OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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found. At forty, the most liberal of Unitarians, the strains of agnosticism were piping madly through his sermons: he began to hint at his new faith in prose which he modelled on the mighty utterance of Carlyle, and in poetry, in what he deemed the manner of Matthew Arnold. His professional connection with the Unitarians, and indeed with the Baptists, Methodists, Holy Rollers, and Seventh Day Adventists, came to an abrupt ending after he read from his pulpit one morning a composition in verse entitled “The Agnostic,” which made up in concision what it lacked in melody, and which ended each stanza sadly, but very plainly, on this recurrence:
“I do not know:
It may be so.”
Thus, when he was almost fifty, Bascom Pentland stopped preaching in public. There was no question where he was going. He had his family’s raging lust for property. He became a “conveyancer”; he acquired enough of the law of property to convey titles; but he began to buy pieces of land in the suburbs of Boston and to build small cheap houses, using his own somewhat extraordinary designs to save the architect’s fees and, wherever possible, doing such odd jobs as laying the foundations, installing the plumbing, and painting the structure.
The small houses that he — no, he did not build them! — he went through the agonies of monstrous childbirth to produce them, he licked, nursed, and fondled them into stunted growth, and he sold them on long but profitable terms to small Irish, Jewish, Negro, Belgian, Italian and Greek labourers and tradesmen. And at the conclusion of a sale, or after receiving from one of these men the current payment, Uncle Bascom went homeward in a delirium of joy, shouting in a loud voice, to all who might be compelled to listen, the merits of the Jews, Belgians, Irish, Swiss or Greeks.
“Finest people in the world! No question about it!”— this last being his favourite exclamation in all moments of payment or conviction.
For when they paid he loved them. Often on Sundays they would come to pay him, tramping over the frozen ground or the packed snow through street after street of smutty grey-looking houses in the flat weary-looking suburb where he lived. To this dismal heath, therefore, they came, the swarthy children of a dozen races, clad in the hard and decent blacks in which the poor pay debts and go to funerals. They would advance across the barren lands, the harsh sere earth scarred with its wastes of rust and rubbish, going stolidly by below the blank board fences of a brick yard, crunching doggedly through the lanes of dirty rutted ice, passing before the grey besmutted fronts of wooden houses which in their stark, desolate, and unspeakable ugliness seemed to give a complete and final utterance to an architecture of weariness, sterility and horror, so overwhelming in its absolute desolation that it seemed as if the painful and indignant soul of man must sicken and die at length before it, stricken, stupefied, and strangled without a tongue to articulate the curse that once had blazed in him.
And at length they would pause before the old man’s little house — one of a street of little houses which he had built there on the barren flatlands of the suburb, and to which he had given magnificently his own name — Pentland Heights — although the only eminence in all that flat and weary waste was an almost imperceptible rise a half-mile off. And here along this street which he had built, these little houses, warped yet strong and hardy, seemed to burrow down solidly like moles for warmth into the ugly stony earth on which they were built and to cower and huddle doggedly below the immense and terrible desolation of the northern sky, with its rimy sun-hazed lights, its fierce and cruel rags and stripes of wintry red, its raw and savage harshness. And then, gripping their greasy little wads of money, as if in the knowledge that all reward below these fierce and cruel skies must be wrenched painfully and minutely from a stony earth, they went in to pay him. He would come up to meet them from some lower cellar-depth, swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward them howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed and faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching his great hands together at his waist. Then they would wait, stiffly, clumsily, fingering their hats, while with countless squints and grimaces and pursings of the lip, he scrawled out painfully their receipts — their fractional release from debt and labour, one more hard-won step toward the freedom of possession.
At length, having pocketed their money and finished the transaction, he would not permit them to depart at once; he would howl urgently at them an invitation to stay, he would offer long weedy-looking cigars to them, and they would sit uncomfortably, crouching on their buttock bones like stalled oxen, at the edges of chairs, shyly and dumbly staring at him, while he howled question, comment, and enthusiastic tribute at them.
“Why, my dear sir!” he would yell at Makropolos, the Greek. “You have a glorious past, a history of which any nation might well be proud!”
“Sure, sure!” said Makropolos, nodding vigorously. “Beeg Heestory!”
“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!” the old man howled, “where burning Sappho loved and sung —” (Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!)
“Sure, sure!” said Makropolos again, nodding good-naturedly but wrinkling his lowering finger’s-breadth of brow in a somewhat puzzled fashion. “Tha’s right! You got it!”
“Why, my dear sir!” Uncle Bascom cried. “It has been the ambition of my lifetime to visit those hallowed scenes, to stand at sunrise on the Acropolis, to explore the glory that was Greece, to see the magnificent ruins of the noblest of ancient civ-i-LIZ-ations!”
For the first time a dark flush, a flush of outraged patriotism, began to burn upon the swarthy yellow of Mr. Makropolos’s cheek: his manner became heavy and animated, and in a moment he said with passionate conviction:
“No, no, no! No ruin! Wat you t’ink, eh! Athens fine town! We got a million pipples dere!” He struggled for a word, then cupped his hairy paws indefinitely: “YOU know? BEEG! O, ni-ez!” he added greasily, with a smile. “Everyt’ing good! We got everyt’ing good dere as you got here! YOU know?” he said with a confiding and painful effort. “Everyt’ing ni-ez! Not old! No, no, no!” he cried with a rising and indignant vigour. “New! de same as here. Ni-ez! You get good and cheap — everyt’ing! Beeg place, new house, dumbwaiter, elevator — wat chew like! — oh, ni-ez!” he said earnestly. “Wat chew t’ink it cost, eh? Feefateen dollar a month! Sure, sure!” he nodded with a swarthy earnestness. “I wouldn’t keed you!”
“Finest people on earth!” Uncle Bascom cried with an air of great conviction and satisfaction. “No question about it!”— and he would usher his visitor to the door, howling farewells into the terrible desolation of those savage skies.
Meanwhile, Aunt Louise, although she had not heard a word of what was said, although she had listened to nothing except the periods of Uncle Bascom’s heavily accented and particular speech, kept up a constant snuffling laughter punctuated momently by faint whoops as she bent over her pots and pans in the kitchen, pausing from time to time as if to listen, and then snuffling to herself as she shook her head in pitying mirth which rose again up to the crisis of a faint crazy cackle as she scoured the pan; because, of course, during the forty-five years of her life with him she had gone thoroughly, imperceptibly, and completely mad, and no longer knew or cared to know whether these words had just been spoken or were the echoes of lost voices long ago.
And again, she would pause to listen, with her small birdlike features uplifted gleefully in a kind of mad attentiveness as the door slammed and he stumped muttering back into the house, intent upon the secret designs of his own life, as remote and isolate from her as if they had each dwelt on separate planets, although the house they lived in was a small one.
time_
Such had been the history of the old man. His life had come up from the wilderness, the buried past, the lost America. The potent mystery of old events and moments had passed around him, and the magic light of dark time fell across him.
Like all men in this land, he had been a wanderer, an exile on the immortal earth. Like all of us, he had no home. Wherever great wheels carried him was home.
As the old man and his nephew talked together, Louise would prepare the meal in the kitchen, which gave on the living-room where they ate, by a swing door that she kept