Of Time and the River (73 page)
For a moment Doctor Thornton regarded her interlocutor with an expression of tolerant and almost playful benevolence. Presently she spoke:
“What have I been doing all day long?” she repeated in a tone of sonorous deliberation. “Why, my dear, I have been READING— reading,” she pursued with rhythmical sonority, “in one of my favourite and most cherished volumes.”
And instantly there was for all her listeners a sense of some transforming radiance in the universe: an event of universal moment: the Doctor had been reading all day long. They looked at her with an awed stare.
“What,” Mrs. Martin nervously began, with a little giggle, “—what was it you were reading, Doctor? It must have been a good book to hold your interest all day long?”
“It was, my dear,” said Doctor Thornton sonorously and deliberately. “It WAS a good book. More than that, it was a GREAT book—a magnificent work of genius to show us to what heights the mind of man may soar when he is inspired by lofty and ennobling sentiments.”
“What was this, Doctor Thornton?” Doctor Withers now inquired. “—Something of Tennyson’s?”
“No, Doctor Withers,” Doctor Thornton answered sonorously, “it was not Tennyson—much as I admire the noble beauty of his poetry. I was not reading poetry, Doctor Withers,” she continued, “I was reading—PROSE,” she said. “I was reading—RUSKIN!” As these momentous words fell from her lips her voice lowered with such an air of portentous significance that the last word was not so much spoken as breathed forth like an incense of devotion. “RUSKIN!” she whispered solemnly again.
And although it is doubtful if this name conveyed any definite meaning to her audience, its magical effect upon them was evident from the looks of solemn awe with which they now regarded her.
“—RUSKIN!” she said again, this time strongly, in an accent of rapturous sonority. “The noble elevation of his thought, the beautiful proportion and the ordered harmony of all the parts, the rich yet simple style, and, above all, the sane and wholesome beauty of his philosophy of art—what nobler monument to man’s higher genius was ever built, my friends, than he proportioned in The Stones of Venice—itself a work of art entirely worthy of the majestic sculptures that it consecrates?”
For a moment after the sonorous periods of that swelling rhetoric had ceased, the old people stared at her with a kind of paralysis of reverent wonder. Then old Mrs. Grey, gasping with a kind of awed astonishment, said:
“Oh-h, Doctor Thornton, I think it’s the most WONDERFUL thing the way you keep your mind occupied all the time with all these deep and beautiful thoughts you have! I don’t see how you do it! I should think you’d get yourself all tired out just by the THINKING that you do.”
“Tired, my dear?” said Doctor Thornton sonorously, bestowing upon her worshipper a smile of tolerant benevolence. “How can anyone grow tired who LIVES and MOVES and BREATHES in this great world of ours? No, no, my dear, do not say TIRED. Rather say REFRESHED, REJUVENATED, and INSPIRED by the glorious pageant that life offers us in its unending beauty and profusion. Wherever I look,” she continued, looking, “I see nothing but order and harmony in the universe. I lift my eyes unto the stars.” she said majestically, at the same time lifting her face in a movement of rapturous contemplation toward the ceiling of the hotel lobby, “and feast my soul upon the infinite beauties of God’s heaven, the glorious proportion of the sidereal universe. I turn my gaze around me, and everywhere I look I see the noble works that man has fashioned, the unceasing progress he has made in his march upward from the brute, the noble aspiration of his spirit, the eternal labour of his mighty intellect towards a higher purpose, the radiant beauty of his countenance in which all the highest ardours of his soul may be discerned!”
And as she pronounced this sonorous eulogy her glance rested benevolently on old Doctor Withers’ soured and wizened features. He lowered his head coyly, as becomes a modest man, and in a moment the rhapsodist continued:
“‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!’”
And having sonorously pronounced Hamlet’s mighty judgment, the wonderful old woman, who had herself for thirty years been one of the most prosperous abortionists in the nation, looked benevolently about her at all the specimens of God’s choice article who were assembled in the lobby.
Over behind the cigar counter the vendor, a fat Czechish youth with a pale flabby face and dull taffy-coloured hair, was industriously engaged in picking his fat nose with a greasy thumb and forefinger. Elsewhere, in another corner of the lobby, three permanent denizens of the Leopold, familiarly and privately known to members of the hotel staff as Crab-face Willy, Maggie the Dope, and Greasy Gertie, were sitting where they always sat, in an unspeaking and unsmiling silence.
And at this moment two more wonder-works of God came in from the street and walked rapidly across the lobby, speaking the golden and poetic language which their Maker had so marvellously bestowed on them.
“Cheezus!” said one of them, a large man with a grey hat and a huge, dead, massive face of tallowy grey which receded in an indecipherable manner into the sagging flesh-folds of his flabby neck—“Cheezus!” he eloquently continued with a protesting laugh that emerged from his tallowy lips in a hoarse expletive mixed with spittle—“Yuh may be right about him, Eddie, but Cheezus!”—again the hoarse protesting laugh. “Duh guy may be all right, but Cheezus!—I don’t know! If he’d come in dere like duh rest of dem an’ let me know about it—but Cheezus!—duh guy may be all right like you say!—but Cheezus! Eddie, I don’t know!”
Doctor Thornton bestowed on them the benevolent approval of her glance as they went by and then, turning to her awed listeners again, declared sonorously with a majestic and expressive gesture of her hand:
“Tired? How could one ever grow tired, my friends, in this great world of ours?”
XLIX
At the end of his classes, the final end, when all had spoken, when that hot wave of life and turbulence had withdrawn, the last clattering footfalls had echoed away along the corridors, the last loud aggressive voices had faded into silence, leaving, it seemed, an odour of exhaustion, use, and weariness even in the walls, boards and benches of the room, so that the empty class-room had a tired but living presence of fatigue, the indefinable but sharply felt character of a room with people absent from it, and seemed somehow to relax, settle, and respire with relief and weariness—at this final, fagged, and burned-out candle-end of day, Abraham Jones, as relentless as destiny, would be there waiting for Eugene. He waited there, grim, grey, unsmiling, tortured-looking behind an ominous wink of glasses, a picture of Yiddish melancholy and discontent, and as Eugene looked at him his heart went numb and dead; he hated the sight of him. He sat there now in the front rows of the class like a nemesis of scorn, a merciless censor of Eugene’s ignorance and incompetence: the sight of his dreary discontented face, with its vast grey acreage of a painful Jewish and involuted intellectualism, was enough, even at the crest of a passionate burst of inspiration, to curdle his blood, freeze his heart, stun and deaden the fiery particle of his brain, and thicken his tongue to a faltering, incoherent mumble. Eugene did not know what Abe wanted, what he expected, what kind of teaching he thought worthy of him: he only knew that nothing he did suited him, that the story of his inadequacy and incompetence was legible in every line of that grey, dreary, censorious face. He thought of it at night with a kind of horror: the ghoulish head which craned out of a vulture’s body swept after him through all the fields of a distressful sleep, a taloned fury filled with croakings of hoarse doom. Never before had Eugene been driven through desperation to such exhausting intensities of work: night by night he sweated blood over great stacks and sheaves of their dull, careless, trivial papers—he read, re-read, and triple-read them, putting in all commas, colons, periods, correcting all faults of spelling, grammar, punctuation that he knew, writing long, laborious comments and criticisms on the back and rising suddenly out of a haunted tortured sleep to change a grade. And at the end, the inexorable end, he was always faced with the menace of Abe’s weekly paper; with dread and quaking he tackled it. He wrote the best papers that Eugene got: the grammar was flawless, the spelling impeccable, the vocabulary precise and extensive, the sentences cleanly and forcibly shaped. The thought was sound, subtle, and coherent—by every standard the work was of an extraordinary grade and quality, its merit was unmistakable, and yet Eugene approached a four-page paper with fear and trembling; before he had gone beyond the first paragraph great sobs and groans of weariness and despair were wrung from him; he stamped across the floor with it like a man maddened by an aching tooth; he began again, he flung himself upon the bed, got up and walked again, doused his head in basins of cold water— but it was no use: to read the paper to the end, as he did and must, was weariness and travail of the spirit—it was like eating chalk or trying to suck sweetness out of paving brick, or being drowned in an ocean of dish-water, or forced to gorge oneself on boiled unseasoned spinach. Abe wrote on a great range and variety of subjects and everything he wrote was good: he wrote about the plays of Pirandello, of “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” and of “three planes of reality” therein: he estimated and analysed those three planes with the power of a philosopher, the delicacy of a subtle-souled psychologist, and all of this to Eugene was as weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, because it was so good, and he did not know what was wrong, and he could not endure to read it. He could not write upon his papers that he found them intolerably dull unless he knew wherein the reason for that dullness lay, and he did not know the reason: accordingly the highest grade he ever gave to anyone—the grade of “A”—was week by week wrung from trembling and reluctant fingers. But no matter what the grade was, or how flattering the comment, Abe protested. Grey, dreary, tortured, discontented, Yiddish, he would be waiting for Eugene at the end of every class, clutching his paper in his impatient fingers, armed and eager for the combat of dispute that was to follow.
The class met at night and they would walk rapidly away together along the empty echoing corridors, and, turning, clatter down the stairs that led to the main entrance. The vast building was deserted and full of weary echoes: they could hear the solitary clang of an elevator door and the dynamic hum of its machinery as it mounted. Someone was walking in the big corridor downstairs: they heard the echoing ring of his footsteps on the slick marble flags, and the noisy rattle of a cleaner’s bucket on the floor. The whole building was charged with a weary electric quality—with the quality of a light which has gone dim. And the taste and the smell of this weariness were in Eugene’s mouth and nostrils; it was as if he had stuck his tongue against a warm but burned-out storage battery; it was like the smell that comes from the wheels of a street car when they have ground around a curve, or like the odour from a smoking hot-box on the fast express. His body also had this feeling of electric weariness, as if the vital currents were exhausted: his flesh felt dry and juiceless, his back was tired, his loins were sterile, the acrid burned-out flavour filled him.
The big ugly building breathed slowly with the fatigue of inanimate objects which have been overcharged with human energy: it was haunted with its tired emptiness, with the absence of the thousands of people who had swarmed through its every part that day with such a clamorous, hot and noisy life. The lifeless air in its passages had been breathed and rebreathed again and again: the walls, the furniture, the floors—every part of the building—seemed to exude this sense of nervous depletion.
As he hurried down the stairs on such an evening with his unshakable companion, his implacable disputant, he hated the building more than he had ever hated any building before: it seemed to be soaked in all the memories of fruitless labour and harsh strife, of fear and hate and weariness, of ragged nerves and pounding heart and tired flesh: the building brooded there, charged with its dreadful burden of human pain, encumbered with its grief; and his hatred for the building was the hatred of a man for the place where he has met some terrible humiliation of the flesh or spirit, or for the room in which a man has seen his brother die, or for the dwelling from which love and the beloved have departed. The ghosts of pain and darkness sat in the empty chairs, the spirits of venom and sterility brooded over the desks: dry hatred and the poison of the brain were seated in the chairs of the instructors; fear trembled in their seats, it made a hateful cold around the heart, it made the bowels queasy, it made swallowing hard, it slithered at the edges of the desk, it fell and crawled and wobbled like a boneless thing. And the grey-faced Jew beside Eugene made the weary lights burn dim: he gave a tongue to weariness, a colour to despair.
They hurried down the steps and left the building almost as if they were in flight. The heavy door clanged to behind them making echoes in the halls, they reached the pavement of the Square, and immediately they halted. Here they were in another world, and their weary bodies drank in a new vitality. Sometimes, on a cold still night in winter, the sky had the peculiarly frosty clarity that comes from a still, biting cold. Above the great vertical radiance and cold Northern passion of New York, it was a-glitter with magnificent stars, it was a-glitter with small pollens, with a jewelled dust of stars that seemed to have been sown drunkenly through heaven, and as Eugene looked his weariness was cleansed out of him at once, he was filled with an overwhelming desire to possess beauty and all things else, and to include all things in him. He would learn to be all things: he would be an artist and he would find a way of living in the maelstrom. The darkness filled him with a sense of power and possession: his spirit soared out over the city, and over the earth, he was no longer afraid of the grey-faced Jew beside him, peace and power and certitude possessed him. He drank the air into his veins in great gulps, he saw the huge walled cliff of the city ablaze with its jewellery of hard sown lights, he knew he could possess it all, and a feeling of joy and victory rushed through his senses.