Of Time and the River (16 page)

He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly: a ravening appetite to him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure—the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart for ever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl. At first, hovering over bookstalls, or walking at night among the vast piled shelves of the library, he would read, watch in hand, muttering to himself in triumph or anger at the timing of each page: “Fifty seconds to do that one. Damn you, we’ll see! You will, will you?”—and he would tear through the next page in twenty seconds.

This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honours, nothing to do with formal learning. He was not in any way a scholar and did not want to be one. He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this. And it was the same with everything he did. In the midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous library, the thought of the streets outside and the great city all around him would drive through his body like a sword. It would now seem to him that every second that he passed among the books was being wasted—that at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable was happening in the streets, and that if he could only get to it in time and see it, he would somehow get the knowledge of the whole thing in him—the source, the well, the spring from which all men and words and actions, and every design upon this earth proceeds.

And he would rush out in the streets to find it, be hurled through the tunnel into Boston and then spend hours in driving himself savagely through a hundred streets, looking into the faces of a million people, trying to get an instant and conclusive picture of all they did and said and were, of all their million destinies, and of the great city and the everlasting earth, and the immense and lonely skies that bent above them. And he would search the furious streets until bone and brain and blood could stand no more—until every sinew of his life and spirit was wrung, trembling, and exhausted, and his heart sank down beneath its weight of desolation and despair.

Yet a furious hope, a wild extravagant belief, was burning in him all the time. He would write down enormous charts and plans and projects of all that he proposed to do in life—a programme of work and living which would have exhausted the energies of 10,000 men. He would get up in the middle of the night to scrawl down insane catalogues of all that he had seen and done:—the number of books he had read, the number of miles he had travelled, the number of people he had known, the number of women he had slept with, the number of meals he had eaten, the number of towns he had visited, the number of states he had been in.

And at one moment he would gloat and chuckle over these stupendous lists like a miser gloating over his hoard, only to groan bitterly with despair the next moment, and to beat his head against the wall, as he remembered the overwhelming amount of all he had not seen or done, or known. Then he would begin another list filled with enormous catalogues of all the books he had not read, all the food he had not eaten, all the women that he had not slept with, all the states he had not been in, all the towns he had not visited. Then he would write down plans and programmes whereby all these things must be accomplished, how many years it would take to do it all, and how old he would be when he had finished. An enormous wave of hope and joy would surge up in him, because it now looked easy, and he had no doubt at all that he could do it.

He never asked himself in any practical way how he was going to live while this was going on, where he was going to get the money for this gigantic adventure, and what he was going to do to make it possible. If he thought about it, it seemed to have no importance or reality whatever—he just dismissed it impatiently, or with a conviction that some old man would die and leave him a fortune, that he was going to pick up a purse containing hundreds of thousands of dollars while walking in the Fenway, and that the reward would be enough to keep him going, or that a beautiful and rich young widow, true-hearted, tender, loving, and voluptuous, who had carrot-coloured hair, little freckles on her face, a snub nose and luminous grey-green eyes with something wicked, yet loving and faithful in them, and one gold filling in her solid little teeth, was going to fall in love with him, marry him, and be for ever true and faithful to him while he went reading, eating, drinking, whoring, and devouring his way around the world; or finally that he would write a book or play every year or so, which would be a great success, and yield him fifteen or twenty thousand dollars at a crack. Thus, he went storming away at the whole earth about him, sometimes mad with despair, weariness, and bewilderment; and sometimes wild with a jubilant and exultant joy and certitude as the conviction came to him that everything would happen as he wished. Then at night he would hear the vast sounds and silence of the earth and of the city, he would begin to think of the dark sleeping earth and of the continent of night, until it seemed to him it all was spread before him like a map—rivers, plains, and mountains and 10,000 sleeping towns; it seemed to him that he saw everything at once.

VIII

One morning, a few days after his arrival in Cambridge, he had received a letter, written on plain but costly paper in a fine but almost feminine hand. The letter read as follows:

“Dear Sir: I should be pleased to have your company for dinner Wednesday evening at eight-thirty at the ‘Cock House Tavern’ on Brattle Street. In case of your acceptance will you kindly call at my rooms in Holyoke House, opposite the Widener Library, at seven- fifteen?

“Sincerely yours,

“FRANCIS STARWICK.”

He read that curt and cryptic note over and over with feelings mixed of astonishment and excitement. Who was Francis Starwick? Why should Francis Starwick, a stranger of whom he had never heard, invite him to dinner? And why was that laconic note not accompanied by a word of explanation?

It is likely he would have gone anyway, from sheer curiosity, and because of the desperate eagerness with which a young man, alone in a strange world for the first time, welcomes any hope of friendship. But before the day was over, he had learned from another student in Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, of which he himself was now a member, that Francis Starwick was Professor Hatcher’s assistant; and correctly inferring that the invitation had some connection with this circumstance, he resolved to go.

In this way, his acquaintance began with that rare and tragically gifted creature who was one of the most extraordinary figures of his generation and who, possessing almost every talent that an artist needs, was lacking in that one small grain of common earth that could have saved him, and brought his work to life.

No fatality rested on that casual meeting. He could not have foreseen in what strange and sorrowful ways his life would weave and interweave with this other one, nor could he have known from any circumstance of that first meeting that this other youth was destined to be that triune figure in his life, of which each man knows one and only one, in youth, and which belongs to the weather of man’s life, and to the fabric of his destiny: his friend, his brother—and his mortal enemy. Nor was there, in the boy he met that night, any prefigurement of the tragic fatality with which that brilliant life was starred, the horrible end toward which, perhaps, it even then was directed.

They were both young men, and both filled with all the vanity, anguish and hot pride of youth, and with its devotion and humility; they were both strong in their proud hope and faith and untried confidence; they both had shining gifts and powers and they were sure the world was theirs; they were splendid and fierce and weak and strong and foolish; the prescience of wild swelling joy was in them; and the goat cry was still torn from their wild young throats. They knew that the most fortunate, good and happy life that any man had ever known was theirs, if they would only take it; they knew that it impended instantly—the fortune, fame, and love for which their souls were panting; neither had yet turned the dark column, they knew that they were twenty, and that they could never die.

Francis Starwick, on first sight, was a youth of medium height and average weight, verging perhaps toward slenderness, with a pleasant ruddy face, brown eyes, a mass of curly auburn-reddish hair, and a cleft chin. The face in its pleasant cast and healthy tone, and spacious, quiet intelligence was strikingly like those faces of young Englishmen which were painted by Hoppner and Sir Henry Raeburn towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was an attractive, pleasant immensely sensitive and intelligent face, but when Starwick spoke this impression of warmth and friendliness was instantly destroyed.

He spoke in a strange and rather disturbing tone, the pitch and timbre of which it would be almost impossible to define, but which would haunt one who had heard it for ever after. His voice was neither very high nor low, it was a man’s voice and yet one felt it might almost have been a woman’s; but there was nothing at all effeminate about it. It was simply a strange voice compared to most American voices, which are rasping, nasal, brutally coarse or metallic. Starwick’s voice had a disturbing lurking resonance, an exotic, sensuous, and almost voluptuous quality. Moreover, the peculiar mannered affectation of his speech was so studied that it hardly escaped extravagance. If it had not been for the dignity, grace, and intelligence of his person, the affectation of his speech might have been ridiculous. As it was, the other youth felt the moment’s swift resentment and hostility that is instinctive with the American when he thinks some one is speaking in an affected manner.

As Starwick welcomed his guest his ruddy face flushed brick-red with the agonizing embarrassment of a shy and sensitive person to whom every new meeting is an ordeal; his greeting was almost repellently cold and formal, but this, too, with the studied affectation of his speech, was protective armour for his shyness.

“A-d’ye-do?” he said, shaking hands, the greeting coming from his throat through lips that scarcely seemed to move. “It was good of you to come.”

“It was good of you to ask me,” the other boy said awkwardly, fumbled desperately for a moment, and then blurted out—“I didn’t know who you were at first—when I got your note—but then somebody told me:—you’re Professor Hatcher’s assistant, aren’t you?”

“Ace,” said Starwick, this strange sound which was intended for “yes” coming through his lips in the same curious and almost motionless fashion. The brick-red hue of his ruddy face deepened painfully, and for a moment he was silent—“Look!” he said suddenly, yet with a casualness that was very warm and welcome after the stilted formality of his greeting, “would you like a drink? I have some whisky.”

“Why, yes—sure—certainly,” the other stammered, almost feverishly grateful for the diversion—“I’d like it.”

Starwick opened the doors of a small cupboard, took out a bottle, a siphon, and some glasses on a tray, and placed them on a table.

“Help yourself,” he said. “Do you like it with soda—or plain water—or how?”

“Why—any way you do,” the other youth stammered. “Aren’t you going to drink? I don’t want to unless you do.”

“Ace,” said Starwick again, “I’ll drink with you. I like the soda,” he added, and poured a drink for himself and filled it with the siphon. “Go on. Pour your own. . . . Look,” he said abruptly again, as the other youth was awkwardly manipulating the unaccustomed siphon. “Do you mind if I drink mine while I’m shaving? I just came in. I’d like to shave and change my shirt before we go out. Do you mind?”

“No, of course not,” the other said, grateful for the respite thus afforded. “Go ahead. Take all the time you like. I’ll drink my drink and have a look at your books, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do,” said Starwick, “if you find anything you like. I think this is the best chair.” He pushed a big chair up beneath a reading lamp and switched the light on. “There are cigarettes on the table,” he said in his strange mannered tone, and went into the bathroom, where, after a moment’s inspection of his ruddy face, he immediately began to lather himself and to prepare for shaving.

“This is a nice place you have here,” the visitor said presently, after another awkward pause, during which the only sound was the minute scrape of the razor blade on Starwick’s face.

“Quite,” he answered concisely, in his mannered tone, and with that blurred sound of people who try to talk while they are shaving. For a few moments the razor scraped on. “I’m glad you like it,” Starwick said presently, as he put the razor down and began to inspect his work in the mirror. “And what kind of place did you find for yourself? Do you like it?”

“Well, it will do, I guess,” the other boy said dubiously. “Of course, it’s nothing like this—it’s not an apartment; it’s just a room I rented.”

“Ace,” said Starwick from the bathroom. “And where is that?”

“It’s on a street called Buckingham Road. Do you know where that is?”

“Oh,” said Starwick coldly, and he craned carefully with his neck, and was silent a moment as he did a little delicate razor-work around the Adam’s apple. “Ace,” he said at length as he put the razor down again. “I think I do. . . . And how did you happen to go out there?” he inquired coldly as he began to dry his face on a towel. “Did some one tell you about the place?”

“Well—yes. I knew about it before I came. It’s a room in a house that some people I know have rented.”

“Oh,” said Starwick coldly, formally again, as he thrust his arms into a fresh shirt. “Then you do know people here in Cambridge?”

“Well, no: they are really people from home.”

“Home?”

“Yes—from my own state, the place I came from, where I went to school before I came here.”

“Oh,” said Starwick, buttoning his shirt, “I see. And where was that? What state are you from?”