OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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’retalking-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.
time_
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 Encyclopædia 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?”