Of Time and the River (32 page)

“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 Encyclopćdia 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.