Of Time and the River (17 page)

“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.”