Of Time and the River (18 page)

“Can I come over to see you now, Uncle Bascom?”

“Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!” that unearthly and passionate voice howled back at once enthusiastically. “Come over at once, my boy, at once! Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means! . . . And now, my boy!” the voice became faintly and comically precise, and he could hear his uncle smacking his large rubbery lips with pedantic relish as he pronounced the words: “Know-ing you are a young man alone in this great city for the first time, I shall give you a few brief—and, I trust, reasonably clear, di-rections,” again Bascom smacked his lips with audible relish as he pronounced this lovely word—“concerning your i-tin- er-ary”—his joy as he smacked his lips over this last word was almost indecently evident, and he went on with meticulous elaboration through a bewildering labyrinth of instructions until even he was satisfied at the confusion he had caused. Then he said good-bye, upon the assurance of his nephew that he would come at once. And it was in this way, after eight years of absence, that the boy again met his uncle.

He found the old man hardly changed at all. He was, indeed, a member of that race of men who scarcely vary by a jot from one decade to another; he was a trifle greyer, the stringy gauntness of his tall stooped frame was perhaps a little more pronounced, his eccentric tricks of speech and manner a little more emphatic—but this was all. In dress, speech, manner and appearance he was to an amazing degree the same as he had been the last time that his nephew saw him.

It is doubtful, in fact, if he had changed appreciably in thirty years. And certainly during the first twenty-five years of this century, business people who had their offices in or near State Street, Boston, and who had grown very familiar with that cadaverous and extraordinary figure, could have testified that he had not changed at all. His daily appearances, indeed, had become so much a part of the established process of events in that crowded street, that they had attained a kind of ritualistic dignity, and any serious alteration in their pattern would have seemed to hundreds of people to whom his gaunt bowed figure had become familiar, almost to constitute a serious disruption of the natural order.

Shortly before nine o’clock of every working day he would emerge from a subway exit near the head of the street and pause vaguely for a moment, making a craggy eddy in the tide of issuing workers that foamed swiftly about him while he stood with his enormous bony hands clutched comically before him at the waist, as if holding himself in, at the same time making the most horrible grimaces with his lean and amazingly flexible features. These grimaces were made by squinting his small sharp eyes together, widening his mouth in a ghastly travesty of a grin, and convolving his chin and cheek in a rapid series of pursed lips and horrible squints as he swiftly pressed his rubbery underlip against a few enormous horse-teeth that decorated his upper jaw. Having completed these facial evolutions, he glanced quickly and, it must be supposed, blindly, in every direction; for he then plunged heedlessly across the street, sometimes choosing the moment when traffic had been halted, and pedestrians were hurrying across, sometimes diving into the midst of a roaring chaos of motor cars, trucks, and wagons, through which he sometimes made his way in safety, accompanied only by a scream of brake-bands, a startled barking of horns, and the hearty curses of frightened drivers, or from which, howling with terror in the centre of a web of traffic which he had snarled hopelessly and brought to a complete standstill, he was sometimes rescued by a red-faced and cursing young Irishman who was on point-duty at that corner.

But Bascom was a fated man and he escaped. Once, it is true, a bright mindless beetle of machinery, which had no thought for fated men, had knocked him down and skinned and bruised him; again, an uninstructed wheel had passed across the soft toe-end of his shoe and held him prisoner, as if he were merely some average son of destiny—but he escaped. He escaped because he was a fated man and because the providence which guides the steps of children and the blind was kind to him; and because this same policeman whose simian upper lip had once been thick and twisted with its curses had long since run the scale from anger to wild fury, and thence to madness and despair and resignation, and had now come to have a motherly affection for this stray sheep, kept his eye peeled for its appearance every morning, or, failing this, at once shrilled hard upon his whistle when he heard the well-known howl of terror and surprise, plunged to the centre of the stalled traffic snarl, plucked Bascom out to safety under curse and shout and scream of brake, and marched him tenderly to the curb, gripping his brawny hand around the old man’s arm, feeling his joints, testing his bones, massaging anxiously his sinewy carcass, and calling him “bud”—although Bascom was old enough to be his grandfather. “Are you all right, bud? You’re not hurt, are you, bud? Are you O.K.?”—to which Bascom, if his shock and terror had been great, could make no answer for a moment save to pant hoarsely and to howl loudly and huskily from time to time, “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

At length, becoming more coherent, if not more calm, he would launch into an ecclesiastical indictment of motor cars and their drivers delivered in a high, howling, and husky voice that suggested the pronouncements of a prophet from a mountain. This voice had a quality of strange remoteness and, once heard, would never be forgotten. It actually had a howling note in it, and carried to great distances, and yet it was not loud: it was very much as if Mr. Bascom Pentland were standing on a mountain and shouting to someone in a quiet valley below—the sounds came to one plainly but as if from a great distance, and it was full of a husky, unearthly passion. It was really an ecclesiastical voice, the voice of a great preacher; one felt that it should be heard in churches, which was exactly where it once was heard, for Bascom had at various times and with great conviction, in the course of his long and remarkable life, professed and preached the faith of the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Unitarians.

Quite often, in fact, as now, when he had narrowly escaped disaster in the streets, Bascom still preached from the corner: as soon as he recovered somewhat from his shock, he would launch forth into a sermon of eloquent invective against any driver of motor cars within hearing, and if any of them entered the fray, as sometimes happened, a very interesting performance occurred.

“What happened to YOU?” the motorist might bitterly remark. “Do the keepers know you’re out?”

Mr. Pentland would thereupon retort with an eloquent harangue, beginning with a few well-chosen quotations from the more violent prophets of the Old Testament, a few predictions of death, destruction and damnation for the owners of motor cars, and a few apt references to Days of Judgment and Reckoning, Chariots of Moloch, and Beasts of the Apocalypse.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” the exasperated motorist might reply. “Are you BLIND? Where do you think you are? In a cow-pasture? Can’t you read the signals? Didn’t you see the cop put his hand up? Don’t you know when it says to ‘Stop’ or ‘Go’? Did you ever hear of the traffic law?”

“The TRAFFIC law!” Bascom sneeringly exclaimed, as if the mere use of the word by the motorist evoked his profoundest contempt. His voice now had a precise and meticulous way of speech, there was something sneering and pedantic in the way he pronounced each word, biting it off with a prim, nasal and heavily accented enunciation in the manner of certain pedants and purists who suggest by their pronunciation that language in the mouths of most people is vilely and carelessly treated, that each word has a precise, subtle, and careful meaning of its own, and that they—THEY alone—understand these matters. “The TRAFFIC law!” he repeated again: then he squinted his eyes together, pursed his rubbery lip against the big horsy upper teeth, and laughed down his nose in a forced, sneering manner. “The TRAFFIC law!” he said. “Why, you pit-i-ful ig-no- RAM-us! You il-LIT-ter-ate ruffian! You dare to speak to me—to ME!” he howled suddenly with an ecclesiastical lift of his voice, striking himself on his bony breast and glaring with a majestical fury as if the word of a mighty prophet had been contradicted by an upstart—“of the traffic law, when it is doubtful if you could READ the law if you saw it,”—he sneered—“and it is obvious to anyone with the perception of a schoolboy that you would not have intelligence enough to understand it, and”—here his voice rose to a howling emphasis and he held one huge bony finger up to command attention—”AND to interpret it, if you could read.”

“Is THAT so?” the motorist heavily remarked. “A WISE guy, eh? One of these guys who knows it all, eh? You’re a PRETTY wise guy, aren’t you?” the motorist continued bitterly, as if caught up in the circle of his refrain and unable to change it. “Well, let me tell YOU something. You think you’re pretty smaht, don’t you? Well, you’re not. See? It’s wise guys like you who go around looking for a good bust on the nose. See? That’s how smaht you are. If you wasn’t an old guy I’d give you one, too,” he said, getting a moody satisfaction from the thought.

“Ow-w! Ow-w! Ow-w!” Bascom howled in sudden terror.

“If you know so much, if you’re so smaht as you think you are, what IS the traffic law?”

Then, assuredly, if there was a traffic law, the unfortunate motorist was lost, for Uncle Bascom would deliver it to him verbatim, licking his lips with joy over all the technicalities of legal phrasing and pronouncing each phrase with a meticulous and pedantic enunciation.

“And furthermore!” he howled, holding up his big bony finger, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decreed, by a statute that has been on the books since 1856, by a statute that is irrevocably, inexorably, ineluctably plain that any driver, director, governor, commander, manager, agent or conductor, or any other person who shall conduct or cause to be conducted any vehicular instrument, whether it be of two, four, six, eight or any number of wheels whatsoever, whether it be in the public service, or in the possession of a private individual, whether it be—” but by this time the motorist, if he was wise, had had enough and had escaped.

If, however, it had been one of his more fortunate mornings, if he had blindly but successfully threaded the peril of roaring traffic, Uncle Bascom proceeded rapidly down State Street, still clutching his raw bony hands across his meagre waist, still contorting his remarkable face in its endless series of pursed grimaces, and presently turned in to the entrance of a large somewhat dingy- looking building of blackened stone, one of those solid, unpretentious, but very valuable properties which smell and look like the early 1900’s, and which belong to that ancient and enormously wealthy corporation across the river known as Harvard University.

Here, Uncle Bascom, still clutching himself together across the waist, mounted a flight of indented marble entry steps, lunged through revolving doors into a large marble corridor that was redolent with vibrating waves of hot steamy air, wet rubbers and galoshes, sanitary disinfectant and serviceable but somewhat old- fashioned elevators and, entering one of the cars which had just plunged down abruptly, banged open its door, belched out two or three people and swallowed a dozen more, he was finally deposited with the same abruptness on the seventh floor, where he stepped out into a wide dark corridor, squinted and grimaced uncertainly to right and left as he had done for twenty-five years, and then went left along the corridor, past rows of lighted offices in which one could hear the preliminary clicking of typewriters, the rattling of crisp papers, and the sounds of people beginning their day’s work. At the end of the corridor Bascom Pentland turned right along another corridor and at length paused before a door which bore this inscription across the familiar glazed glass of American business offices: “The John T. Brill Realty Co.—Houses For Rent or Sale.” Below this bold legend in much smaller letters was printed: “Bascom Pentland—Att’y at Law—Conveyancer and Title Expert.”

The appearance of this strange figure in State Street, or anywhere else, had always been sufficient to attract attention and to draw comment. Bascom Pentland, if he had straightened to his full height, would have been six feet and three or four inches tall, but he had always walked with a stoop and as he grew older the stoop had become confirmed: he presented a tall, gnarled, bony figure, cadaverous and stringy, but tough as hickory. He was of that race of men who seem never to wear out, or to grow old, or to die: they live with almost undiminished vitality to great ages, and when they die they die suddenly. There is no slow wastage and decay because there is so little to waste or decay: their mummied and stringy flesh has the durability of granite.

Bascom Pentland clothed his angular figure with an assortment of odd garments which seemed to have the same durability: they were immensely old and worn, but they also gave no signs of ever wearing out, for by their cut and general appearance of age, it seemed that his frugal soul had selected in the ‘nineties materials which it hoped would last for ever. His coat, which was originally of a dark dull pepper-and-salt grey, had gone green at the seams and pockets, and moreover it was a ridiculously short skimpy coat for a gaunt big-boned man like this: it was hardly more than a jacket, his great wristy hands burst out of it like lengths of cordwood, and the mark of his high-humped narrow shoulders cut into it with a knife-like sharpness. His trousers were also tight and skimpy, of a lighter grey and of a rough woolly texture from which all fuzz and fluff had long ago been rubbed; he wore rough country brogans with raw-hide laces, and a funny little flat hat of ancient black felt, which had also gone green along the band. One understands now why the policeman called him “Bud”: this great bony figure seemed ruthlessly to have been crammed into garments in which a country fledgling of the ‘eighties might have gone to see his girl, clutching a bag of gumdrops in his large red hand. A stringy little neck-tie, a clean but dilapidated collar which by its bluish and softly mottled look Bascom Pentland must have laundered himself (a presumption which is quite correct since the old man did all his own laundry work, as well as his mending, repairing, and cobbling)— this was his costume, winter and summer, and it never changed, save that in winter he supplemented it with an ancient blue sweater which he wore buttoned to the chin and whose frayed ends and cuffs projected inches below the scanty little jacket. He had never been known to wear an overcoat, not even on the coldest days of those long, raw, and formidable winters from which Boston suffers.