OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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had before, and for this reason people wanted to be near him, to live in this thrilling enchantment that he gave to everything.
Even as he sat there smoking, drinking and talking with his guest, he did a simple and characteristic thing that yet seemed wonderful and thrilling to the other boy.
“Look,” said Starwick suddenly, getting up, going over to one of his bookshelves and switching on a light. “Look,” he said again, in his strangely fibred voice, “did you ever read this?”
As he uttered these words he took a book from one of the shelves and put on his spectacles. There was something strange and wonderful about the spectacles, and in the way he put them on, quietly, severely, plainly; the spectacles had thick old-fashioned silver rims, and silver handles. Their plain, honest and old-fashioned sobriety was somehow remarkable, and as he put them on, with a patient and quiet movement, and turned his attention to the pages of the book, the gravity and maturity of quiet and lonely thought in the boy’s face and head were, remarkably evident.
“Did you ever read this?” he said quietly, turning to the other youth, and handing him the book. It was a copy of George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man: the other replied he had not read it.
“Then,” said Starwick, “why don’t you take it along with you? It’s really quite amusing.” He switched off the light above the bookshelves, took off his glasses with a quiet tired movement, and folding them and putting them in his breast pocket, came back to the table and sat down.
“I think it may interest you,” he said.
Although the other boy had always felt an instinctive repulsion towards books which someone else urged him to read, something in Starwick’s simple act had suddenly given the book a strange rare value: he felt a strange and pleasurable excitement when he thought about it, and was instantly eager and curious to read it. Moreover, in an indefinable way, he had understood, the moment that Starwick turned to him, that he was GIVING, and not LENDING him the book; and this act, too, instantly was invested with a princely and generous opulence. It was this way with everything that Starwick did: everything he touched would come instantly to life with grace and joy; his was an incomparable, an enslaving power — a Midas-gift of life and joy almost too fortunate and effortless for one man to possess and in the end, like all his other gifts of life and joy, a power that would serve death, not life, that would spread corruption instead of health, and that finally would turn upon its owner and destroy him.
Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation which Starwick was somehow able to convey to everything he did and give to everyone he knew and liked, was constantly apparent. It was a fine clear night in early October, crispness and an indefinable smell of smoke were in the air, students were coming briskly along the street, singly or in groups of two or three, light glowed warmly in the windows of the book-shops, pharmacies, and tobacco stores near Harvard Square, and from the enormous library and the old buildings in the Harvard Yard there came a glow of lights, soft, rich, densely golden, embedded in old red brick.
All of these things, vital, exciting, strangely, pleasurably stirring as they were, gained a curious enhancement from Starwick’s presence until they gave to the younger boy not only a feeling of sharp, mounting, strangely indefinable excitement, but a feeling of power and wealth — a sense of being triumphant and having before him the whole golden and unvisited plantation of the world to explore, possess and do with as he would — the most fortunate and happy life that any man had ever known.
Starwick went into a tobacco shop to cash a cheque and the whole place, with its pungent smells of good tobacco, its idling students, its atmosphere of leisure and enjoyment, became incomparably wealthy, rich, exciting as it had never been before.
And later, when the two young men had gone into the “Cock House Tavern” on Brattle Street, the prim and clean little rooms of the old house, the clean starched waitresses and snowy tablecloth, the good food, and several healthy and attractive-looking girls of the New England type all gained an increased value. He felt a thrill of pleasurable anticipation and a feeling of unlimited wealth, simply because Starwick was there ordering the meal, conferring on everything around him the sense of wealth and ease and nameless joy which his wonderful personality, with its magic touch, instantly gave to anything on earth.
Yet during the meal the feeling of hostile constraint between the two young men was not diminished, but grew constantly. Starwick’s impeccable cold courtesy — really the armour of a desperately shy person — his mannered tone, with its strange and disturbing accent, the surgical precision of his cross-examination into the origin, experience, and training of the other youth sharpened a growing antagonism in the other’s spirit, and put him on his guard. Moreover, failure to give any information about himself — above all his complete reticence concerning his association with Professor Hatcher and the reason for his curt and brusquely-worded invitation to dinner — all this began to bear now with oppressive weight upon the other’s spirit. It seemed to him there was a deliberate arrogance in this cold reticence. He began to feel a sullen resentment because of this secretive and mysterious conduct. And later that evening when the two young men parted, the manner of each of them was cold and formal. They bowed stiffly, shook hands with each other coldly, and marched away. It was several months before the younger would again talk to Starwick, and during that period he thought of him with a feeling of resentment, almost of dislike.
ix
That first impact of the city had stunned him with its huge and instant shock, and now, like a swimmer whelmed in a raging storm, he sought desperately among that unceasing flood of faces for one that he knew, one that he could call his own, and suddenly he thought of Uncle Bascom. When his mother had told him he should go to see his uncle and his family as soon as he could he had nodded his head mechanically and muttered a few words of perfunctory assent, but so busy were his mind and heart with his shining vision of the city and all the magic he was sure to find there that it had never seriously occurred to him that he would turn eagerly to the old man for companionship and help.
But now, the day after his arrival in the city, he found himself pawing eagerly through the pages of the phone book for his uncle’s business address: he found it — the familiar words, “Bascom Pentland” stared up out of the crowded page with a kind of unreal shocking incandescence, and in another moment he heard himself speaking across the wire to a puzzled voice that came to him with its curious and unearthly remoteness as if from some planetary distance — and suddenly the howling recognition of the words — words whose unearthly quality now came back to him in a searing flash of memory, although he had not heard his uncle’s voice for eight years, when he was twelve years old:
“Oh, hello! hello! hello!” that unearthly voice howled faintly at him. “How are you, my boy, how are you, how are you, how are you? . . . And say!” the voice yelled with a sudden comical transition to matter of factness —“I had a letter from your mother just this morning. She told me you were on your way. . . . I’ve been expecting you.”
“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: “Knowing 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,