Of Time and the River (15 page)

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 anćsthetized 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.