking
female, clad in a long batik gown, through seven Gothic chambers
mystical with chimes and incense.  And finally he told how he had
been ushered into the presence of the great ecclesiastic who sat at
the end of a cathedral-like room beneath windows of church glass,
and how he was preceded all the time by Snaky Susie who swept low
in obeisance as she approached, and said in a silky voice--"One is
here to see you, Mahster," and how she had been dismissed with
Christ-like tone and movement of the hand--"Rise, Rose, and leave
us now."  Professor Hatcher told this story with a quiet drollery
that was irresistible, and was rewarded all along by their shouts
of astounded laughter, and finally by their smiling and astonished
faces, lifting disbelieving eyebrows at each other, saying, "Simply
incredible!  It doesn't seem possible! . . .  MARVELLOUS!"

Finally, when Professor Hatcher talked to them of how a Russian
actress used her hands, of rhythm, tempo, pause, and timing, of
lighting, setting, and design, he gave them a language they could
use with a feeling of authority and knowledge, even when authority
and knowledge were lacking to them.  It was a dangerous and often
very trivial language--a kind of jargonese of art that was coming
into use in the world of those days, and that seemed to be
coincident with another jargonese--that of science--"psychology,"
as they called it--which was also coming into its brief hour of
idolatry at about the same period, and which bandied about its talk
of "complexes," "fixations," "repressions," "inhibitions," and the
like, upon the lips of any empty-headed little fool that came
along.

But although this jargon was perhaps innocuous enough when rattled
off the rattling tongue of some ignorant boy or rattle-pated girl,
it could be a very dangerous thing when uttered seriously by men
who were trying to achieve the best, the rarest, and the highest
life on earth--the life which may be won only by bitter toil and
knowledge and stern living--the life of the artist.

And the great danger of this glib and easy jargon of the arts was
this: that instead of knowledge, the experience of hard work and
patient living, they were given a formula for knowledge; a language
that sounded very knowing, expert and assured, and yet that knew
nothing, was experienced in nothing, was sure of nothing.  It gave
to people without talent and without sincerity of soul or integrity
of purpose, with nothing, in fact, except a feeble incapacity for
the shock and agony of life, and a desire to escape into a
glamorous and unreal world of make-believe--a justification for
their pitiable and base existence.  It gave to people who had no
power in themselves to create anything of merit or of beauty--
people who were the true Philistines and enemies of art and of the
artist's living spirit--the language to talk with glib knowingness
of things they knew nothing of--to prate of "settings," "tempo,"
"pace," and "rhythm," of "boldly stylized conventions," and the
wonderful way some actress "used her hands."  And in the end, it
led to nothing but falseness and triviality, to the ghosts of
passion, and the spectres of sincerity, to the shoddy appearances
of conviction and belief in people who had no passion and
sincerity, and who were convinced of nothing, believed in nothing,
were just the disloyal apes of fashion and the arts.

"I think you ought to go," says one.  "I really do.  I really think
you might be interested."

"Yes," says number two, in a tone of fine, puzzled, eyebrow-lifting
protest, "but I hear the play is pretty bad.  The reviews were
rather awful--they really were, you know."

"Oh, the play!" the other says, with a slight start of surprise, as
if it never occurred to him that anyone might be interested in the
play--"the play, the play IS rather terrible.  But, my dear fellow,
no one goes to see the PLAY . . . the play is nothing," he
dismisses it with a contemptuous gesture--"It's the SETS!" he
cries--"the SETS are really quite remarkable.  You ought to go, old
boy, just to see the SETS!  They're very good--they really are."

"H'm!" the other says, stroking his chin in an impressed manner.
"Interesting!  In that case, I shall go!"

The SETS!  The SETS!  One should not go to see the play; the only
thing that matters is the sets.  And this is the theatre--the
magic-maker and the world of dreams; and these the men that are to
fashion for it--with their trivial ape's talk about "sets."  Did
anyone ever hear such damned stuff as this since time began?

False, trivial, glib, dishonest, empty, without substance, lacking
faith--is it any wonder that among Professor Hatcher's young men
few birds sang?



XIII


That year the youth was twenty, it had been his first year in New
England, and the winter had seemed very long.  In the man-swarm he
felt alone and lost, a desolate atom in the streets of life.  That
year he went to see his uncle many times.

Sometimes he would find him in his dusty little cubicle, bent over
the intricacy of a legal form, painfully and carefully, with
compressed lips, filling in the blank spaces with his stiff,
angular and laborious hand.  Bascom would speak quietly, without
looking up, as he came in:  "Hello, my boy.  Sit down, won't you?
I'll be with you in a moment."  And for a time the silence would be
broken only by the heavy rumble of Brill's voice outside, by the
minute scratching of his uncle's pen, and by the immense and
murmurous sound of time, which rose above the city, which caught up
in the upper air all of the city's million noises, and yet seemed
remote, essential, imperturbable and everlasting--fixed and
unchanging, no matter what men lived or died.

Again, the boy would find his uncle staring straight before him,
with his great hands folded in a bony arch, his powerful gaunt face
composed in a rapt tranquillity of thought.  At these times he
seemed to have escaped from every particular and degrading thing in
life--from the excess of absurd and eccentric speech and gesture,
from all demeaning parsimonies, from niggling irascibilities, from
everything that contorted his face and spirit away from its
calmness and unity of thought.  His face at such a time might well
have been the mask of thought, the visage of contemplation.
Sometimes he would not speak for several minutes, his mind seemed
to brood upon the lip and edge of time, to be remote from every
dusty moment of the earth.

One day the boy went there and found him thus: after a few moments
he lowered his great hands and, without turning toward his nephew,
sat for some time in an attitude of quiet relaxation.  At length he
said:

"What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late,
with a magical northern suddenness.  It seemed to have burst out of
the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.

Spring came that year like a triumph and like a prophecy--it sang
and shifted like a moth of light before the youth, but he was sure
that it would bring him a glory and fulfilment he had never known.

His hunger and thirst had been immense: he was caught up for the
first time in the midst of the Faustian web--there was no food that
could feed him, no drink that could quench his thirst.  Like an
insatiate and maddened animal he roamed the streets, trying to draw
up mercy from the cobble-stones, solace and wisdom from a million
sights and faces, or he prowled through endless shelves of high-
piled books, tortured by everything he could not see and could not
know, and growing blind, weary, and desperate from what he read and
saw.  He wanted to know all, have all, be all--to be one and many,
to have the whole riddle of this vast and swarming earth as
legible, as tangible in his hand as a coin of minted gold.

Suddenly spring came, and he fell at once exultant certainty and
joy.  Outside his uncle's dirty window he could see the edge of
Faneuil Hall, and hear the swarming and abundant activity of the
markets.  The deep roar of the markets reached them across the
singing and lyrical air, and he drank into his lungs a thousand
proud, potent, and mysterious odours which came to him like the
breath of certainty, like the proof of magic, and like the
revelation that all confusion had been banished--the world that he
longed for won, the word that he sought for spoken, the hunger that
devoured him fed and ended.  And the markets, swarming with
richness, joy, and abundance, thronged below him like a living
evidence of fulfilment.  For it seemed to him that nowhere more
than here was the passionate enigma of New England felt: New
England, with its harsh and stony soil, and its tragic and lonely
beauty; its desolate rocky coasts and its swarming fisheries, the
white, piled, frozen bleakness of its winters with the magnificent
jewellery of stars, the dark firwoods, and the warm little white
houses at which it is impossible to look without thinking of
groaning bins, hung bacon, hard cider, succulent bastings and
love's warm, white and opulent flesh.

There was the rustle of gingham by day and sober glances; then,
under low eaves and starlight, the stir of the satiny thighs in
feather beds, the white small bite and tigerish clasp of secret
women--always the buried heart, the sunken passion, the frozen
heat.  And then, after the long, unendurably hard-locked harshness
of the frozen winter, the coming of spring as now, like a lyrical
cry, like a flicker of rain across a window glass, like the sudden
and delicate noises of a spinet--the coming of spring and ecstasy,
and overnight the thrum of wings, the burst of the tender buds, the
ripple and dance of the roughened water, the light of flowers, the
sudden, fleeting, almost captured, and exultant spring.

And here, within eighty yards of the dusty little room where his
uncle Bascom had his desk, there was living evidence that this
intuition was not false: the secret people, it was evident, did not
subsist alone on codfish and a jugful of baked beans--they ate
meat, and large chunks of it, for all day long, within the market
district, the drivers of big wagons were standing to their chins in
meat, boys dragged great baskets of raw meat along the pavements,
red-faced butchers, aproned with gouts of blood, and wearing the
battered straw hats that butchers wear, toiled through the streets
below with great loads of loin or haunch or rib, and in "chill"
shops with sawdust floors the beeves were hung in frozen regimental
rows.

Right and left, around the central market, the old buildings
stretched down to the harbour and the smell of ships: this was
built-on land; in old days ships were anchored where these cobbles
were, but the warehouses were also old--they had the musty, mellow,
blackened air and smell of the 'seventies, they looked like
Victorian prints, they reeked of ancient ledgers, of "counting-
houses," of proud, moneyed merchants, and the soft-spoked rumble of
victorias.

By day, this district was one snarled web of chaos: a gewirr of
deep-bodied trucks, powerful dappled horses, cursing drivers, of
loading, unloading, and shipping, of dispatch and order, of the
million complicated weavings of life and business.

But if one came here at evening, after the work of the day was
done, if one came here at evening on one of those delicate and
sudden days of spring that New England knows, if one came here as
many a lonely youth had come here in the past, some boy from the
inland immensity of America, some homesick lad from the South, from
the marvellous hills of Old Catawba, he might be pierced again by
the bitter ecstasy of youth, the ecstasy that tears him apart with
a cry that has no tongue, the ecstasy that is proud, lonely, and
exultant, that is fierce with joy and a moment, that the intangible
cannot be touched, the ungraspable cannot be grasped--the imperial
and magnificent minute is gone for ever which, with all its
promises, its million intuitions, he wishes to clothe with the
living substance of beauty.  He wishes to flesh the moment with the
thighs and breast and belly of a wonderful mistress, he wishes to
be great and glorious and triumphant, to distil the ether of this
ecstasy in a liquor, and to drink strong joy for ever; and at the
heart of all this is the bitter knowledge of death--death of the
moment, death of the day, death of one more infrequent spring.

Perhaps the thing that really makes New England wonderful is this
sense of joy, this intuition of brooding and magic fulfilment that
hovers like a delicate presence in the air of one of these days.
Perhaps the answer is simple: perhaps it is only that this soft and
sudden spring, with its darts and flicks of evanescent joy, its
sprite-like presence that is only half believed, its sound that is
the sound of something lost and elfin and half dreamed, half heard,
seems wonderful after the grim frozen tenacity of the winter, the
beautiful and terrible desolation, the assault of the frost and ice
on living flesh which resists it finally as it would resist the
cruel battering of a brute antagonist, so that the tart, stingy
speech, the tight gestures, the withdrawn and suspicious air, the
thin lips, red pointed noses and hard prying eyes of these people
are really the actions of those who, having to defend themselves
harshly against nature, harshly defend themselves against all the
world.



At any rate, the thing the boy feels who comes here at the day's
end is not completion, weariness, and sterility, but a sense of
swelling ecstasy, a note of brooding fulfilment.  The air will have
in it the wonderful odours of the market and the smell of the sea;
as he walks over the bare cobbled pavement under the corrugated tin
awnings of the warehouses and produce stores a hundred smells of
the rich fecundity of the earth will assail him: the clean sharp
pungency of thin crated wood and the citric nostalgia of oranges,
lemons, and grape-fruit, the stench of a decayed cabbage and the
mashed pulp of a rotten orange.  There will be also the warm coarse
limy smell of chickens, the strong coddy smell of cold fish and
oysters; and the crisp moist cleanliness of the garden smells--of
great lettuces, cabbages, new potatoes, with their delicate skins
loamy with sweet earth, the wonderful sweet crispness of crated
celery; and then the melons--the ripe golden melons bedded in
fragrant straw--and all the warm infusions of the tropics: the
bananas, the pineapples and the alligator pears.

The delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odours with
a new and delicious vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements
also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses the
compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piny scents of
packing-boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have
thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar,
turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines
and roots and old piled sacking; the clean, ground strength of
fresh coffee, brown, sultry, pungent, and exultantly fresh and
clean; the smell of oats, baled hay and bran, of crated eggs and
cheese and butter; and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen
beeves, slick porks, and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys,
of haunch, paunch, and jowl; of meat that is raw and of meat that
is cooked, for upstairs in that richly dingy block of buildings
there is a room where the butchers, side by side with the bakers,
the bankers, the brokers and the Harvard boys, devour thick steaks
of the best and tenderest meat, smoking-hot breads, and big,
jacketed potatoes.

And then there is always the sea.  In dingy blocks, memoried with
time and money, the buildings stretch down to the docks, and there
is always the feeling that the sea was here, that this is built-on
earth.  A single truck will rattle over the deserted stones, and
then there is the street that runs along the harbour, the dingy
little clothing shops and eating places, the powerful strings of
freight cars, agape and empty, odorous with their warm fatigued
planking and the smells of flanges and axles that have rolled great
distances.

And finally, by the edges of the water, there are great piers and
storehouses, calm and potent with their finished work: they lie
there, immense, starkly ugly, yet touched with the powerful beauty
of enormous works and movements; they are what they are, they have
been built without a flourish for the work they do, their great
sides rise in level cliffs of brick, they are pierced with tracks
and can engulf great trains; and now that the day is done they
breathe with the vitality of a tired but living creature.  A single
footfall will make remote and lonely echoes in their brooding
depths, there will be the expiring clatter of a single truck, the
sound of a worker's voice as he says "Good night," and then the
potent and magical silence.

And then there is the sea--the sea, beautiful and mysterious as it
is only when it meets the earth in harbours, the sea that bears in
swell and glut of tides the odorous savour of the earth, the sea
that swings and slaps against encrusted piles, the sea that is
braided with long ropes of scummy weed, the sea that brings the
mast and marly scent of shelled decay.  There is the sea, and there
are the great ships--the freighters, the fishing schooners, the
clean white one-night boats that make the New York run, now also
potent and silent, a glitter of bright lights, of gleaming brasses,
of opulent saloons--a token of joy and splendour in dark waters, a
hint of love and the velvet belly upon dark tides--and the sight of
all these things, the fusion of all these odours by the sprite of
May is freighted with unspeakable memories, with unutterable
intuitions for the youth: he does not know what he would utter, but
glory, love, power, wealth, flight, and movement and the sight of
new earth in the morning, and the living corporeal fulfilment of
all his ecstasy is in his wish and his conviction.

Certainly, these things can be found in New England, but perhaps
the person who finds this buried joy the most is this lonely
visitor--and particularly the boy from the South, for in the heart
of the Southerner alone, perhaps, is this true and secret knowledge
of the North: it is there in his dreams and his childhood
premonition, it is there like the dark Helen, and no matter what he
sees to cheat it, he will always believe in it, he will always
return to it.  Certainly, this was true of the gnarled and miserly
old man who now sat not far from all this glory in his dingy State
Street office, for Bascom Pentland, although the stranger on seeing
him might have said, "There goes the very image of a hard-bitten
old Down-Easter," had come, as lonely and wretched a youth as ever
lived, from the earth of Old Catawba, he had known and felt these
things and, in spite of his frequent bitter attacks on the people,
the climate, the life, New England was the place to which he had
returned to live, and for which he felt the most affection.



Now, ruminant and lost, he stared across the archway of his hands.
In a moment, with what was only an apparent irrelevance, with what
was really a part of the coherent past, a light plucked from dark
adyts of the brain, he said:  "Who knoweth the spirit of man that
goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to
the earth?"

He was silent and thoughtful for a moment; then he added sadly:
"I am an old man.  I have lived a long time.  I have seen so many
things.  Sometimes everything seems so long ago."

Then his eye went back into the wilderness, the lost earth, the
buried men.

Presently he said:  "I hope you will come out on Sunday.  O, by all
means!  By all means!  I believe your aunt is expecting you.  Yes,
sir, I believe she said something to that effect.  Or perhaps she
intends to pay a visit to one of her children.  I do not know, I
have not the REMOTEST--not the FAINTEST idea, of what she proposes
to do," he howled.  "Of course," he said impatiently and
scornfully, "I never have any notion what she has in mind.  No,
sir, I really could not tell you.  I no longer pay any attention to
what she says--O!  not the slightest!" he waved his great hand
through the air--"SAY!" stiffly and harshly he tapped the boy's
knee, grinning at him with the combative glitter of his ptotic eye--
"SAY! did you ever find ONE of them with whom it was possible to
carry on a coherent conversation?  Did you ever find one of them
who would respond to the processes of reason and ordered thought?
My dear boy!" he cried, "you cannot talk to them.  I assure you,
you cannot talk to them.  You might as well whistle into the wind
or spit into the waters of the Nile, for all the good it will do
you.  In his youth man will bare the riches of his spirit to them,
will exhaust the rich accumulations of his genius--his wisdom, his
learning, his philosophy--in an effort to make them worthy of his
companionship--and in the end, what does he ALWAYS find?  Why,"
said Uncle Bascom bitterly, "that he has spent his powers in
talking to an imbecile"--and he snarled vengefully through his
nose.  In a moment more, he contorted his face, and nasally whined
in a grotesque and mincing parody of a woman's voice, "O, I feel SO
sick!  O, deary ME, now!  I think my TIME is coming on again!  O,
you don't LOVE me any mo-o-ore!  O, I WISH I was dead!  O, I can't
get UP today!  O, I wish you'd bring me something NICE from TA-OWN!
O, if you loved me you'd buy me a NEW hat!  O, I've got nothing to
WE-E-AR!" here his voice had an added snarl of bitterness--"I'm
ashamed to go out on the street with all the other wim-men!"

Then he paused broodingly for a moment more, wheeled abruptly and
tapped the boy on the knee again:  "The proper study of mankind is--
say!" he said with a horrible fixed grimace and in a kind of
cunning whisper--"does the poet say--WOMAN?  I want to ask you:
DOES he, now?  Not on your life!" yelled Uncle Bascom.  "The word
is MAN! MAN! MAN!  Nothing else but MAN!"

Again he was silent: then, with an accent of heavy sarcasm, he went
on:  "Your aunt likes music.  You may have observed your aunt is
fond of music--"

It was, in fact, the solace of her life: on a tiny gramophone which
one of her daughters had given her, she played constantly the
records of the great composers.

"--Your aunt is fond of music," Bascom said deliberately.  "Perhaps
you may have thought--perhaps it seemed to you that she discovered
it--perhaps you thought it was your aunt's own patent and
invention--but there you would be wrong!  O yes! my boy!" he howled
remotely.

"You may have thought so, but you would be wrong--Say!" he turned
slowly with a malevolent glint of interrogation, a controlled
ironic power--"was the Fifth Symphony written by a woman?  Was the
object of your aunt's worship, Richard Wagner, a FEMALE?" he
snarled.  "By no means!  Where are their great works--their mighty
symphonies, their great paintings, their epic poetry?  Was it in a
woman's skull that the Critique of Pure Reason was conceived?  Is
the gigantic work upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the
product of a woman's genius?--Say! did you ever hear of a lady by
the name of William Shakespeare?  Was it a female of that name who
wrote King Lear?  Are you familiar with the works of a nice young
lady named John Milton?  Or Fräulein Goethe, a sweet German girl?"
he sneered.  "Perhaps you have been edified by the writ-ings of
Mademoiselle Voltaire or Miss Jonathan Swift?  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!
Phuh!  Phuh!"

He paused, stared deliberately across his hands, and in a moment
repeated, slowly and distinctly:  "The woman gave me of the tree
and I did eat.  Ah! that's it!  There, my boy, you have it!  There,
in a nutshell, you have the work for which they are best fitted."
And he turned upon his nephew suddenly with a blaze of passion, his
voice husky and tremulous from the stress of emotion.  "The
tempter!  The Bringer of Forbidden Fruit!  The devil's ambassador!
Since the beginning of time that has been their office--to madden
the brain, to turn man's spirit from its highest purposes, to
corrupt, to seduce, and to destroy!  To creep and crawl, to intrude
into the lonely places of man's heart and brain, to wind herself
into the core of his most secret life as a worm eats its way into a
healthy fruit--to do all this with the guile of a serpent, the
cunning of a fox--that, my boy, is what she's here for!--and she'll
never change!"  And, lowering his voice to an ominous and
foreboding whisper, he said mysteriously, "Beware!  Beware!  Do not
be deceived!"

In a moment more he had resumed his tone and manner of calm
deliberation and, with an air of irrelevance, somewhat grudgingly,
as if throwing a bone to a dog, he said:  "Your aunt, of course,
was a woman of considerable mentality--considerable, that is, for a
female.  Of course, her mind is no longer what it used to be.  I
never talk to her any more," he said indifferently.  "I do not
listen to her.  I think she said something to me about your coming
out on Sunday!  But I do not know.  No, sir, I could not tell you
what her plans are.  I have my own interests, and I suppose she has
hers.  Of course, she has her music. . . .  Yes, sir, she always
has her music," he said indifferently and contemptuously, and,
staring across the apex of his hands, he forgot her.



Yet, he had been young, and full of pain and madness.  For a space
he had known all the torments any lover ever knew.  So much Louise
had told her nephew, and so much Bascom had not troubled to deny.
For bending toward the boy swiftly, fiercely, and abruptly, as if
Bascom was not there, she whispered:  "Oh, yes! he's indifferent
enough to me now--but there was a time, there was a time, I tell
you!--when he was mad about me!  The old fool!" she cackled
suddenly and bitterly with a seeming irrelevance.  Then bending
forward suddenly with a resumption of her former brooding
intensity, she whispered:  "Yes! he was mad, mad, mad!  Oh, he
can't deny it!" she cried.  "He couldn't keep his eyes off me for a
minute!  He went cwazy if any other man so much as looked at me!"

"Quite true, my dear!  Quite true!" said Uncle Bascom without a
trace of anger or denial in his voice, with one of his sudden and
astonishing changes to a mood of tender and tranquil agreement.
"Oh, yes," he said again, staring reminiscently across the apex of
his great folded hands, "it is all quite true--every word as she
has spoken it--quite true, quite true, I had forgotten, but it's
all quite true."  And he shook his gaunt head gently from side to
side, turning his closed eyes downward, and snuffling gently,
blindly, tenderly, with laughter, with a passive and indifferent
memory.

For a year or two after his marriage, she had said, he had been
maddened by a black insanity of jealousy.  It descended on his
spirit like a choking and pestilence-laden cloud, it entered his
veins with blackened tongues of poison, it crept along the conduits
of his blood, sweltered venomously in his heart, it soaked into the
convolutions of his brain until his brain was fanged with hatred,
soaked in poison, stricken, maddened, and unhinged.  His gaunt
figure wasted until he became the picture of skeletonized
emaciation; jealousy and fear ate like a vulture at his entrails,
all of the vital energy, the power and intensity of his life, was
fed into this poisonous and consuming fire and then, when it had
almost wrecked his health, ruined his career, and destroyed his
reason, it left him as suddenly as it came: his life reverted to
its ancient and embedded core of egotism, he grew weary of his
wife, he thought of her indifferently, he forgot her.

And she, poor soul, was like a rabbit trapped before the fierce
yellow eye, the hypnotic stare of a crouching tiger.  She did not
know whether he would spring, strike forth his paw to maul her, or
walk off indifferently.  She was dazed and stricken before the
violence of his first passion, the unreasoning madness of his
jealousy, and in the years that followed she was bewildered,
resentful, and finally embittered by the abrupt indifference which
succeeded it--an indifference so great that often he seemed to
forget her very existence for days at a time, to live with her in a
little house as if he were scarcely conscious of her presence,
stumping about the place in an intensity of self-absorption while
he cursed and muttered to himself, banged open furnace doors,
chopped up whatever combinations of raw foods his fantastic
imagination might contrive, and answering her impatiently and
contemptuously when she spoke to him:  "What did you SAY-Y!  Oh,
what are you talk-ing about?"--and he would stump away again,
absorbed mysteriously with his own affairs.  And sometimes, if he
was the victim of conspiracy in the universe--if God had forsaken
him and man had tricked and cheated him, he would roll upon the
floor, hammer his heels against the wall, and howl his curses at
oblivious heaven.

Louise, meanwhile, her children having left her, played Wagner on
the gramophone, kept her small house tidy, and learned to carry on
involved and animated conversations with herself, or even with her
pots and pans, for when she scrubbed and cleaned them, she would
talk to them: if she dropped one, she would scold it, pick it from
the floor, spank it across the bottom, saying:  "No, you don't!
Naughty, you bad thing, you!"  And often, while he stumped through
the house, these solitary conversations were interspersed by fits
of laughter: she would bend double over her pots snuffling with
soft laughter which was faintly broken at its climax, a long high
"Who-o-op!"  Then she would shake her head pityingly, and be off
again, but at what she was laughing she could not have said.

One night, however, she interrupted one of Bascom's stamping and
howling tirades by putting on her tiny gramophone The Ride of the
Valkyries, as recorded by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
Bascom, after the first paralysis of his surprise had passed,
rushed furiously toward the offending instrument that was providing
such melodious but mighty competition.  Then Bascom halted; for
suddenly he noticed that Louise was standing beside the instrument,
that she was snuffling through her nose with laughter, and that
from time to time she looked craftily toward him, and broke into a
high piercing cackle.  Bascom also noticed that she held a large
carving-knife in her hand.  With a loud yell he turned and fled
toward his room, where he locked the door, crying out strongly in
an agony of terror:  "O Momma!  Momma!  Save me!"

All this had amused Louise enormously.  She played the record over
time after time, for ever snuffling with laughter and the high
cackle:  "Who-oo-oo!"  She bent double with it.



And now, as the boy looked at the old man, he had a sense of union
with the past.  It seemed to him if he would only speak, the living
past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and
despair, the million scenes and faces of the buried life--all that
an old man ever knew--would be revealed to him, would be delivered
to him like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men
owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all
living.  His savage hunger was a kind of memory: he thought if he
could speak, it would be fed.

And for a moment, it seemed, he saw the visages of time, dark time,
the million lock-bolts shot back in man's memory, the faces of the
lost Americans, and all the million casual moments of their lives,
with Bascom blazing at them from a dozen pulpits, Bascom, tortured
by love and madness, walking the streets of the nation, stumping
the rutted roads, muttering through darkness with clasped bony
hands, a gaunt and twisted figure reeling across the continent
below immense and cruel skies.  Light fell upon his face and
darkness crossed it:--he came up from the wilderness, from derbied
men and bustled women, from all of the memories of lavish brown,
and from time, dark time--from a time that was further off than
Saxon thanes, all of the knights, the spearheads, and the horses.

Was all this lost?

"It was so long ago," the old man said.



Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: the flying leaf, the
broken cloud.  Was no love crying in the wilderness?

"--So long ago.  I have lived so long.  I have seen so much.  I
could tell you so many things," his uncle said huskily, with
weariness and indifference.  His eye was lustreless and dead, he
looked for a moment tired and old.

All at once, a strange and perplexing vision, which was to return
many times in the years that followed, came to the boy.  It was
this: there was a company of old men and women at dinner, seated
together around a table.  All of them were very old, older than his
uncle; the faces of the old men and women were fragile and delicate
like old yellowed china, their faces were frail and sexless, they
had begun to look alike.  In their youth all these people had known
one another.  The men had drunk, fought, whored, hated one another,
and loved the women.  Some had been devoured by the sterile and
corrupt fear and envy that young men know.  In secret their lips
were twisted, their faces livid, and their hearts bitter; their
eyes glittered with a reptilian hatred of another man--they dreaded
his success, and they exulted in his failure, laughing with a
delirious joy when they heard or read of his hurt, defeat, or
humiliation.  They had been afraid to speak or confess what was in
their hearts, they feared the mockery of their fellows; with one
another their words were careful, picked, and disparaging.  They
gave the lie to passion and belief and they said what they knew was
false.  And yet along dark roads at night they had shouted out into
the howling winds their great goat-cries of joy, exultancy and
power; they had smelled snow in thick brooding air at night, and
they had watched it come, softly spitting at the window glass,
numbing the footfalls of the earth with its soft silent fall,
filling their hearts with a dark proud ecstasy, touching their
entrails with impending prophecy.  Each had a thousand dark desires
and fantasies; each wanted wealth, power, fame and love; each saw
himself as great, good and talented; each feared and hated rivals
in business or in love--and in crowds they glared at one another
with hard hostile eyes, they bristled up like crested cocks, they
watched their women jealously, felt looks and glances through their
shoulder-blades, and hated men with white spermatic necks, amorous
hair, and faces proud and insolent with female conquest.

They had been young and full of pain and combat, and now all this
was dead in them: they smiled mildly, feebly, gently, they spoke in
thin voices, and they looked at one another with eyes dead to
desire, hostility, and passion.

As for the old women, they sat there on their yellowed and bony
haunches.  They were all beyond the bitter pain and ecstasy of
youth--its frenzy, its hope, its sinew of bright blood and agony:
they were beyond the pain and fear of anything save age and death.
Here was a faithful wife, a fruitful mother; here was an adulterous
and voluptuous woman, the potent mistress of a dozen men; here was
her cuckold husband, who had screamed like a tortured animal when
he had first found her in bed with another man, and here was the
man he found her with; here was another man in whom the knowledge
of his wife's infidelity had aroused only a corrupt inverted joy;
he exulted in it, he urged her on into new love affairs, he
besought her greedily to taunt him with it, he fed upon his pain--
and now they were all old and meagre and had the look of yellowed
china.  They turned their mild sunken faces toward one another with
looks in which there was neither hate nor love nor desire nor
passion; they laughed thinly, and their memory was all of little
things.

They no longer wanted to excel or to be first; they were no longer
mad and jealous; they no longer hated rivals; they no longer wanted
fame; they no longer cared for work or grew drunk on hope; they no
longer turned into the dark and struck their bloody knuckles at the
wall; they no longer writhed with shame upon their beds, cursed at
the memory of defeat and desolation, or ripped the sheets between
convulsive fingers.  Could they not speak?  Had they forgotten?

Why could not the old men speak?  They had known pain, death and
madness, yet all their words were stale and rusty.  They had known
the wilderness, the savage land, the blood of the murdered men ran
down into the earth that gave no answer; and they had seen it, they
had shed it.  Where were the passion, pain and pride, the million
living moments of their lives?  Was all this lost?  Were they all
tongueless?  It seemed to the boy that there was something sly and
evil in their glances as they sat together, as if they hoarded some
cunning and malevolent wisdom in their brains, as if the medicine
to all our grief and error was in them, but as if through the evil
and conspirate communication of their glance, they had resolved to
keep it from us.  Or were they simply devoured with satiety, with
weariness and indifference?  Did they refuse to speak because they
could not speak, because even memory had gone lifeless in them?

Yes.  Words echoed in their throat but they were tongueless.  For
them the past was dead: they poured into our hands a handful of dry
dust and ashes.



The dry bones, the bitter dust?  The living wilderness, the silent
waste?  The barren land?

Have no lips trembled in the wilderness?  No eyes sought seaward
from the rock's sharp edge for men returning home?  Has no pulse
beat more hot with love or hate upon the river's edge?  Or where
the old wheel and the rusted stock lie stogged in desert sand: by
the horsehead a woman's skull.  No love?

No lonely footfalls in a million streets, no heart that beat its
best and bloodiest cry out against the steel and stone, no aching
brain, caught in its iron ring, groping among the labyrinthine
canyons?  Naught in that immense and lonely land but incessant
growth and ripeness and pollution, the emptiness of forests and
deserts, the unhearted, harsh and metal jangle of a million
tongues, crying the belly-cry for bread, or the great cat's snarl
for meat and honey?  All then, all?  Birth and the twenty thousand
days of snarl and jangle--and no love, no love?  Was no love crying
in the wilderness?

It was not true.  The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel
leaves were trembling in the wood.



Suddenly it seemed to the boy that if he could put his hand upon
his uncle, if he could grip his fingers in his stringy arm, his own
strength and youth would go into him, and he could rekindle memory
like a living flame in him, he could animate for an hour that
ancient heart with the exultancy, the power, the joy that pulsed in
himself; he could make the old man speak.

He wanted to speak to him as people never speak to one another, he
wanted to say and hear the things one never says and hears.  He
wanted to know what the old man's youth beyond its grim weather of
poverty, loneliness, and desperation had been like.  His uncle had
been over ten years old when the war had ended, and he had seen the
men plod home in wreaths of dust and heard their casual voices in a
room; he had breathed the air of vanished summers, he had seen
cloud shadows floating on the massed green of the wilderness, the
twisting of a last lone leaf upon a bough; and he had heard the
desolate and stricken voices in the South long, long ago, the quiet
and casual voices of lost men, a million vanished footsteps in the
streets of life.  And he had known the years of brown, dark lavish
brown, the lost and hypocritical years, the thunder of the wheels
and hooves upon the cobbles, the colour of bright blood--the
savagery, the hunger and the fear.

Was the memory of all this lost?

The boy touched him--he put his hand upon his uncle's shoulder; the
old man did not move.  Sunken in what lost world, buried in what
incommunicable and tongueless past, he said--"So long ago."

Then the boy got up and left him and went out into the streets
where the singing and lyrical air, the man-swarm passing in its
million-footed weft, the glorious women and the girls compacted in
a single music of belly and breasts and thighs, the sea, the earth,
the proud, potent, clamorous city, all of the voices of time, fused
to a unity that was like a song, a token and a cry.  Victoriously,
he trod the neck of doubt as if it were a serpent: he was joined to
the earth, a part of it, and he possessed it; he would be wasted
and consumed, filled and renewed eternally; he would feel
unceasingly alternate tides of life and dark oblivion; he would be
emptied without weariness, replenished for ever with strong joy.
He had a tongue for agony, a food for hunger, a door for exile and
a surfeit for insatiate desire: exultant certainty welled up in
him, he thought he could possess it all, and he cried:  "Yes!  It
will be mine!"



XIV


He had spells and rhymes of magic numbers which would enable him,
he thought, to read all of the million books in the great library.
This was a furious obsession with him all the time.  And there were
other spells and rhymes which would enable him to know the lives of
50,000,000 people, to visit every country in the world, to know a
hundred languages, possess 10,000 lovely women, and yet have one he
loved and honoured above all, who would be true and beautiful and
faithful to him.

And by the all-resuming magic of these spells he would go
everywhere on earth, while keeping one place to return to; and
while driven mad with thirst and hunger to have everything, he
would be peacefully content with almost nothing; and while wanting
to be a famous, honoured, celebrated man, he would live obscurely,
decently, and well, with one true love for ever.  In short, he
would have the whole cake of the world, and eat it, too--have
adventures, labours, joys, and triumphs that would exhaust the
energies of ten thousand men, and yet have spells and charms for
all of it, and was sure that with these charms and spells and
sorceries, all of it was his.

He would rush out of the great library into the street and take the
subway into Boston.  And as the train smashed and rocked along, he
would sit there solemnly with his lungs expanded to the bursting
point and his chest swollen and stuck out like the breast of a
pouter pigeon, while his eyes bulged, the veins on his forehead
stuck out, and his face slowly turned an apoplectic purple as he
sat there rocking with the agony of his effort.

Then the train would roar into the Central Station, and the breath
would come sobbing and soughing out of his tortured lungs like wind
out of an organ bellows.  And for several seconds, while the train
was stopped there at the station (for in these magic formulas these
stops at stations "did not count") he would pant and gasp for
breath like a fish out of water, gulping a new supply ravenously
down into his lungs again, as if he thought he was being shot in a
projectile through the terrific vacuum of unmeasured space.

Then, as the train roared out into the tunnel's dark again, he
would repeat the effort, sitting as solemn as an owl with his
bulging eyes, stuck-out chest, the stolid apoplectic purple of his
swollen face, while little children looked at him with frightened
eyes, their mothers with a glance of nervous apprehension, and the
men in all the various attitudes of gape-jawed astonishment and
stupefaction.  Yet, at that time, he saw nothing strange or curious
in this mad behaviour.  Rather, to hold his breath there in the
tunnel's dark, to make that mystery of rite and number, and to
follow it with a maniacal devotion seemed as inevitable and natural
to him as the very act of life, of breath itself, and he was
sometimes bitterly incensed when people stared at him because of
it.

Those faces--the secret, dark, unknown, nameless faces, the faces
of the million instant casual meetings of these years, in the cars
of subway trains or on the swarming streets--returned in later
years to haunt him with a blazing, unforgettable intensity of
vision, with an overwhelming sense of strangeness, loss and sorrow,
a poignancy of familiarity, affection and regret, which was
somehow, unbelievably, as wordless, grievous, full of an instant
rending and unfathomable pity, as those things a man has known best
and loved with all the life and passion in him, and has lost for
ever--a child's quick laugh of innocence and exultant mirth, a
woman's smile, an intonation in her voice, the naked, child-like
look remembered in the eyes of simple, faithful people who have
gone, or the snatches of the song one's brother sang when he lay
drowned in darkness and delirium, as he died.

Why did the unknown faces of these years come back to him?  For he
could not forget the million obscure faces of those first years of
his wandering when for the first time he walked alone the streets
of a great city, a madman, a beggar, and a king, feeling the huge
joy of the secret world impending over him with all the glory of
its magic imminence, and when each furious prowl and quest into the
swarming streets of life, each furious journey through the tunnel's
depth was living with the intolerable prescience of triumph and
discovery--a life more happy, fortunate, golden and complete than
any life before had ever been.

He did not know.  He never knew why all those obscure, nameless and
unknown faces of a million strangers who passed and vanished in an
instant from his sight, or whom he passed a hundred times upon the
streets without a word or sign of recognition, should return to
haunt him later with a sense of loss, affection, and the
familiarity of utter knowledge.  But he knew that they came back to
him in images of unfading brightness, and that the light of time,
dark time, was on them all, and that there was revealed to him, in
later years, something strange and mad and lonely in the lives of
all of them, which he had accepted instantly, and felt no wonder or
surprise at, when he had seen them.

But these images of the past would come back in later years, and
with a feeling of bitter loss and longing he would want to find, to
see, to know them all again, to ask them what their lives had been,
and what had happened to them.  It was a weird, strange, assorted
crew--that company of memory--on whom the light of time would fall
with such a lonely hue, and how they were all got together in that
magic consonance he could never tell, but he could not forget them.

One was an old man, an old man with fierce restless eyes, and
bedraggled moustaches of a stained tobacco yellow who kept a
lodging-house where a student that he knew had rooms, and whose
house, from the basement to the attic, was a museum to the old
man's single mania.  For that house was crowded with old tottering
stacks of books, a mountain of junk, uncounted and uncountable, a
weariness and desolation of old print, dusty, yellowed, and
unreadable--and all were memoirs of a single man, Napoleon.

Another was a woman with a mass of henna hair, piled up in a great
crown upon her head, who sat smugly, day after day, like something
ageless and embalmed, a presence deathless and hermetic to all the
things that change and pass, in a glass cage before a moving-
picture house on Washington Street, where people thronged in the
dense and narrow line before her all the time, and glass steps and
a rotating stairway went steeply up beside her cage, and flashing
cascades of bright water foamed and tumbled underneath the glassy
stairs, as the woman with piled henna hair sat always in her cage,
deathless, smug, hermetic, and embalmed.

Another was an old man with a mad, fierce, handsome face and wild
strewn hair of silvery white, who never wore a hat or overcoat, and
who muttered through the streets of Cambridge, over the board walks
of the Harvard Yard, in every kind of weather; winter was around
him always, the rugged skies of wintry sunsets, red and harsh, the
frozen desolation of old snow in street and Yard and gutter, the
harsh, interminable, weary savagery of grey winter.

One was a waitress in a restaurant on Tremont Street, a woman
quiet, decent, and demure in manner, who wore faintly on her lips
continually the most sensual, tender, and seductive mystery of a
smile that he had ever seen on any woman's face, who drew him back
into that place to eat a thousand times, who made him think of her
at night, and prowl the streets and think of her, and go back to
that restaurant night after night, with a feeling of wild joy and
imminent possession when he thought of her, and yet who said, did,
promised nothing that was not sedate, decent, and correct, or that
could give him comfort, hope, or knowledge of her life.

He never got to know her, he never even knew her name, some secrecy
and pride in him prevented him from speaking to her with familiar
warmth or curiosity, but he spent thousands of good hours in
thinking of her--hours filled with all the passion, dreams, and
longing youth can know.  The woman was no longer young; the other
waitresses were younger, fresher, better-looking, had better legs
and finer figures; he had no way at all of knowing the quality of
her life, mind, spirit, speech--save that when he heard her speak
her voice was a little husky and coarse-fibred--but that woman
became the central figure of one of those glittering and impossible
fantasies young men have.

It was a great legend of wealth and fame and love and glory in
which this woman lived as a creature of queenly beauty, delicacy,
intelligence, and grandeur of the soul--and every obstacle of cold
and acid fact that interposed itself between him and his vision he
would instantly destroy by the wild fantastic logic of desire.

And because of her he prowled a hundred streets, and walked three
thousand miles, and ate one thousand sirloin steaks in that one
restaurant.  He would wait for night to come with furious
impatience, and would feel his hands grow weak, his entrails numb,
his heart begin to pound, and his throat to swell with this
intolerable exultancy of joy as he approached the restaurant.  Then
when he got inside, and had gone upstairs to where the restaurant
was, his whole body would be stirred with such a shifting
iridescence of passion, happiness, hunger, triumph, music, and wild
exuberant humour that he felt he could no longer hold the swelling
power of ecstasy that he felt in him.

Everything in the restaurant would become impossibly good,
wonderful, and happy.  The beautifully clean, crisply-waisted, and
voluptuous-looking waitresses would be passing all around him
bearing trays of food, the empress of his desire would pass by
clean and neat and dainty, sedate and decent and demure, smiling
that proud, smoke-like, faint, ghost-phantom smile of maddening
tenderness and seduction, the three-piece orchestra would be
playing briskly, softly, languorously, strains of popular music,
filling his heart with the swelling pæans of another, prouder,
grander, more triumphant music; while he listened, some robust,
handsome, clear-eyed and lusty-figured New England girls would be
sitting at a table, smartly, roughly dressed, their fine legs
clothed with woollen stockings, their feet shod with wide-open
galoshes, looking almost ripe for love and tenderness if something
could be done to them--and all of this spurred his hunger with a
kind of maddening relish, and made the food taste better than any
he had ever had before.

Everything he saw would fill him with haunting sorrow, hunger, joy,
the sense of triumph, glory, and delight, or with a limitless
exuberance of wild humour.  The motto of the restaurant, fixed on
the wall in shields embossed with a flamboyant coat of arms, was
written in a scroll beneath the coat of arms, as follows:  "Luxuria
cum Economia."  The effect these words wrought on his spirit was
unbelievable: he could never say what he wished to say, or what he
felt about them, and to say that they were "the funniest words he
ever saw" would not begin to convey their real effect on him.

For what they did to him was so far beyond mere funniness that he
had no name to give to the emotion they evoked.  But instantly,
when he saw them, the wild wordless surge of a powerful and idiotic
exuberance of humour would swell up in him and split his features
with an exultant grin.

He would want to roar with laughter, to shout out and pound upon
the table in his joy, but instead the wild voices of a goat-like
exuberance would swell up in his throat until the people at the
other tables would begin to stare at him as if he had gone mad.
And later, on the streets, or in his room at night, he would
suddenly remember them again, and then that idiotic, wordless, and
exultant glee would burst out of him in one roar of joy.

Yet the words gave him a strange happiness and content as well.  He
felt a feeling of tenderness for the people who had written them,
for the owners of the restaurant who had solemnly and triumphantly
thought them out, for all the doctrines of "taste," "class," and
"refinement" they evoked, for something mistaken and most pitiful
that had got into our lives, and that was everywhere, something
grotesquely wrong, ridiculous and confused that made one somehow
feel a warm, a wordless affection for its victims.



But this was the reason why these things could never be forgotten--
because we are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America.  Immense
and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on for ever
and we have no home.  Therefore, it is not the slow, the punctual
sanded drip of the unnumbered days that we remember best, the ash
of time; nor is it the huge monotone of the lost years, the
unswerving schedules of the lost life and the well-known faces,
that we remember best.  It is a face seen once and lost for ever in
a crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and vanished on a
passing train, it is a prescience of snow upon a certain night, the
laughter of a woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the
memory of a single moon seen at the pine's dark edge in old
October--and all of our lives is written in the twisting of a leaf
upon a bough, a door that opened, and a stone.

For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the
streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life
alone.

It is the place of the howling winds, the hurrying of the leaves in
old October, the hard clean falling to the earth of acorns.  The
place of the storm-tossed moaning of the wintry mountain-side,
where the young men cry out in their throats and feel the savage
vigour, the rude strong energies; the place also where the trains
cross rivers.

It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the one
place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the
time.

It is the place of exultancy and strong joy, the place of the
darkened brooding air, the smell of snow; it is the place of all
the fierce, the bitten colours in October, when all of the wild,
sweet woods flame up; it is also the place of the cider press and
the last brown oozings of the York Imperials.  It is the place of
the lovely girls with good jobs and the husky voices, who will buy
a round of drinks; it is the place where the women with fine legs
and silken underwear lie in the Pullman berth below you; it is the
place of the dark-green snore of the Pullman cars and the voices in
the night-time in Virginia.

It is the place where great boats are baying at the harbour's
mouth, where great ships are putting out to sea; it is the place
where great boats are blowing in the gulf of night, and where the
river, the dark and secret river, full of strange time, is for ever
flowing by us to the sea.

The tugs keep baying in the river; at twelve o'clock the Berengaria
moans, her lights slide gently past the piers beyond Eleventh
Street; and in the night a tall tree falls in Old Catawba, there in
the hills of home.

It is the place of autumnal moons hung low and orange at the frosty
edges of the pines; it is the place of frost and silence, of the
clean dry shocks and the opulence of enormous pumpkins that yellow
on hard dotted earth; it is the place of the stir and feathery
stumble of the hens upon their roost, the frosty, broken barking of
the dogs, the great barn-shapes and solid shadows in the running
sweep of the moon-whited countryside, the wailing whistle of the
fast express.  It is the place of flares and steamings on the
tracks, and the swing and bob and tottering dance of lanterns in
the yards; it is the place of dings and knellings and the sudden
glare of mighty engines over sleeping faces in the night; it is the
place of the terrific web and spread and smouldering, the distant
glare of Philadelphia and the solid rumble of the sleepers; it is
also the place where the Transcontinental Limited is stroking
eighty miles an hour across the continent and the small dark towns
whip by like bullets, and there is only the fanlike stroke of the
secret, immense and lonely earth again.

I have foreseen this picture many times: I will buy passage on the
Fast Express.

It is the place of the wild and exultant winter's morning and the
wind, with the powdery snow, that has been howling all night long;
it is the place of solitude and the branches of the spruce and
hemlock piled with snow; it is the place where the Fall River boats
are tethered to the wharf, and the wild grey snow of furious,
secret, and storm-whited morning whips across them.  It is the
place of the lodge by the frozen lake and the sweet breath and
amorous flesh of sinful woman; it is the place of the tragic and
lonely beauty of New England; it is the place of the red barn and
the sound of the stabled hooves and of bright tatters of old circus
posters; it is the place of the immense and pungent smell of
breakfast, the country sausages and the ham and eggs, the smoking
wheat cakes and the fragrant coffee, and of lone hunters in the
frosty thickets who whistle to their lop-eared hounds.

Where is old Doctor Ballard now with all his dogs?  He held that
they were sacred, that the souls of all the dear lost dead went
into them.  His youngest sister's soul sat on the seat beside him;
she had long ears and her eyes were sad.  Two dozen of his other
cherished dead trotted around the buggy as he went up the hill past
home.  And that was eleven years ago, and I was nine years old; and
I stared gravely out of the window of my father's house at old
Doctor Ballard.

It is the place of the straight stare, the cold white bellies and
the buried lust of the lovely Boston girls; it is the place of ripe
brainless blondes with tender lips and a flowery smell, and of the
girls with shapely arms who stand on ladders picking oranges; it is
also the place where large slow-bodied girls from Kansas City, with
big legs and milky flesh, are sent East to school by their rich
fathers, and there are also immense and lovely girls, with the grip
of a passionate bear, who have such names as Neilson, Lundquist,
Jorgenson, and Brandt.

I will go up and down the country, and back and forth across the
country on the great trains that thunder over America.  I will go
out West where States are square; Oh, I will go to Boise, and
Helena and Albuquerque.  I will go to Montana and the two Dakotas
and the unknown places.

It is the place of violence and sudden death; of the fast shots in
the night, the club of the Irish cop, and the smell of brains and
blood upon the pavement; it is the place of the small-town
killings, and the men who shoot the lovers of their wives; it is
the place where the negroes slash with razors and the hillmen kill
in the mountain meadows; it is the place of the ugly drunks and the
snarling voices and of foul-mouthed men who want to fight; it is
the place of the loud word and the foolish boast and the violent
threat; it is also the place of the deadly little men with white
faces and the eyes of reptiles, who kill quickly and casually in
the dark; it is the lawless land that feeds on murder.

"Did you know the two Lipe girls?" he asked.  "Yes," I said.  "They
lived in Biltburn by the river, and one of them was drowned in the
flood.  She was a cripple, and she wheeled herself along in a
chair.  She was strong as a bull."  "That's the girl," he said.

It is the place of the crack athletes and of the runners who limber
up in March; it is the place of the ten-second men and the great
jumpers and vaulters; it is the place where spring comes, and the
young birch trees have white and tender barks, of the thaw of the
earth, and the feathery smoke of the trees; it is the place of the
burst of grass and bud, the wild and sudden tenderness of the
wilderness, and of the crews out on the river and the coaches
coming down behind them in the motor-boats, the surges rolling out
behind when they are gone with heavy sudden wash.  It is the place
of the baseball players, and the easy lob, the soft spring
smackings of the glove and mit, the crack of the bat; it is the
place of the great batters, fielders, and pitchers, of the nigger
boys and the white, drawling, shirt-sleeved men, the bleachers and
the resinous smell of old worn wood; it is the place of Rube
Waddell, the mighty untamed and ill-fated pitcher when his left arm
is swinging like a lash.  It is the place of the fighters, the
crafty Jewish lightweights and the mauling Italians, Leonard,
Tendler, Rocky Kansas, and Dundee; it is the place where the
champion looks over his rival's shoulder with a bored expression.

I shall wake at morning in a foreign land thinking I heard a horse
in one of the streets of home.

It is the place where they like to win always, and boast about
their victories; it is the place of quick money and sudden loss; it
is the place of the mile-long freights with their strong, solid,
clanking, heavy loneliness at night, and of the silent freight of
cars that curve away among raw piny desolations with their promise
of new lands and unknown distances--the huge attentive gape of
emptiness.  It is the place where the bums come singly from the
woods at sunset, the huge stillness of the water-tower, the fading
light, the rails, secret and alive, trembling with the oncoming
train; it is the place of the great tramps, Oklahoma Red, Fargo
Pete, and the Jersey Dutchman, who grab fast rattlers for the
Western shore; it is the place of old blown bums who come up in
October skirls of dust and wind and crumpled newspapers and beg,
with canned heat on their breaths:  "Help Old McGuire: McGuire's a
good guy, kid.  You're not so tough, kid: McGuire's your pal, kid:
How about McGuire, McGuire--?"

It is the place of the pool-room players and the drug-store boys;
of the town whore and her paramour, the tough town driver; it is
the place where they go to the woods on Sunday and get up among the
laurel and dogwood bushes and the rhododendron blossoms; it is the
place of the cheap hotels and the kids who wait with chattering
lips while the nigger goes to get them their first woman; it is the
place of the drunken college boys who spend the old man's money and
wear fur coats to the football games; it is the place of the lovely
girls up North who have rich fathers, of the beautiful wives of
business men.

The train broke down somewhere beyond Manassas, and I went forward
along the tracks with all the other passengers.  "What's the
matter?" I said to the engineer.  "The eccentric strap is broken,
son," he said.  It was a very cold day, windy and full of sparkling
sun.  This was the farthest north I'd ever been, and I was twelve
years old and on my way to Washington to see Woodrow Wilson
inaugurated.  Later I could not forget the face of the engineer and
the words "eccentric strap."

It is the place of the immense and lonely earth, the place of fat
ears and abundance where they grow cotton, corn, and wheat, the
wine-red apples of October, and the good tobacco.

It is the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the
innocent place; it is the wild lawless place, the vital earth that
is soaked with the blood of the murdered men, with the blood of the
countless murdered men, with the blood of the unavenged and
unremembered murdered men; but it is also the place of the child
and laughter, where the young men are torn apart with ecstasy, and
cry out in their throats with joy, where they hear the howl of the
wind and the rain and smell the thunder and the soft numb spitting
of the snow, where they are drunk with the bite and sparkle of the
air and mad with the solar energy, where they believe in love and
victory and think that they can never die.

It is the place where you come up through Virginia on the great
trains in the night-time, and rumble slowly across the wide Potomac
and see the morning sunlight on the nation's dome at Washington,
and where the fat man shaving in the Pullman washroom grunts,
"What's this?  What's this we're coming to--Washington?"--And the
thin man glancing out of the window says, "Yep, this is Washington.
That's what it is, all right.  You gettin' off here?"--And where
the fat man grunts, "Who--me?  Naw--I'm goin' on to Baltimore."  It
is the place where you get off at Baltimore and find your brother
waiting.

Where is my father sleeping on the land?  Buried?  Dead these seven
years?  Forgotten, rotten in the ground?  Held by his own great
stone?  No, no!  Will I say "Father" when I come to him?  And will
he call me "Son"?  Oh, no, he'll never see my face; we'll never
speak except to say--

It is the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage,
the tragic lonely beauty of New England, and the web of Boston; the
place of the mighty station there, and engines passive as great
cats, the straight dense plumes of engine smoke, the acrid and
exciting smell of trains and stations, and of the man-swarm passing
ever in its million-footed weft, the smell of the sea in harbours
and the thought of voyages--and the place of the goat-cry, the
strong joy of our youth, the magic city, when we knew the most
fortunate life on earth would certainly be ours, that we were
twenty and could never die.

And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured
moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished,
and the word; the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and
never have forgotten.  And these are the things that we remember of
America, for we have known all her thousand lights and weathers,
and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the
streets of life alone.



XV


Now at Cambridge, in the house of the Murphys on Trowbridge Street,
he found himself living with the Irish for the first time, and he
discovered that the Murphys were utterly different from all the
Irish he had known before, and all that he had felt and believed
about them.  He soon discovered that the Murphys were a typical
family of the Boston Irish.  It was a family of five: there were
Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, two sons and a daughter.  Mrs. Murphy ran the
house on Trowbridge Street, which they owned, and rented the rooms
to lodgers, Mr. Murphy was night watchman in a warehouse on the
Boston water-front, the girl was a typist in an Irish business
house in Boston, the older boy, Jimmy, had a clerical position in
the Boston City Hall, and the youngest boy, Eddy, whom the youth
knew best, was a student at Boston College.  In addition there were
two Irish lodgers who had lived with them for years: Mr. Feeney, a
young man who worked at Raymond's, a department store in Washington
Street, Boston, and Mr. O'Doul, a middle-aged man, unmarried, who
occupied the front room upstairs just over the boy's own room.  Mr.
O'Doul was a civil engineer, he drank very heavily, and he would
sometimes be confined to his bed for days at a time with terrible
attacks of rheumatism which would bend, gnarl, and twist him, and
render him incapable of movement.

But in the Murphys the boy discovered none of the richness,
wildness, extravagance, and humour of such people as Mike Fogarty,
Tim Donovan, or the MacReadys--the Irish he had known at home.  The
Murphys were hard, sterile, arid, meagre, and cruel: they were
disfigured by a warped and infuriated puritanism, and yet they were
terribly corrupt.  There was nothing warm, rich, or generous about
them or their lives: it seemed as if the living roots of nature had
grown gnarled and barren among the walls and pavements of the city;
it seemed that everything that is wild, sudden, capricious,
whimsical, passionate, and mysterious in the spirit of the race had
been dried and hardened out of them by their divorce from the
magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle
of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel
and stone and brick had entered their souls.  Even their speech
had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost
inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words
in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially--Murphy,
his two sons, Feeney, and O'Doul--made constant use of a few arid
words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a
slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in
enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they
could say or wished to say.  Chief among these words or phrases was
"YOU know?". . . or "YOU know what I mean?"--words which were
uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on "You," a slight and
painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the
listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply.
For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent
with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and
their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to
offer than "Chee!" or "Jeez!" or "Ho-ly Jeez!" or "Christ!" or "HO-
ly Christ!" or occasionally "HO-ly Mary!"  Finally, they made a
constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a
word "guy": it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of
paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless
and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and
hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats--the word
fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a
cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of
concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out
under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.

At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre
but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the
contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant
spirits, as waiters in European café's, restaurants, and dining-
cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs
of British and American tourists--he thought this because he saw
something sly, closed, conspiratorial, mocking and full of hatred
and mistrust, in their relations with people who were not members
of their race and their religion; he thought they had a warm,
secret and passionate life of their own which never could be known
by a stranger.  But he soon found that this belief was untrue: even
in their conversations with one another, they were almost
inarticulate--a race which thought, felt, and spoke with the wooden
insensitivity of automatons or dummies on whose waxen souls a few
banal formulas for speech and feeling had been recorded.  He heard
some amazing performances: every evening toward six o'clock the
family would gather in their dingy living-room at the end of the
hall, Mr. Feeney and Mr. O'Doul would join them, and then he could
hear the voices of the men raised in argument, protest, agreement,
denial, affirmation and belief, or scepticism, evoking a ghastly
travesty of all of man's living moments of faith, doubt, and
passion, and yet speaking for hours at a time, with the idiotic
repetitions of a gramophone held by its needle to a single groove,
a blunted jargon of fifty meaningless words:

"What guy?"

"DAT guy!"

"Nah, nah, nah, not him--duh otheh guy!"

"Wich guy do yuh mean--duh big guy?"

"Nah, nah, nah--yuh got it all wrong!--Not HIM--duh little guy!"

"Guh-WAN!"--a derisive laugh--"Guh-wan!"

"Watcha tryin' t' do--KID me?  Dat guy neveh saw de day he could
take Grogan.  Grogan 'ud bat his brains out."

"Guh-WAN!  Yer full of prunes! . . .  Watcha tryin' t' give me?
Dat guy 'ud neveh take Tommy Grogan in a million yeahs!  He
couldn't take Tommy duh best day he eveh saw!  Grogan 'ud have him
on de floeh in thirty seconds!"

"HO-ly Ghee!"

"Sure he would!"

"Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!  Yer CRAZY!  GROGAN!  HO-ly Ghee!"

And this, with laughter, denial, agreement--all the appurtenances
of conversation among living men--could go on unweariedly for hours
at a time.

Sometimes he would interrupt these conversations for a moment: he
would go back to leave a message, to pay the rent, to ask if anyone
had called.

As soon as he knocked, the voices would stop abruptly, the room
would grow suddenly hushed, there would be whispers and a dry
snickering laughter: in a moment someone would say "Come in," and
he would enter a room full of hushed and suddenly straightened
faces.  The men would sit quietly or say a word or two of greeting,
friendly enough in appearance, but swift sly looks would pass
between them, and around the corners of their thin, hard mouths
there would be something loose, corrupt and mocking.  Mrs. Murphy
would rise and come to greet him, her voice filled with a false
heartiness, an unclean courtesy, a horrible and insolent travesty
of friendliness, and her face would also have the look of having
been suddenly straightened out and solemnly compressed; she would
listen with a kind of evil attention, but she would have the same
loose, mocking look, and the quiet sly look would pass between her
and the others.  Then, when he had left them and the door had
closed behind him, there would be the same sly silence for a
moment, then a low muttering of words, a sudden violence of hard
derisive laughter, and someone saying, "HO-ly Jeez!"

He despised them: he loathed them because they were dull, dirty,
and dishonest, because their lives were stupid, barren, and ugly,
for their deliberate and insolent unfriendliness and for the
conspiratorial secrecy and closure of their petty and vicious
lives, entrenched solidly behind a wall of violent and corrupt
politics and religious fanaticism, and regarding the alien, the
stranger, with the hostile and ignorant eyes of the peasant.

All of the men had a dry, meagre, and brutal quality: Mr. Murphy
was a little man with a dry, corky figure; he had a grey face, a
thin sunken mouth, around which the line of loose mockery was
always playing, and a closely cropped grey moustache.  The boy
always found him in his shirt-sleeves, with his shoes off and his
stockinged feet thrust out upon a chair.  Feeney, O'Doul, Jimmy and
Eddy Murphy, although of various sizes, shapes, and ages, all had
thick tallowy-looking skins, hard dull eyes and a way of speaking
meagrely out of the corners of their loose thin mouths.  Mrs.
Murphy was physically the biggest of the lot, with a certain
quality of ripeness and fertility, however blighted, that none of
the others had: she was a large slatternly woman, with silvery
white hair which gave her somehow a look of sly and sinister
haggishness; she had a high, flaming colour marked with patches of
eczematous red, her voice was hearty and she had a big laugh, but
her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of
the others.

Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd.  All
decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in
him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the
rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder,
and more liberal kind of life.  As time went on, he made a few
awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he
began to come into the young man's room from time to time, and
presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes
for the future.  He was a little fellow, with the same dry,
febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of
the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his
legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of
having broken it in a high-school football game.  The first time
he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and
mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to
time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and
stricken stupefaction.

"Watcha do wit all dese books?  Huh?"

"I read them."

"Guh-WAN!  Watcha tryin' t' hand me?  Y' ain't read all dem books!
Dey ain't no guy dat's read dat much."

As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in
the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire
contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.

"Well, I have read them all," the other said.  "Most of them,
anyway, and a lot more besides."

"Guh-WAN!  No kiddin'!" he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of
astounded disbelief.  "Watcha want to read so much for?"

"I like to read.  Don't you?"

"Oh, I don't know.  YOU know," he said painfully, with the
slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders.
". . . 'S'all right."

"You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don't you?"

"DO I?" he cried, with a sudden waking to life.  "I'll say I
do! . . .  HO-ly Chee!  Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a
CRIME!"

There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the
books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner,
and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly:
"Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived.  He wrote plays
an' sonnets.  A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is composed
of two pahts, de sextet an' de octrave."

"That's pretty good.  They must make you work out there?"

"DO they?" he cried.  "I'll tell duh cock-eyed world dey do! . . .
Do you know who de greatest prose-writeh was?" he burst out with
the same convulsive suddenness.

"No . . . who was it?  Jonathan Swift?"

"Guh-WAN!"

"Addison? . . .  Dryden? . . .  Matthew Arnold?" the youth asked
hopefully.

"Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!" he shouted derisively.  "Yuh're way off!"

"Am I? . . .  Who was it then?"

"James Henry Cardinal Nooman," he crowed triumphantly.  "Dat's who
it was! . . .  Father Dolan said so. . . .  Chee! . . .  Dey ain't
nuttin' dat guy don't know!  He's duh greatest English scholeh
livin'! . . .  Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo," he said
triumphantly.  "Dat's Latin."

"Well, yes, he IS a good writer," said the other boy.  "But Thomas
Carlyle is a good writer, too?" he proposed argumentatively.

"Guh-WAN!" shouted Eddy derisively.  "Watcha givin' me?"  He was
silent a moment; then he added with a grin, "Yuh know de reason why
you say dat?"

"No, why?"

"It's because yuh're a Sout'paw," and suddenly he laughed,
naturally and good-naturedly.

"A Southpaw?  How do you mean?"

"Oh, dat's duh name de fellows call 'em out at school," he said.

"Call who?"

"Why, guys like you," he said.  "Dat's de name we call duh
Protestants," he said, laughing.  "We call 'em Sout'paws."

The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard,
fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was
disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly
funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.

After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to
see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and
naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask
for help with them.

Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he
thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his
childhood--of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys--it
seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely
different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air
and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were,
while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements,
soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard
and dead and ugly in the barren land.



The only person near him in the house, and the only person there
the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang:
he had the room next to him--in fact, he had the two next rooms,
for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class
who governed one of the Chinese provinces.

But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the
average Oriental who attends an American university.  These others,
studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work.  Mr. Wang, a
lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend,
had come to play.  And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion
to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose.  His pleasures
were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running
to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut
in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of
chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips
to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant
in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and
the companionship of "nice flat girls"--by this he meant to say his
women should be "fat," which apparently was the primary requisite
for voluptuous pulchritude.

Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted
child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment
were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens,
fat divans, couches, and chests.  The rooms were always lighted
with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour
of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr.
Wang's shrill sudden scream of childish laughter.  He had two
cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure-
loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one
could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange
speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then
screams of laughter.

The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come
to him to seek help on his English composition themes--he was not
only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything--
and the boy had written several for him.  And Mr. Wang, in grateful
recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of
strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever
urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes.  And no matter
where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the
street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one
joke--a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight
of a child or an idiot.  And the joke was this:  Mr. Wang would
come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his
fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter.  Then,
wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:

"Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . .  Yis, yis, yis," he
would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest,
shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands--"Big
flat girl--like this--yis, yis, yis!" he would scream again, and
bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, "nice flat girl--like
this--yis, yis, yis, yis, yis."

He had perpetrated this "joke" so often, and at such unseasonable
places, that it had now become embarrassing.  He seemed, in fact,
to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious
conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already
caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to
Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a
starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty
years, and whose name was Fust.  Nothing could be done to stop him;
protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set
him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and
he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, "Yis,
yis, yis--nice flat girl--like this, eh," and would shape fat
suggestion with his fat hands.



XVI


The purposes of Professor Hatcher's celebrated school for
dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough.
Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant
claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course.  He
did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came
to take his course.  He did not predict a successful career in the
professional theatre for every student who had been a member of his
class.  He did not even say he could teach a student how to write
plays.  No.  He made, in fact, no claims at all.  Whatever he said
about his course was very reasonably, prudently, and temperately
put: it was impossible to quarrel with it.

All Professor Hatcher said about his course was that, if a man had
a genuine dramatic and theatrical talent to begin with, he might be
able to derive from the course a technical and critical guidance
which it would be hard for him to get elsewhere, and which he might
find for himself only after years of painful and even wasteful
experiment.

Certainly this seemed reasonable enough.  Moreover, Professor
Hatcher felt that the artist would benefit by what was known as the
"round-table discussion"--that is, by the comment and criticism of
the various members of the class, after Professor Hatcher had read
them a play written by one of their group.  He felt that the spirit
of working together, of seeing one's play produced and assisting in
the production, of being familiar with all the various arts of the
theatre--lighting, designing, directing, acting, and so on--was an
experience which should be of immense value to the young dramatist
of promise and of talent.  In short, although he made no assertion
that he could create a talent where none was, or give life by
technical expertness to the substance of a work that had no real
life of its own, Professor Hatcher did feel that by the beneficent
influence of this tutelage he might trim the true lamp to make it
burn more brightly.

And though it was possible to join issue with him on some of his
beliefs--that, for example, the comment and criticism of "the
group" and a community of creative spirits were good for the
artist--it was impossible to deny that his argument was reasonable,
temperate, and conservative in the statement of his purposes.

And he made this plain to every member of his class.  Each one was
made to understand that the course made no claims of magic alchemy--
that he could not be turned into an interesting dramatist if the
talent were not there.

But although each member of the class affirmed his understanding of
this fundamental truth, and readily said that he accepted it, most
of these people, at the bottom of their hearts, believed--pitiably
and past belief--that a miracle would be wrought upon their
sterile, unproductive spirits; that for them, for THEM, at least, a
magic transformation would be brought about in their miserable
small lives and feeble purposes--and all because they now were
members of Professor Hatcher's celebrated class.

The members of Professor Hatcher's class belonged to the whole lost
family of the earth, whose number is uncountable, and for this
reason they could never be forgotten.

And, first and foremost, they belonged to that great lost tribe of
people who are more numerous in America than in any other country
in the world.  They belonged to that unnumbered horde who think
that somehow, by some magic and miraculous scheme or rule or
formula, "something can be done for them."  They belonged to that
huge colony of the damned who buy thousands of books that are
printed for their kind, telling them how to run a tea-shop, how
to develop a pleasing personality, how to acquire "a liberal
education," swiftly and easily and with no anguish of the soul, by
fifteen minutes' reading every day; how to perform the act of
sexual intercourse in such a way that your wife will love you for
it; how to have children or to keep from having children; how to
write short-stories, novels, plays, and verses which are profitably
saleable; how to keep from having body-odour, constipation, bad
breath, or tartar on the teeth; how to have good manners, know the
proper fork to use for every course, and always do the proper
thing--how, in short, to be beautiful, "distinguished," "smart,"
"chic," "forceful," and "sophisticated"--finally, how to have "a
brilliant personality" and "achieve success."

Yes, for the most part, the members of Professor Hatcher's class
belonged to this great colony of the lost Americans.  They belonged
to that huge tribe of all the damned and lost who feel that
everything is going to be all right with them if they can only take
a trip, or learn a rule, or meet a person.  They belonged to that
futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well
with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be
supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and
the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only
they eat bran for breakfast, secure an introduction to a celebrated
actress, get a reading for their manuscript by a friend of Sinclair
Lewis, or win admission to Professor Hatcher's celebrated class of
dramatists.

And, in a curious way, the plays written by the people in Professor
Hatcher's class illustrated, in one form or another, this desire.
Few of the plays had any intrinsic reality, for most of these
people were lacking in the first, the last, the foremost quality of
the artist, without which he is lost: the ability to get out of his
own life the power to live and work by, to derive from his own
experience--as a fruit of all his seeing, feeling, living, joy and
bitter anguish--the palpable and living substance of his art.

Few of the people in Professor Hatcher's class possessed this
power.  Few of them had anything of their own to say.  Their lives
seemed to have grown from a stony and a fruitless soil and, as a
consequence, the plays they wrote did not reflect that life, save
by a curious and yet illuminating indirection.

Thus, in an extraordinary way, their plays--unreal, sterile,
imitative, and derivative as most of them indubitably were--often
revealed more about the lives of the people who wrote them than
better and more living work could do.  For, although few of the
plays showed any contact with reality--with that passionate
integument of blood and sweat and pain and fear and grief and joy
and laughter of which this world is made--most of them did show, in
one way or another, what was perhaps the basic impulse in the lives
of most of these people--the impulse which had brought them here to
Professor Hatcher's class.

The impulse of the people in the class was not to embrace life and
devour it, but rather to escape from it.  And in one way or another
most of the plays these people wrote were illustrative of this
desire.  For in these plays--unnatural, false, and imitative, as
they were--one could discern, in however pale and feeble a design,
a picture of the world not as its author had seen and lived and
known it, but rather as he wished to find it or believe in it.
And, in all their several forms--whether sad, gay, comic, tragic,
or fantastical--these plays gave evidence of the denial and the
fear of life.

The wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, for example, wrote
plays which had their setting in a charming little French café.
Here one was introduced to all the gay, quaint, charming Frenchmen--
to Papa Duval, the jolly proprietor, and Mamma Duval, his rotund
and no less jolly spouse, as well as to all the quaint and curious
habitués that are so prolific in theatrical establishments of this
order.  One met, as well, that fixture of these places: old
Monsieur Vernet, the crusty, crotchety, but kindly old gentleman
who is the café's oldest customer and has had the same table in the
corner by the window for more than thirty years.  One saw again the
familiar development of the comic situation--the day when Monsieur
Vernet enters at his appointed time and finds at his table a total
stranger.  Sacrilege!  Imprecations!  Tears, prayers, and
entreaties on the part of Papa Duval and his wife, together with
the stubborn refusal of the imperious stranger to move!  Climax:
old Monsieur Vernet storming out of the café, swearing that he will
never return.  Resolution of conflict: the efforts of Papa and
Mamma Duval to bring their most prized customer back into the fold
again, and their final success, the pacification and return of
Monsieur Vernet amid great rejoicing, thanks to a cunning stratagem
on the part of Henri, the young waiter, who wins a reward for all
these efforts, the hand of Mimi, Papa Duval's charming daughter,
from whom he has been separated by Papa Duval's stern decree.

Thus custom is restored and true love reunited by one brilliant
comic stroke!

And all this pretty little world, the contribution of a rich young
man who came from Philadelphia!  How perfectly God-damn delightful
it all was, to be sure!

The plays of old Seth Flint, the sour and withered ex-reporter,
were, if of a different colouring, cut from the same gaudy cloth of
theatrical unreality.  For forty years old Seth had pounded
precincts as a newsman, and had known city-rooms across the nation.
He had seen every crime, ruin, and incongruity of which man's life
is capable.  He was familiar with every trait of graft, with every
accursed smell and smear of the old red murder which ineradicably
fouled the ancient soul of man, and the stench of man's falseness,
treachery, cruelty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and injustice, together
with the look of brains and blood upon the pavements of the nation,
was no new thing to old Seth Flint.

His skin had been withered, his eyes deadened, his heart and spirit
burdened wearily, his faith made cynical, and his temper soured by
the black picture of mankind which he had seen as a reporter--and
because of this, in spite of this, he had remained or become--how,
why, in what miraculous fashion no one knew--a curiously honest,
sweet, and generous person, whose life had been the record of a
selfless loyalty.  He had known poverty, hardship, and self-
sacrifice, and endured all willingly without complaint: he had
taken the savings of a lifetime to send the two sons of his widowed
sister to college; he had supported this woman and her family for
years, and now, when his own life was coming to its close, he was
yielding to the only self-indulgence he had ever known--a year away
from the city-room of a Denver newspaper, a year away in the rare
ether, among the precious and æsthetic intellects of Professor
Hatcher's celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream
of a lifetime, the vision of his youth--a year in which to write
the plays he had always dreamed of writing.  And what kind of plays
did he write?

Alas!  Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded
perfectly in fulfilling his desire--and, by a tragic irony, his
failure lay in just this fact.  The plays which he produced with an
astounding and prolific ease--("Three days is enough to write a
play," the old man said in his sour voice.  "You guys who take a
year to write a play give me a pain.  If you can't write a play a
week, you can't write anything; the play's no good")--these plays
were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man,
and therein was evident their irremediable fault.

For Seth's plays--so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done--would
have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only
done them twenty years before.  He wrote, without effort and with
unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular
at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had
grown tired of twenty years before.  He wrote plays in which the
babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in
which the rich man's child goes to the family of the little grocer,
and the grocer's child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune,
with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him.  And he
brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the
meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents,
with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that
was astonishing.  His characters--all well-known types of the
theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter
cynical, and so on--were well conceived to fret their purpose,
their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made.  He had mastered
the formula of an older type of "well-made play" with astonishing
success.  Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in
such plays had vanished twenty years before.

So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays
for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.

"Chekhov!  Ibsen!" old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing
gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his
bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face.  "You guys all make me
tired the way you worship them!" he would whine out at some of the
exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher's class.  "Those
guys can't write a play!  Take Chekhov, now!" whined Seth.  "That
guy never wrote a real play in his life!  He never knew how to
write a play!  He couldn't have written a play if he tried!  He
never learned the rules for writing a play!--That Cherry Orchard
now," whined old Seth with a sour sneering laugh, "--that Cherry
Orchard that you guys are always raving about!  That's not a play!"
he cried indignantly.  "Whatever made you think it was a play?  I
was trying to read it just the other day," he rasped, "and there's
nothing there to hold your interest!  It's got no PLOT!  There's no
story in it!  There's no suspense!  Nothing happens in it.  All you
got is a lot of people who do nothing but talk all the time.  You
never get anywhere," said Seth scornfully.  "And yet to hear you
guys rave about it, you'd think it was a great play."

"Well, what do you call a great play, then, if The Cherry Orchard
isn't one?" one of the young men said acidly.  "Who wrote the great
plays that you talk about?"

"Why, George M. Cohan wrote some," whined Seth instantly.  "That's
who.  Avery Hopwood wrote some great plays.  We've had plenty of
guys in this country who wrote great plays.  If they'd come from
Russia you'd get down and worship 'em," he said bitterly; "but just
because they came out of this country they're no good!"

In the relation of the class towards old Seth Flint, it was
possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life
everywhere around them.  For here was a man--whatever his defects
as a playwright might have been--who had lived incomparably the
richest, most varied and dangerous, and eventful life among them;
as he was himself far more interesting than any of the plays they
wrote, and as dramatists they should have recognized and understood
his quality.  But they saw none of this.  For their relation
towards life and people such as old Seth Flint was not one of
understanding.  It was not even one of burning indignation--of that
indignation which is one of the dynamic forces in the artist's
life.  It was rather one of supercilious scorn and ridicule.

They felt that they were "above" old Seth, and most of the other
people in the world, and for this reason they were in Professor
Hatcher's class.  Of Seth they said:

"He's really a misfit, terribly out of place here.  I wonder why he
came."

And they would listen to an account of one of Seth's latest errors
in good taste with the expression of astounded disbelief, the tones
of stunned incredulity which were coming into fashion about that
time among elegant young men.

"Not really! . . .  But he never really said THAT. . . .  You CAN'T
mean it."

"Oh, but I assure you, he did!"

". . . It's simply past belief! . . .  I can't believe he's as bad
as THAT."

"Oh, but he IS!  It's incredible, I know, but you've no idea what
he's capable of."  And so on.

And yet old Seth Flint was badly needed in that class: his bitter
and unvarnished tongue caused Professor Hatcher many painful
moments, but it had its use--oh, it had its use, particularly when
the play was of this nature:


Irene (slowly, with scorn and contempt in her voice).  So--it has
come to this!  This is all your love amounts to--a little petty
selfish thing!  I had thought you were bigger than that, John.

John (desperately).  But--but, my God, Irene--what am I to think?
I found you in bed with him--my best friend! (with difficulty).
You know--that looks suspicious, to say the least!

Irene (softly--with amused contempt in her voice).  You poor little
man!  And to think I thought your love was SO BIG.

John (wildly).  But I do love you, Irene.  That's just the point.

Irene (with passionate scorn).  Love!  You don't know what love
means!  Love is bigger than that!  Love is big enough for all
things, all people.  (She extends her arms in an all-embracing
gesture.)  My love takes in the world--it embraces all mankind!  It
is glamorous, wild, free as the wind, John.

John (slowly).  Then you have had other lovers?

Irene:  Lovers come, lovers go.  (She makes an impatient gesture.)
What is that?  Nothing!  Only love endures--my love, which is
greater than all.


Eugene would writhe in his seat, and clench his hands convulsively.
Then he would turn almost prayerfully to the bitter, mummied face
of old Seth Flint for that barbed but cleansing vulgarity that
always followed such a scene:

"Well?" Professor Hatcher would say, putting down the manuscript he
had been reading, taking off his eye-glasses (which were attached
to a ribbon of black silk) and looking around with a quizzical
smile, an impassive expression on his fine, distinguished face.
"Well?" he would say again urbanely, as no one answered.  "Is there
any comment?"

"What is she?"  Seth would break the nervous silence with his
rasping snarl.  "Another of these society whores?  You know," he
continued, "you can find plenty of her kind for three dollars a
throw without any of that fancy palaver."

Some of the class smiled faintly, painfully, and glanced at each
other with slight shrugs of horror; others were grateful, felt
pleasure well in them and said underneath their breath exultantly:

"Good old Seth!  Good old Seth!"

"Her love is big enough for all things, is it?" said Seth.  "I know
a truck driver out in Denver I'll match against her any day."

Eugene and Ed Horton, a large and robust aspirant from the Iowa
cornlands, roared with happy laughter, poking each other sharply in
the ribs.



"Do you think the play will act?" someone said.  "It seems to me
that it comes pretty close to closet drama."

"If you ask me," said Seth, "it comes pretty close to water-closet
drama. . . .  No," he said sourly.  "What that boy needs is a
little experience.  He ought to go out and get him a woman and get
all this stuff off his mind.  After that, he might sit down and
write a play."

For a moment there was a very awkward silence, and Professor
Hatcher smiled a trifle palely.  Then, taking his eye-glasses with
a distinguished movement, he looked around and said:

"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:


     "I do not know:
      It may be so."


Thus, when he was almost fifty, Bascom Pentland stopped preaching
in public.  There was no question where he was going.  He had his
family's raging lust for property.  He became a "conveyancer"; he
acquired enough of the law of property to convey titles; but he
began to buy pieces of land in the suburbs of Boston and to build
small cheap houses, using his own somewhat extraordinary designs to
save the architect's fees and, wherever possible, doing such odd
jobs as laying the foundations, installing the plumbing, and
painting the structure.

The small houses that he--no, he did not build them!--he went
through the agonies of monstrous childbirth to produce them, he
licked, nursed, and fondled them into stunted growth, and he sold
them on long but profitable terms to small Irish, Jewish, Negro,
Belgian, Italian and Greek labourers and tradesmen.  And at the
conclusion of a sale, or after receiving from one of these men the
current payment, Uncle Bascom went homeward in a delirium of joy,
shouting in a loud voice, to all who might be compelled to listen,
the merits of the Jews, Belgians, Irish, Swiss or Greeks.

"Finest people in the world!  No question about it!"--this last
being his favourite exclamation in all moments of payment or
conviction.

For when they paid he loved them.  Often on Sundays they would come
to pay him, tramping over the frozen ground or the packed snow
through street after street of smutty grey-looking houses in the
flat weary-looking suburb where he lived.  To this dismal heath,
therefore, they came, the swarthy children of a dozen races, clad
in the hard and decent blacks in which the poor pay debts and go to
funerals.  They would advance across the barren lands, the harsh
sere earth scarred with its wastes of rust and rubbish, going
stolidly by below the blank board fences of a brick yard, crunching
doggedly through the lanes of dirty rutted ice, passing before the
grey besmutted fronts of wooden houses which in their stark,
desolate, and unspeakable ugliness seemed to give a complete and
final utterance to an architecture of weariness, sterility and
horror, so overwhelming in its absolute desolation that it seemed
as if the painful and indignant soul of man must sicken and die at
length before it, stricken, stupefied, and strangled without a
tongue to articulate the curse that once had blazed in him.

And at length they would pause before the old man's little house--
one of a street of little houses which he had built there on the
barren flatlands of the suburb, and to which he had given
magnificently his own name--Pentland Heights--although the only
eminence in all that flat and weary waste was an almost
imperceptible rise a half-mile off.  And here along this street
which he had built, these little houses, warped yet strong and
hardy, seemed to burrow down solidly like moles for warmth into the
ugly stony earth on which they were built and to cower and huddle
doggedly below the immense and terrible desolation of the northern
sky, with its rimy sun-hazed lights, its fierce and cruel rags and
stripes of wintry red, its raw and savage harshness.  And then,
gripping their greasy little wads of money, as if in the knowledge
that all reward below these fierce and cruel skies must be wrenched
painfully and minutely from a stony earth, they went in to pay him.
He would come up to meet them from some lower cellar-depth,
swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward
them 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 they would wait, stiffly,
clumsily, fingering their hats, while with countless squints and
grimaces and pursings of the lip, he scrawled out painfully their
receipts--their fractional release from debt and labour, one more
hard-won step toward the freedom of possession.

At length, having pocketed their money and finished the
transaction, he would not permit them to depart at once; he would
howl urgently at them an invitation to stay, he would offer long
weedy-looking cigars to them, and they would sit uncomfortably,
crouching on their buttock bones like stalled oxen, at the edges of
chairs, shyly and dumbly staring at him, while he howled question,
comment, and enthusiastic tribute at them.

"Why, my dear sir!" he would yell at Makropolos, the Greek.  "You
have a glorious past, a history of which any nation might well be
proud!"

"Sure, sure!" said Makropolos, nodding vigorously.  "Beeg
Heestory!"

"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!" the old man howled,
"where burning Sappho loved and sung--" (Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!
phuh!)

"Sure, sure!" said Makropolos again, nodding good-naturedly but
wrinkling his lowering finger's-breadth of brow in a somewhat
puzzled fashion.  "Tha's right!  You got it!"

"Why, my dear sir!" Uncle Bascom cried.  "It has been the ambition
of my lifetime to visit those hallowed scenes, to stand at sunrise
on the Acropolis, to explore the glory that was Greece, to see the
magnificent ruins of the noblest of ancient civ-i-LIZ-a-tions!"

For the first time a dark flush, a flush of outraged patriotism,
began to burn upon the swarthy yellow of Mr. Makropolos's cheek:
his manner became heavy and animated, and in a moment he said with
passionate conviction:

"No, no, no!  No ruin!  Wat you t'ink, eh!  Athens fine town!  We
got a million pipples dere!"  He struggled for a word, then cupped
his hairy paws indefinitely:  "YOU know?  BEEG!  O, ni-ez!" he
added greasily, with a smile.  "Everyt'ing good!  We got everyt'ing
good dere as you got here!  YOU know?" he said with a confiding and
painful effort.  "Everyt'ing ni-ez!  Not old!  No, no, no!" he
cried with a rising and indignant vigour.  "New! de same as here.
Ni-ez!  You get good and cheap--everyt'ing!  Beeg place, new house,
dumbwaiter, elevator--wat chew like!--oh, ni-ez!" he said
earnestly.  "Wat chew t'ink it cost, eh?  Feefateen dollar a month!
Sure, sure!" he nodded with a swarthy earnestness.  "I wouldn't
keed you!"

"Finest people on earth!" Uncle Bascom cried with an air of great
conviction and satisfaction.  "No question about it!"--and he would
usher his visitor to the door, howling farewells into the terrible
desolation of those savage skies.

Meanwhile, Aunt Louise, although she had not heard a word of what
was said, although she had listened to nothing except the periods
of Uncle Bascom's heavily accented and particular speech, kept up a
constant snuffling laughter punctuated momently by faint whoops as
she bent over her pots and pans in the kitchen, pausing from time
to time as if to listen, and then snuffling to herself as she shook
her head in pitying mirth which rose again up to the crisis of a
faint crazy cackle as she scoured the pan; because, of course,
during the forty-five years of her life with him she had gone
thoroughly, imperceptibly, and completely mad, and no longer knew
or cared to know whether these words had just been spoken or were
the echoes of lost voices long ago.

And again, she would pause to listen, with her small birdlike
features uplifted gleefully in a kind of mad attentiveness as the
door slammed and he stumped muttering back into the house, intent
upon the secret designs of his own life, as remote and isolate from
her as if they had each dwelt on separate planets, although the
house they lived in was a small one.



Such had been the history of the old man.  His life had come up
from the wilderness, the buried past, the lost America.  The potent
mystery of old events and moments had passed around him, and the
magic light of dark time fell across him.

Like all men in this land, he had been a wanderer, an exile on the
immortal earth.  Like all of us, he had no home.  Wherever great
wheels carried him was home.

As the old man and his nephew talked together, Louise would prepare
the meal in the kitchen, which gave on the living-room where they
ate, by a swing door that she kept open, in order that she might
hear what went on.  And, while they waited, Uncle Bascom would talk
to the boy on a vast range of subjects, dealing with that
literature in which he had once been deep--the poetry of the Old
Testament, the philosophy of Hegel, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold,
whom he worshipped, or some question in the daily papers.

Uncle Bascom, seated, his fine gaunt face grave, magnificently
composed now above his arched gnarled hands, spoke with eloquent
deliberation.  He became triumphant reasoning mind: he talked with
superb balanced judgment.  All the tumult and insanity of his life
had been forgotten: no question of money or of self was involved.
Meanwhile, from the kitchen Aunt Louise kept up a constant
snuffling laughter, punctuated momently by faint whoops.  She was
convinced, of course, that her husband was mad and all his opinions
nonsensical.  Yet she had not listened to a word of what he was
saying, but only to the sound of his heavily accented, precise, and
particular speech.  From time to time, snuffling to herself, she
would look in on Eugene, trembling with laughter, and shake her
head at him in pitying mirth.

"BEYOND a doubt!  Beyond a DOUBT!" Uncle Bascom would say.  "The
quality of the best writing in the books of the Old Testament may
take rank with the best writing that has ever been done, but you
are right in believing, too, the amount of great writing is less
than it is commonly supposed to be.  There are passages, nay!
BOOKS"--his voice rising strangely to a husky howl--"of the vilest
rubbish--Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth--O vile! vile!" he cried. . . .
"And Azariah begat Amariah and Amariah begat Ahitub (Phuh!
Phuh!  Phuh!).  AHITUB!" he sneered.  "And Azariah begat Seraiah,
and Seraiah begat Jehozadak (Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!) JEHOZADAK"--he
sneered with his precise articulation, finally letting out the last
syllable with a kind of snarling contempt.  "Can you IMAGINE, can
you even DREAM," he howled, "of calling anyone a name like that!
'And Jehozadak went into captivity'--as, indeed, he ought! (phuh!
phuh! phuh!)--his VERY name would constitute a PENAL offence!
(Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!) JeHOZadak!" Uncle Bascom sneered.  "But," he
proceeded deliberately in a moment, as he stared calmly over his
great arched hands, "--but--the quality of some of the language is
God-intoxicated: the noblest poetry ever chanted in the service of
eternity."

"The Book of Wevelations," cried Aunt Louise, suddenly rushing out
of the kitchen with a carving-knife in her hand, having returned to
earth for a moment to hear him.  "The Book of Wevelations!" she
said in a hoarse whisper, her mouth puckered with disgust.
"EUGENE!  A WICKED, bloo-o-edy, kwu-u-el monument to supahstition.
Twibute to an avenging and MUH-DUH-WOUS GAWD!"  The last word
uttered in a hoarse almost inaudible whisper would find his aunt
bent double, clutching a knife in one hand, with her small bright
eyes glaring madly at us.

"Oh no, my dear, oh no," said Uncle Bascom, with astonishing,
unaccustomed sadness, with almost exquisite gentleness.  And, his
vibrant passionate voice thrilling suddenly with emotion, he added:

"The triumphant music of one of the mightiest of earth's poets: the
sublime utterance of a man for whom God had opened the mysteries of
heaven and hell."

He paused a moment, then quietly in a remote voice--in that remote
and magnificent voice which could thrill men so deeply when it
uttered poetry, he continued:  "'I am Alpha and Omega, the first
and the last, the beginning and the end'--the mightiest line, my
dear boy, the most magnificent poetry, that was ever written."  And
suddenly Uncle Bascom threw his gaunt hands before his face, and
wept in strong hoarse sobs:  "Oh, my God, my God!--the beauty, the
pity of it all! . . .  You must pardon me," he whispered after a
moment, drawing his faded sweater sleeve across his eyes.  "You
must pardon me.  It brought back--memories."

Aunt Louise, who had been stricken with a kind of fear and horror
when he began to weep, now looked at Eugene with an expression of
strong physical disgust, almost of nausea, shaking her head
slightly in an affronted and ladylike manner as might one who,
having achieved healthy and courageous discipline over all the
excesses of emotion, feels only contempt for him who gives way to
them.

She retired now with exaggerated dignity to the kitchen, served the
meal, and addressed Eugene for some time thereafter with absurd
quietness and restraint of manner, and a kind of stiff primness
about her backbone.  She was an excellent cook; there was magic in
her treatment of food, and on the occasions when Eugene was coming
out, she insisted that Bascom get her a decent piece of meat to
work with.

There would be a juicy fragrant piece of lamb, or a boiled leg of
mutton with currant jelly, or perhaps a small crisply browned roast
of beef, with small flaky biscuits, smoking hot, two or three
vegetables, and rich coffee.  Uncle Bascom, quite unperturbed by
his outbreak, would stamp into the kitchen, where he could be heard
swearing and muttering to himself, as he searched for various
things.  Later he would appear at the table bearing a platter
filled with some revolting mess of his own concoction--a mixture of
raw vegetables, chopped up--onions, carrots, beans, and raw
potatoes--for he had the full strength of his family's mania
concerning food, violent prejudices about its preparation, and
deep-seated distrust of everybody's cleanliness but his own.

"Have some, my boy.  Have some!" he would yell huskily, seating
himself and lunging toward Eugene with the awful mess, in a gesture
of violent invitation.

"Thank you, no."  Eugene would try to keep his eyes averted from
the mess and focus on the good food heaping his plate.

"You may eat that slop if you want to," Uncle Bascom would exclaim
with a scornful and sneering laugh.  "It would give ME my death of
dyspepsia."  And the silence of their eating would be broken by the
recurrent snuffling whoops of Aunt Louise, accompanied by many
pitying looks and head-shakes as she trembled with laughter and hid
her mouth.

Or, suddenly, in the full rich progress of the meal, Eugene would
be shocked out of his pleasure in the food by the mad bright eyes
of Aunt Louise bearing fiercely down upon him:

"Eugene!--don't bwood, boy!  Don't bwood!  You've got it in you--
it's in the blood!  You're one of them.  You're one of THEM!--a
PENTLAND," she croaked fatally.

"Ah-h--you DON'T know what you're talking about"--thus suddenly in
fierce distemper Uncle Bascom.  "SCOTCH!  SCOTCH-Irish!  Finest
people on earth!  No question about it whatever."

"Fugitive ideation!  Fugitive ideation!" she chattered like a
monkey over a nut.  "Mind goes off in all diwections.  Can't stick
to anything five minutes at a time.  The same thing that's wong
with the moduhn decadents.  Wead Nordau's book, Eugene.  It will
open yoah eyes," and she whispered hoarsely again:  "You're OVAH-
SEXED--ALL of you!"

"Bosh!  Bosh!" growled Uncle Bascom.  "Some more of your
psychology--the BASTARD of superstition and quackery: the black
magic of little minds--the effort of a blind man (phuh! phuh!
phuh!) crawling about in a dark room (phuh! phuh!) looking for a
BLACK CAT (phuh! phuh!) that ISN'T THERE," he yelled triumphantly,
and closed his eyes and snarled and snuffled down his nose with
laughter.

He knew nothing about it: occasionally he still read Kant, and he
could be as deep in absolute categories, moments of negation, and
definitions of a concept as she with all of her complicated and
extensive paraphernalia of phobias, complexes, fixations, and
repressions.

"Well, Eugene," thus Aunt Louise with light raillery and yet with
eager curiosity, "have you found you a nice wosy-cheeked New
England gul yet?  You had bettah watch OUT, boy!  I tell you, you
had bettah watch OUT!" she declared, kittenishly, wagging her
finger at him, before he had time to answer.

"If he has," said Uncle Bascom grimly, "he will find her sadly
lacking in the qualities of delicacy, breeding, and womanly decorum
that the Southern girl has.  Oh, yes!  No question about that
whatever!" for Uncle Bascom still had the passionate loyalty and
sentimental affection for the South that many Southerners have who
could not be induced, under any circumstances, to return.

"Take a Nawthun gul, Eugene."  Aunt Louise became at once
combative.  "They're bettah for you!  They are BETTAH.  They are
BETTAH!" she declared, shaking her head in an obdurate manner, as
if further argument was useless.  "Moah independence!  Bettah
minds!  They won't choke yoah life out by hanging awound yoah
neck," she concluded crisply.

"I will tell you a story," Uncle Bascom continued deliberately as
if she had not spoken, "that will illustrate admirably what I
mean."  Here he cleared his throat, as if he were preparing to
deliver a set speech, and began in a deliberate and formal tone:
"Some years ago I had occasion to go to Portland, Maine, on
business.  When I arrived at the North Station I found a crowd
waiting before the window: it was necessary for me to wait in line.
I was carrying a small valise which I placed on the floor between
my legs in order to get out the money for my ticket.  At this
moment the woman who stood behind me, apparently not given to
noticing very well where she was going," he snarled bitterly,
"started to move forward and stubbed her toe against the valise.
Before I had time to turn round and apologize"--he stopped
abruptly, then, leaning forward with a horrible grimace, he tapped
Eugene stiffly with his great bony fingers and continued in a
lowered voice:  "Say!  Have you any idea what she did, my boy?"

"No," Eugene said.

"Why, I give you my word, my boy," he whispered solemnly, "without
so much as 'By your leave,' she lifted her leg and KICKED me,
KICKED me"--he howled--"in the STERN!  And SHE, my boy, was a New
England woman."

"Whoo-o-op!"  Aunt Louise was off again, rocking back and forth,
holding her napkin over her mouth.

"Can you IMAGINE, can you DREAM," said Bascom, his voice an intense
whisper of disgust, "of a Southern lady, the flower of modesty and
the old aristocracy, doing such a thing as that?"

"Yes-s," hissed Aunt Louise, her cackle subsiding, leaning
intensely across the table and glaring at him, "and it SUHVED you
wight!  It SUHVED you wight!  It SUHVED you wight!  These things
would nevah happen if you thought of any one's convenience but yoah
own.  What WIGHT did you have to put yoah baggage there?  What
WIGHT?"

"Ah," he replied, with a kind of precise snarl, profoundly
contemptuous of her opinion, "you-don't-know-what-you're-talk-ing-
about!  What RIGHT? she says--Why all the right in the world," he
yelled.  "Have you ever read the conditions enumerated upon the
back of railway tickets concerning the transportation of baggage?"

"Suttinly not!" she retorted crisply.  "One does not need to wead
the backs of wailway tickets to learn how to behave like a
civilized pusson!"

"Well, I will tell them to you," said Uncle Bascom, licking his
lips, and with a look of joy upon his face.  And, at great length,
with infinite gusto, lip-pursing, and legal pedantry of elocution,
he would enumerate them all.

"And say, by the way, Eugene," he would continue without a halt,
"there is a very charming young lady who occasionally comes to my
office (with her mother, of course) who is very anxious to meet
you.  She is a musician: she appears quite often in public.  They
live in Melrose, but they came, originally, I believe, from New
Hampshire.  Finest people in the world: no question about it," his
uncle said.

And suddenly alert, scenting adventure and seduction, the young man
got the address from him immediately.

"Yes, my boy"--here Uncle Bascom fumbled through a mass of
envelopes--"you may call her, without indiscretion, over the
telephone at any time.  I have spoken to her frequently about you:
no doubt you'll find much in common.  Or, SAY!"--here a flash of
inspiration aroused him to volcanic action--"I could call her now
and let you talk to her."  And he plunged violently toward the
telephone.

"No, no, no, no, no!"  Eugene sprang after him and checked him.
For he wanted to make his own appointment luxuriously in private,
sealed darkly in a telephone booth, craftily to feel his way,
speculating on the curve of the unseen hip by the sound of the
voice; probing, with the most delicate innuendo, the depth and
richness of the promise.  He loathed all family intercession and
interference: they placed, he felt, at the outset, a crushing
restraint upon the adventure from which it could never recover.

"I had rather call her myself," he added, "when I have more time.
I don't know when I could see her now: it might be awkward calling
at just this time."

Later, while Uncle Bascom was poking furiously at the meagre coals
of the tiny furnace in the cellar, setting up a clangorous and
smoky din all through the house, Aunt Louise would bear down madly
upon the boy, whispering:

"Did you hear him!  Did you hear him!  Still mad about the women at
his age!  Can't keep his hands off them!  The lechewous old fool!"
and she cackled bitterly.  Then, with a fierce change:  "He's MAD
about them, Eugene.  He's had one after anothah for the last twenty
yeahs!  He has spent FAW-CHUNS on them!  Have you seen that gul in
his office yet?  The stenographer?"

He had, and believed he had rarely seen a more solidly dull
unattractive female than this pallid course-featured girl.  But he
only said:  "Yes."

"He has spent thousands on her, Gene!  THOUSANDS!  The old fool!
And all they do is laugh at him behind his back.  Why, even at home
heah," her eyes darting madly about the place, "he can hardly keep
his hands off me at times!  I have to lock myself in my woom to
secure pwotection," and her bright old eyes muttered crazily about
in her head.

He thought these outbursts the result of frantic and extravagant
jealousy: fruit of some passionate and submerged affection that his
aunt still bore for her husband.  This, perhaps, was true, but
later he was to find there was a surprising modicum of fact in what
she had said.



During the wintry afternoon, he would sit and smoke one of his
uncle's corn-cob pipes, filling it with the coarse cheap powerful
tobacco that lay, loosely spread, upon a bread-board in the
kitchen.

Meanwhile, his aunt, on these usual Sundays when she must remain at
home, played entire operas from Wagner on her small victrola.

Most of the records had been given her by her two daughters, and
during the week the voices of the music afforded her the only
companionship she had.  The boy listened attentively to all she
said about music, because he knew little about it, and had got from
poetry the kind of joy that music seemed to give to others.
Shifting the records quickly, his aunt would point out the
melodramatic effervescence of the Italians, the metallic precision,
the orderly profusion, the thrill, the vibration, the emptiness of
French composition.  She liked the Germans and the Russians.  She
liked what she called the "barbaric splendour" of Rimsky, but was
too late, of course, either to have heard or to care much for the
modern composers.

She would play Wagner over and over again, lost in the enchanted
forests of the music, her spirit wandering drunkenly down vast
murky aisles of sound, through which the great hoarse throats of
horns were baying faintly.  And occasionally, on Sundays, on one of
her infrequent excursions into the world, when her daughters bought
her tickets for concerts at Symphony Hall--that great grey room
lined on its sides with pallid plaster shells of Greece--she would
sit perched high, a sparrow held by the hypnotic serpent's eye of
music--following each motif, hearing minutely each subtle entry of
the mellow flutes, the horns, the spinal ecstasy of violins--until
her lonely and desolate life was spun out of her into aerial
fabrics of bright sound.

During this time, Uncle Bascom, who also knew nothing about music,
and cared so little for it that he treated his wife's passion for
it with contempt, would bury himself in the Sunday papers, or thumb
deliberately through the pages of an ancient edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica in search of arbitrament for some contested
point.

"Ah!  Here we are, just as I thought," he would declare suddenly,
with triumphant satisfaction.  "'Upon the fifth, however, in spite
of the heavy rains which had made of the roads quaking bogs,
Jackson appeared suddenly from the South, at the head of an army of
33,000 men.'"

Then they would wrangle furiously over the hour, the moment, the
place of dead event: each rushing from the room fiercely to produce
the document which would support his own contention.

"Your aunt, my boy, is not the woman she once was," Bascom would
say regretfully during her absence.  "No question about that!  At
one time she was a very remarkable woman!  Yes, sir, a woman of
very considerable intelligence--considerable, that is, for a
woman," he said, with a slight sneer.

And she, whispering, when he had gone:  "You have noticed, of
course, Gene?"

"What?"

"His mind's going," she muttered.  "What a head he had fifteen
years ago!  But NOW!--Senile decay--G. Stanley Hall--forgets
everything--" she whispered hoarsely, as she heard his returning
footfalls.

Or, as the winter light darkened greyly, slashed on the western sky
by fierce cold red, his uncle passed sheaf after sheaf of his verse
to him, sniggering nosily, and prodding the boy with his great
fingers, while his aunt cleared the table or listened to the music.
The great majority of these verses, laboured and pedantic as they
were, were variations of the motif of agnosticism, the horn on
which his ministry in the Church had fatally gored itself--and
still a brand that smouldered in his brain--not now so much from an
all-mastering conviction, as from some desire to justify himself.
These verses, which he asserted were modelled on those of his great
hero, Matthew Arnold, were all remarkably like this one:


                 MY CREED

     "Is there a land beyond the stars
      Where we may find eternal day,
      Life after death, peace after wars?
      Is there?  I cannot say.
      Shall we find there a happier life,
      All joy that here we never know,
      Love in all things, an end of strife?
      Perhaps: it may be so."


And so on.

And sniggering down his nose, Bascom would prod the young man
stiffly with his great fingers, saying, as he slyly thrust another
verse into his hand:

"Something in a lighter vein, my boy.  Just a little foolishness,
you know.  (Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh)"  Which was:


     "Mary had a little calf,
      It followed up her leg,
      And everywhere that Mary went,
      The boys were sure to beg."


And so on.

Uncle Bascom had hundreds of them:  Poems--Chiefly Religious, he
sent occasionally to the morning papers.  They were sometimes
printed in the Editor's Correspondence or The Open Forum.  But
Poems--Chiefly Profane he kept apparently for his own regalement.



Then, as it darkened, toward five o'clock, the boy would depart,
leaving them at times bitterly involved in a political wrangle,
with the strewn Sunday numbers of The Boston Herald and The Boston
Post around them, she parroting intensely the newspaper jargon,
assaulting Borah and "the Senate iwweconcilables," he angrily
defending Senator Lodge as a scholar and a gentleman, with whom he
had not always been in agreement, but from whom he had once
received a most courteous letter--a fact which seemed to
distinguish him in Bascom's mind as the paragon of statesmanship.

And as Eugene left, he would note, with a swift inchoate pang, the
sudden mad loneliness in Aunt Louise's eyes, doomed for another
week to her grim imprisonment.  But he did not know that her
distended and exhausted heart hissed audibly each time she ascended
from futile labour on the cold furnace, stoked with cheap slag and
coke, and that her thin blood was fed by gristly butcher's
leavings, in answer to the doctor's call for meat.

And his aunt would go with Eugene to the frost-glazed door, open
it, and stand huddled meagrely and hugging herself together beneath
the savage desolation of the Northern cold; talking to him for a
moment and calling brightly after him as he went down the icy path:
"Come again, boy!  Always glad to see you!"

And in the dull cold Sunday light he strode away, his spirit braced
by the biting air, the Northern cold, the ragged bloody sky, which
was somehow prophetic to him of glorious fulfilment, and at the
same time depressed by the grey enormous weight of Sunday tedium
and dreariness all around him.

And yet, he never lost heart that out of this dullness he would
draw some rich adventure.  He strode away with quickening pulse,
hoping to see it issue from every warmly lighted house, to find it
in the street cars, the subway or at a restaurant.  Then he would
go back into the city and dine at one of the restaurants where the
pretty waitresses served him.  Later he would go out on the
sparsely peopled Sunday streets, turning finally, as a last resort,
into Washington Street, where the moving-picture places and cheap
vaudeville houses were filled with their Sunday Irish custom.

Sometimes he went in, but as one weary act succeeded the other, and
the empty brutal laughter of the people echoed in his ears, seeming
to him forced and dishonest, as if people laughed at the ghosts of
mirth, the rotten husks of stale wit, the sordidness, hopelessness,
and sterility of their lives oppressed him hideously.  On the stage
he would see the comedian again display his red neck-tie with a
leer, and hear the people laugh about it; he would hear again that
someone was a big piece of cheese, and listen to them roar; he
would observe again the pert and cheap young comedian with nothing
to offer waste time portentously, talk in a low voice with the
orchestra leader; and the only thing he liked would be the strength
and balance of the acrobats.

Finally, drowned in a sea-depth of grey horror, and with the weary
brutal laughter of the audience ringing in his ears, he would rush
out on the street again, filled with its hideous Sunday dullness
and the sterile wink of the chop-suey signs, and take the train to
Cambridge.

And there, as the night grew late, his spirit would surge up in
him; sunken in books at midnight, with the soft numb prescience of
brooding snow upon the air, the feeling of exultancy, joy, and
invincible strength would come back; and he was sure that the door
would open for him, the magic word be spoken, and that he would
make all of the glory, power, and beauty of the earth his own.



XVIII


One day the boy telephoned the girl of whom his Uncle Bascom had
spoken.  She was coy and cautious, but sounded hopeful: he liked
her voice.  When, after some subtle circumlocutions, he asked her
for an early meeting, she countered swiftly by asking him to meet
her the following evening at the North Station: she was coming in
to town to perform at a dinner.  She played the violin.  He
understood very well that she was really anxious to see him before
admitting him to the secure licence of a suburban parlour; so he
bathed himself, threw powder under his arm-pits, and put on a new
shirt, which he bought for the occasion.

It was November: rain fell coldly and drearily.  He buttoned
himself in his long raincoat and went to meet her.  She had
promised to wear a red carnation; the suggestion was her own, and
tickled him hugely.  As the pink-faced suburbanites poured, in an
icy stream, into the hot waiting-room, he looked for her.
Presently he saw her: she came toward him immediately, since his
height was unmistakable.  They talked excitedly flustered, but
gradually getting some preliminary sense of each other.

She was a rather tall, slender girl, dressed in garments that
seemed to have been left over, in good condition, from the early
part of the century.  She wore a flat but somehow towering hat: it
seemed to perch upon her head as do those worn by the Queen of
England.  She was covered with a long blue coat, which flared and
bustled at the hips, and had screws and curls of black corded
ornament; she looked respectable and antiquated, but her costume,
and a naïve stupidity in her manner, gave her a quaintness that he
liked.  He took her to the subway, having arranged a meeting at her
home for the following night.

The girl, whose name was Genevieve Simpson, lived with her mother
and her brother, a heavy young lout of nineteen years, in a two-
family house at Melrose.  The mother, a small, full, dumpling-face
woman, whose ordinary expression in repose, in common with that of
so many women of the middle class in America who have desired one
life and followed another and found perhaps that its few
indispensable benefits, as security, gregariousness, decorum, have
not been as all-sufficient as they had hoped, was one of sullen,
white, paunch-eyed discontent.

It was this inner petulance, the small carping disparagement of
everyone and everything that entered the mean light of her world,
that made absurdly palpable the burlesque mechanism of social
heartiness.  Looking at her while she laughed with shrill falsity
at all the wrong places, he would rock with huge guffaws, to which
she would answer with eager renewal, believing that both were
united in their laughter over something of which she was, it is
true, a little vague.

It was, she felt, her business to make commercially attractive to
every young man the beauty and comfort of the life she had made for
her family, and although the secret niggling discontent of their
lives was plainly described on both her own and her daughter's
face, steeped behind their transparent masks in all the small
poisons of irritability and bitterness, they united in their pretty
tableau before the world--a tableau, he felt, something like those
final exhibitions of grace and strength with which acrobats finish
the act, the strained smile of ease and comfort, as if one could go
on hanging by his toes for ever, the grieving limbs, the whole
wrought torture which will collapse in exhausted relief the second
the curtain hides it.

"We want you to feel absolutely at home here," she said brightly.
"Make this your headquarters.  You will find us simple folk here,
without any frills," she continued, with a glance around the
living-room, letting her eye rest with brief satisfaction upon the
striped tiles of the hearth, the flowered vases of the mantel, the
naked doll, tied with a pink sash, on the piano, and the pictures
of "The Horse Fair," the lovers flying before the storm, Maxfield
Parrish's "Dawn," and Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," which
broke the spaces of the wall, "but if you like a quiet family life,
a welcome is always waiting for you here.  Oh, yes--everyone is for
each other here: we keep no secrets from each other in our little
family."

Eugene thought that this was monstrous if it was true; a swift look
at Genevieve and Mama convinced him, however, that not everything
was being told.  A mad exultancy arose in him: the old desire
returned again to throw a bomb into the camp, in order to watch its
effect; to express murderous opinions in a gentle Christian voice,
further entrenched by an engaging matter-of-factness, as if he were
but expressing the commonplace thought of all sensible people;
bawdily, lewdly, shockingly with a fine assumption of boyish
earnestness, sincerity, and naïveté.  So, in a voice heavily coated
with burlesque feeling, he said:  "Thank you, thank you, Mrs.
Simpson.  You have no idea what it means to me to be able to come
to a place like this."

"I know," said Genevieve with fine sympathy, "when you're a
thousand miles from home--"

"A thousand!" he cried, with a bitter laugh, "a thousand!  Say
rather a million."  And he waited, almost squealing in his throat,
until they should bite.

"But--but your home is in the South, isn't it?" Mrs. Simpson
inquired doubtfully.

"Home!  Home!" cried he, with raucous laugh.  "I have no home!"

"Oh, you poor boy!" said Genevieve.

"But your parents--are they BOTH dead?"

"No!" he answered, with a sad smile.  "They are both living."

There was a pregnant silence.

"They do not live together," he added after a moment, feeling he
could not rely on their deductive powers.

"O-o-oh," said Mrs. Simpson significantly, running the vowel up and
down the vocal scale.  "O-o-oh!"

"Nasty weather, isn't it?" he remarked, deliberately drawing a
loose cigarette from his pocket.  "I wish it would snow: I like
your cold Northern winters as only a Southerner can like them; I
like the world at night when it is muffled, enclosed with snow; I
like a warm secluded house, sheltered under heavy fir trees, with
the curtains drawn across a mellow light, and books, and a
beautiful woman within.  These are some of the things I like."

"Gee!" said the boy, his heavy blond head leaned forward intently.
"What was the trouble?"

"Jimmy!  Hush!" cried Genevieve, and yet they all looked toward
Eugene with eager intensity.

"The trouble?" said he, vacantly.  "What trouble?"

"Between your father and mother?"

"Oh," he said carelessly, "he beat her."

"Aw-w!  He hit her with his fist?"

"Oh, no.  He generally used a walnut walking-stick.  It got too
much for her finally.  My mother, even then, was not a young woman--
she was almost fifty, and she could not stand the gaff so well as
she could in her young days.  I'll never forget that last night,"
he said, gazing thoughtfully into the coals with a smile.  "I was
only seven, but I remember it all very well.  Papa had been brought
home drunk by the mayor."

"The MAYOR?"

"Oh, yes," said Eugene casually.  "They were great friends.  The
mayor often brought him home when he was drunk.  But he was very
violent that time.  After the mayor had gone, he stamped around the
house smashing everything he could get his hands on, cursing and
blaspheming at the top of his voice.  My mother stayed in the
kitchen and paid no attention to him when he entered.  This, of
course, infuriated him.  He made for her with the poker.  She saw
that at last she was up against it; but she had realized that such
a moment was inevitable.  She was not unprepared.  So she reached
in the flour bin and got her revolver--"

"Did she have a revolver?"

"Oh, yes," he said nonchalantly, "my Uncle Will had given it to her
as a Christmas present.  Knowing my father as he did, he told her
it might come in handy sometime.  Mama was forced to shoot at him
three times before he came to his senses."

There was a silence.

"Gee!" said the boy, finally.  "Did she hit him?"

"Only once," Eugene replied, tossing his cigarette into the fire.
"A flesh wound in the leg.  A trifle.  He was up and about in less
than a week.  But, of course, Mama had left him by that time."

"Well!" said Mrs. Simpson, after a yet longer silence, "I've never
had to put up with anything like THAT."

"No, thank heaven!" said Genevieve fervently.  Then, curiously:
"Is--is your mother Mr. Pentland's sister?"

"Yes."

"And the uncle who gave her the revolver--Mr. Pentland's brother?"

"Oh, yes," Eugene answered readily.  "It's all the same family."
He grinned in his entrails, thinking of Uncle Bascom.

"Mr. Pentland seems a very educated sort of man," said Mrs.
Simpson, having nothing else to say.

"Yes.  We went to see him when we were hunting for a house,"
Genevieve added.  "He was very nice to us.  He told us he had once
been in the ministry."

"Yes," said Eugene.  "He was a Man of God for more than twenty
years--one of the most eloquent, passionate, and gifted soul-savers
that ever struck fear into the hearts of the innumerable sinners of
the American nation.  In fact, I know of no one with whom to
compare him, unless I turn back three centuries to Jonathan
Edwards, the Puritan divine, who evoked, in a quiet voice like the
monotonous dripping of water, a picture of hell-fire so near that
the skins of the more imaginative fanatics on the front rows
visibly blistered.  However, Edwards spoke for two and a half
hours: Uncle Bascom, with his mad and beautiful tongue, has been
known to drive people insane with terror in twenty-seven minutes by
the clock.  There are still people in the asylums that he put
there," he said piously.  "I hope," he added quickly, "you didn't
ask him why he had left the Church."

"Oh, no!" said Genevieve.  "We never did that."

"Why did he?" asked Mrs. Simpson bluntly, who felt that now she had
only to ask and it would be given.  She was not disappointed.

"It was the centuries-old conflict between organized authority and
the individual," said Eugene.  "No doubt you have felt it in your
own lives.  Uncle Bascom was a poet, a philosopher, a mystic--he
had the soul of an artist which must express divine love and ideal
beauty in corporeal form.  Such a man as this is not going to be
shackled by the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical convention.  An
artist must love and be loved.  He must be swept by the Flow of
Things, he must be a constantly expanding atom in the rhythmic
surges of the Life Force.  Who knew this better than Uncle Bascom
when he first met the choir contralto?"

"Contralto!" gasped Genevieve.

"Perhaps she was a soprano," said Eugene.  "It skills not.  Suffice
it to say they lived, they loved, they had their little hour of
happiness.  Of course, when the child came--"

"The child!" screamed Mrs. Simpson.

"A bouncing boy.  He weighed thirteen pounds at birth and is at the
present a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy."

"What became of--her?" said Genevieve.

"Of whom?"

"The--the contralto."

"She died--she died in childbirth."

"But--but Mr. Pentland?" inquired Mrs. Simpson in an uncertain
voice.  "Didn't he--marry her?"

"How could he?" Eugene answered with calm logic.  "He was married
to someone else."

And casting his head back, suddenly he sang:  "You know I'm in love
with some-boddy else, so why can't you leave me alone?"

"Well, I NEVER!"  Mrs. Simpson stared dumbly into the fire.

"Well, HARDLY ever," Eugene became allusively Gilbertian.  "She
hardly ever has a Big, Big B."  And he sang throatily:  "Oh, yes!
Oh, yes, in-deed!" relapsing immediately into a profound and moody
abstraction, but noting with delight that Genevieve and her mother
were looking at him furtively, with frightened and bewildered
glances.

"Say!"  The boy, whose ponderous jowl had been sunken on his fist
for ten minutes, now at length distilled a question.  "Whatever
became of your father?  Is he still living?"

"No!" said Eugene, after a brief pause, returning suddenly to fact.
"No!  He's still dying."

And he fixed upon them suddenly the battery of his fierce eyes, lit
with horror:

"He has a cancer."  After a moment, he concluded:  "My father is a
very great man."

They looked at him in stricken bewilderment.

"Gee!" said the boy, after another silence.  "That guy's worse than
our old man!"

"Jimmy!  Jimmy!" whispered Genevieve scathingly.

There was a very long, for the Simpson family, a very painful,
silence.

"Aha!  Aha!"  Eugene's head was full of ahas.

"I suppose you have thought it strange," Mrs. Simpson began with a
cracked laugh, which she strove to make careless, "that you have
never seen Mr. Simpson about when you called?"

"Yes," he answered with a ready dishonesty, for he had never
thought of it at all.  But he reflected at the same moment that
this was precisely the sort of thing people were always thinking
of: suddenly before the embattled front of that little family, its
powers aligned for the defence of reputation, he felt lonely, shut
out.  He saw himself looking in at them through a window: all
communication with life grouped and protected seemed for ever shut
off.

"Mother decided some months ago that she could no longer live with
Father," said Genevieve, with sad dignity.

"Sure," volunteered Jimmy, "he's livin' with another woman!"

"Jimmy!" said Genevieve hoarsely.

Eugene had a momentary flash of humorous sympathy with the departed
Simpson; then he looked at her white bickering face and felt sorry
for her.  She carried her own punishment with her.



XIX


Shall a man be dead within your heart before his rotten flesh be
wholly dead within the ground, and before the producing fats and
syrup cease to give life to his growing hair?  Shall a man so soon
be done with that which still provides a nest for working maggotry
or shall a brother leave a brother's memory before the worms have
left his tissue?  This is a pregnant subject: there should be laws
passed, and a discipline, which train a man to greater constancy.
And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would
awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an
enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some
strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of
pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood, and feel the
strange and bitter miracle of life and have no words for what he
wished to say.

That lost world would come back to him at many times, and often for
no cause that he could trace or fathom--a voice half-heard, a word
far-spoken, a leaf, a light that came and passed and came again.
But always when that lost world would come back, it came at once,
like a sword-thrust through the entrails, in all its panoply of
past time, living, whole, and magic as it had always been.

And always when it came to him, and at whatever time, and for
whatever reason, he could hear his father's great voice sounding in
the house again and see his gaunt devouring stride as he had come
muttering round the corner at the hour of noon long years before.

And then he would hear again the voice of his dead brother, and
remember with a sense of black horror, dream-like disbelief, that
Ben was dead, and yet could not believe that Ben had ever died, or
that he had had a brother, lost a friend.  Ben would come back to
him in these moments with a blazing and intolerable reality, until
he heard his quiet living voice again, saw his fierce scowling eyes
of bitter grey, his scornful, proud and lively face, and always
when Ben came back to him it was like this: he saw his brother in
a single image, in some brief forgotten moment of the past,
remembered him by a word, a gesture, a forgotten act; and certainly
all that could ever be known of Ben's life was collected in that
blazing image of lost time and the forgotten moment.  And suddenly
he would be there in a strange land, staring upward from his bed in
darkness, hearing his brother's voice again, and living in the far
and bitter miracle of time.

And always now, when Ben came back to him, he came within the frame
and limits of a single image, one of those instant blazing images
which from this time would haunt his memory and which more and
more, as a kind of distillation--a reward for all the savage
struggles of his Faustian soul with the protean and brain-maddening
forms of life--were to collect and concentrate the whole material
of experience and memory, in which the process of ten thousand days
and nights could in an instant be resumed.  And the image in which
Ben now always came to him was this: he saw his brother standing in
a window, and an old red light of fading day, and all the strange
and tragic legend of his destiny was on his brow, and all that any
man could ever see or know or understand of his dead brother's life
was there.

Bitter and beautiful, scorn no more.  Ben stands there in the
window, for a moment idle, his strong, lean fingers resting lightly
on his bony hips, his grey eyes scowling fiercely, bitterly and
contemptuously over the laughing and exuberant faces of the crowd.
For a moment more he scowls fixedly at them with an expression of
almost savage contempt.  Then scornfully he turns away from them.
The bitter, lean and pointed face, the shapely, flashing, close-
cropped head jerks upward, backward, he laughs briefly and with
pitying contempt as he speaks to that unknown and invisible auditor
who all his life has been the eternal confidant and witness of his
scorn.

"Oh my God!" he says, jerking his scornful head out towards the
crowd again.  "Listen to this, will you?"

They look at him with laughing and exuberant faces, unwounded by
his scorn.  They look at him with a kind of secret and unspoken
tenderness which the strange and bitter savour of his life awakes
in people always.  They look at him with faith, with pride, with
the joy and confidence and affection which his presence stirs in
everyone.  And as if he were the very author of their fondest
hopes, as if he were the fiat, not the helpless agent, of the thing
they long to see accomplished, they yell to him in their
unreasoning exuberance:  "All right, Ben!  Give us a hit now!  A
single's all we need, boy!  Bring him in!"  Or others, crying with
the same exuberance of faith:  "Strike him out, Ben!  Make him
fan!"

But now the crowd, sensing the electric thrill and menace of a
decisive conflict, has grown still, is waiting with caught breath
and pounding hearts, their eyes fixed eagerly on Ben.  Somewhere, a
thousand miles to the North, somewhere through the reddened,
slanting and fast-fading light of that October day, somewhere
across the illimitable fields and folds and woods and hills and
hollows of America, across the huge brown earth, the mown fields,
the vast wild space, the lavish, rude and unfenced distances, the
familiar, homely, barren, harsh, strangely haunting scenery of the
nation; somewhere through the crisp, ripe air, the misty, golden
pollenated light of all her prodigal and careless harvest;
somewhere far away at the heart of the great sky-soaring, smoke-
gold, and enchanted city of the North, and of their vision--the
lean right arm of the great pitcher Mathewson is flashing like a
whip.  A greyhound of a man named Speaker, quick as a deer to run,
sharp as a hawk to see, swift as a cat to strike, stands facing
him.  And the huge terrific stands, packed to the eaves incredibly
with mounting tiers of small white faces, now all breathless,
silent, and intent, all focused on two men as are the thoughts, the
hearts, the visions of these people everywhere in little towns,
soar back, are flung to the farthest edges of the field in a vision
of power, of distance, space and lives unnumbered, fused into a
single unity that is so terrific that it bursts the measures of our
comprehension and has a dream-like strangeness of reality even when
we see it.

The scene is instant, whole and wonderful.  In its beauty and
design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of forty
thousand empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of
the playing field, and the small lean figures of the players, set
there, lonely, tense and waiting in their places, bright, desperate
solitary atoms encircled by that huge wall of nameless faces, is
incredible.  And more than anything, it is the light, the miracle
of light and shade and colour--the crisp, blue light that swiftly
slants out from the soaring stands and, deepening to violet, begins
to march across the velvet field and towards the pitcher's box,
that gives the thing its single and incomparable beauty.

The batter stands swinging his bat and grimly waiting at the plate,
crouched, tense, the catcher, crouched, the umpire, bent, hands
clasped behind his back, and peering forward.  All of them are set
now in the cold blue of that slanting shadow, except the pitcher,
who stands out there all alone, calm, desperate, and forsaken in
his isolation, with the gold-red swiftly fading light upon him, his
figure legible with all the resolution, despair and lonely dignity
which that slanting, somehow fatal light can give him.  Deep lilac
light is eating swiftly in from every corner of the field now, and
far off there is a vision of the misty, golden and October towers
of the terrific city.  The scene is unforgettable in the beauty,
intoxication and heroic feeling of its incredible design, and yet,
as overwhelming as the spectacle may be for him who sees it, it is
doubtful if the eye-witness has ever felt its mystery, beauty, and
strange loveliness as did that unseen and unseeing audience in a
little town.

But now the crowd, sensing the menaceful approach of a decisive
moment, has grown quiet and tense and breathless, as it stands
there in the street.  In the window, Ben sets the earphones firmly
with his hands, his head goes down, the scowl between his grey eyes
deepens to a look of listening intensity.  He begins to speak
sharply to a young man standing at a table on the floor behind him.
He snaps his fingers nervously, a cardboard placard is handed to
him, he looks quickly at it, and then thrusts it back, crying
irritably:

"No, no, no!  Strike one, I said!  Damn it, Mac, you're about as
much help to me as a wooden Indian!"

The young man on the floor thrusts another placard in his hand.
Ben takes it quickly, swiftly takes out a placard from the
complicated frame of wires and rows and columns in the window (for
it is before the day of the electric Scoreboard, and this clumsy
and complicated system whereby every strike, ball, substitution, or
base hit--every possible movement and event that can occur upon the
field--must be indicated in this way by placards printed with the
exact information, is the only one they know) and thrusts a new
placard on the line in place of the one that he has just removed.
A cheer, sharp, lusty, and immediate, goes up from the crowd.  Ben
speaks sharply and irritably to the dark and sullen-featured youth
whose name is Foxey and Foxey runs outside quickly with another
placard inscribed with the name of a new player who is coming in.
Swiftly, Foxey takes out of its groove the name of the departing
player, shoves the new one into place, and this time the rival
partisans in the crowd cheer for the pitch hitter.

In the street now there is the excited buzz and hum of controversy.
The people, who, with a strange and somehow moving loyalty, are
divided into two groups supporting the merits of two teams which
they have never seen, are eagerly debating, denying, making
positive assertions of what is likely to happen, which are
obviously extravagant and absurd in a contest where nothing can be
predicted, and so much depends on fortune, chance, and the
opportunity of the moment.

In the very forefront of the crowd, a little to the right as Ben
stands facing them, a well-dressed man in the late fifties can be
seen excitedly discussing the prospect of the game with several of
his companions.  His name is Fagg Sluder, a citizen well known to
every one in town.  He is a man who made a fortune as a contractor
and retired from active business several years ago, investing part
of his wealth in two or three large office buildings, and who now
lives on the income he derives from them.

He is a nervous energetic figure of a man, of middle height, with
greying hair, a short-cropped moustache, and the dry, spotted,
slightly concave features which characterize many Americans of his
age.  A man who, until recent years, has known nothing but hard
work since his childhood, he has now developed, in his years of
leisure, an enthusiastic devotion to the game, that amounts to an
obsession.

He has not only given to the town the baseball park which bears his
name, he is also president of the local Club, and uncomplainingly
makes good its annual deficit.  During the playing season his whole
time is spent in breathing, thinking, talking baseball all day
long: if he is not at the game, bent forward in his seat behind the
home plate in an attitude of ravenous absorption, occasionally
shouting advice and encouragement to the players in his rapid,
stammering, rather high-pitched voice that has a curiously incisive
penetration and carrying power, then he is up on the Square before
the fire department going over every detail of the game with his
cronies and asking eager, rapid-fire questions of the young red-
necked players he employs, and towards whom he displays the
worshipful admiration of a schoolboy.

Now this man, who, despite his doctor's orders, smokes twenty or
thirty strong black cigars a day, and in fact is never to be seen
without a cigar in his fingers or in his mouth, may be heard all
over the crowd speaking eagerly in his rapid, stammering voice to a
man with a quiet and pleasant manner who stands behind him.  This
is the assistant chief of the fire department and his name is
Bickett.

"Jim," Mr. Sluder is saying in his eager and excited way, "I--I--I--
I tell you what I think!  If--if--if Speaker comes up there again
with men on bases--I--I--I just believe Matty will strike him out--
I swear I do.  What do you think?" he demands eagerly and abruptly.

Mr. Bickett, first pausing to draw slowly and languorously on a
cigarette before casting it into the gutter, makes some easy, quiet
and non-committal answer which satisfies Mr. Sluder completely,
since he is paying no attention to him, anyway.  Immediately, he
claps the chewed cigar which he is holding in his stubby fingers
into his mouth, and nodding his head briskly and vigorously, with
an air of great decision, he stammers out again:

"Well--I--I--I just believe that's what he's going to do: I--I--I
don't think he's afraid of that fellow at all!  I--I--I think he
knows he can strike him out any time he feels like it."

The boy knows everyone in the crowd as he looks around him.  Here
are the other boys of his own age, and older--his fellow route-boys
in the morning's work, his school companions, delivery boys
employed by druggists, merchants, clothiers, the sons of the more
wealthy and prominent people of the town.  Here are the boys from
the eastern part of town from which he comes and in which his
father's house is built--the older, homelier, and for some reason
more joyful and confident part of town to him--though why, he does
not know, he cannot say.  Perhaps it is because the hills along the
eastern borders of the town are near and close and warm, and almost
to be touched.  But in the western part of town, the great vistas
of the soaring ranges, the distant summits of the Smokies fade far
away into the west, into the huge loneliness, the haunting
desolation of the unknown distance, the red, lonely light of the
powerful retreating sun.

But now the old red light is slanting swiftly, the crowd is waiting
tense and silent, already with a touch of sorrow, resignation, and
the winter in their hearts, for summer's over, the game is ending,
and October has come again, has come again.  In the window, where
the red slant of the sun already falls, Ben is moving quickly,
slipping new placards into place, taking old ones out, scowling,
snapping his hard, white fingers in command, speaking curtly,
sharply, irritably to the busy figures, moving at his bidding on
the floor.  The game--the last game of the series--is sharp, close,
bitterly contested.  No one can say as yet which way the issue
goes, which side will win, when it will end--but that fatality of
red slanting light, the premonitory menace of the frost, the fatal
certitude of victory and defeat, with all the sorrow and regret
that both can bring to man, are in their hearts.

From time to time, a wild and sudden cheer breaks sharply from the
waiting crowd, as something happens to increase their hope of
victory, but for the most part they are tense and silent now, all
waiting for the instant crisis, the quick end.

Behind Ben, seated in a swivel chair, but turned out facing toward
the crowd, the boy can see the gouty bulk of Mr. Flood, the owner
of the paper.  He is bent forward heavily in his seat, his thick
apoplectic fingers braced upon his knees, his mouth ajar, his
coarse, jowled, venously empurpled face and bulging yellow eyes
turned out upon the crowd, in their constant expression of slow
stupefaction.  From time to time, when the crowd cheers loudly, the
expression of brutal surprise upon Mr. Flood's coarse face will
deepen perceptibly and comically, and in a moment he will say
stupidly, in his hoarse and phlegmy tones:

"Who done that? . . .  What are they yelling for? . . .  Which
side's ahead now? . . .  What happened that time, Ben?"

To which Ben usually makes no reply whatever, but the savage scowl
between his grey eyes deepens with exasperation, and finally,
cursing bitterly, he says:

"Damn it, Flood!  What do you think I am--the whole damned
newspaper?  For heaven's sake, man, do you think all I've got to do
is answer damn-fool questions?  If you want to know what's
happening, go outside where the rest of them are!"

"Well, Ben, I just wanted to know how--" Mr. Flood begins hoarsely,
heavily, and stupidly.

"Oh, for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't you?" says Ben,
laughing scornfully and contemptuously as he addresses the
invisible auditor of his scorn, and jerking his head sideways
toward the bloated figure of his employer as he does so.  "Here!"
he says, in a disgusted manner.  "For God's sake, someone go and
tell him what the score is, and put him out of his misery!"  And
scowling savagely, he speaks sharply into the mouthpiece of the
phone and puts another placard on the line.

And suddenly, even as the busy figures swarm and move there in the
window before the waiting crowd, the bitter thrilling game is over!
In waning light, in faint shadows, far, far away in a great city of
the North, the 40,000 small empetalled faces bend forward,
breathless, waiting--single and strange and beautiful as all life,
all living, and man's destiny.  There's a man on base, the last
flash of the great right arm, the crack of the bat, the streaking
white of a clean-hit ball, the wild, sudden, solid roar, a pair of
flashing legs have crossed the rubber, and the game is over!  And
instantly, there at the city's heart, in the great stadium, and all
across America, in ten thousand streets, ten thousand little towns,
the crowd is breaking, flowing, lost for ever!  That single,
silent, most intolerable loveliness is gone for ever.  With all its
tragic, proud and waiting unity, it belongs now to the huge, the
done, the indestructible fabric of the past, has moved at last out
of that inscrutable maw of chance we call the future into the
strange finality of dark time.

Now it is done, the crowd is broken, lost, exploded, and 10,000,000
men are moving singly down 10,000 streets--toward what?  Some by
the light of Hesperus which, men say, can bring all things that
live on earth to their own home again--flock to the fold, the
father to his child, the lover to the love he has forsaken--and the
proud of heart, the lost, the lonely of the earth, the exile and
the wanderer--to what?  To pace again the barren avenues of night,
to pass before the bulbous light of lifeless streets with half-
averted faces, to pass the thousand doors, to feel again the
ancient hopelessness of hope, the knowledge of despair, the faith
of desolation.

And for a moment, when the crowd has gone, Ben stands there silent,
lost, a look of bitter weariness, disgust, and agony upon his grey
gaunt face, his lonely brow, his fierce and scornful eyes.  And as
he stands there that red light of waning day has touched the
flashing head, the gaunt, starved face, has touched the whole image
of his fiercely wounded, lost and scornful spirit with the prophecy
of its strange fatality.  And in that instant as the boy looks at
his brother, a knife is driven through his entrails suddenly, for
with an instant final certitude, past reason, proof, or any visual
evidence, he sees the end and answer of his brother's life.
Already death rests there on his proud head like a coronal.  The
boy knows in that one instant Ben will die.



XX


He visited Genevieve frequently over a period of several months.
As his acquaintance with the family deepened, the sharpness of his
appetite for seduction dwindled, and was supplanted by an ecstatic
and insatiable glee.  He felt that he had never in his life been so
enormously and constantly amused: he would think exultantly for
days of an approaching visit, weaving new and more preposterous
fables for their consumption, bursting into violent laughter on the
streets as he thought of past scenes, the implication of a tone, a
gesture, the transparent artifice of mother and daughter, the
incredible exaggeration of everything.

He was charmed, enchanted: his mind swarmed daily with monstrous
projects--his heart quivered in a tight cage of nervous exultancy
as he thought of the infinite richness of absurdity that lay stored
for him.  His ethical conscience was awakened hardly at all--he
thought of these three people as monsters posturing for his
delight.  His hatred of cruelty, the nauseating horror at the
idiotic brutality of youth, had not yet sufficiently defined itself
to check his plunge.  He was swept along in the full tide of his
adventure: he thought of nothing else.



Through an entire winter, and into the spring, he went to see this
little family in a Boston suburb.  Then he got tired of the game
and the people as suddenly as he had begun, with the passionate
boredom, weariness, and intolerance of which youth is capable.  And
now that the affair was ending, he was at last ashamed of the part
he had played in it and of the arrogant contempt with which he had
regaled himself at the expense of other people.  And he knew that
the Simpsons had themselves at length become conscious of the
meaning of his conduct, and saw that, in some way, he had made them
the butt of a joke.  And when they saw this, the family suddenly
attained a curious quiet dignity, of which he had not believed them
capable and which later he could not forget.

One night, as he was waiting in the parlour for the girl to come
down, her mother entered the room, and stood looking at him quietly
for a moment.  Presently she spoke:

"You have been coming here for some time now,"