Of Time and the River (33 page)

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 naďve 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 naďveté. 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.