Thomas Wolfe, page 413
Or again, if it were a matter of clothing, a matter of fencing in his bones and tallows against the frozen nail of Boston winter, he would howl derisively: “An overcoat! Not on your life! I wouldn’t give two cents for all the old overcoats in the world! The only thing they’re good for is to gather up germs and give you colds and pneumonia. I haven’t worn an overcoat in thirty years, and I’ve never had the vestige—no! not the semblance—of a cold during all that time!”—an assertion that was not strictly accurate since he always complained bitterly of at least two or three during the course of a single winter, declaring at those times that no more hateful, treacherous, damnable climate than that of Boston had ever been known.
Similarly, if it were a question of laundries he would scornfully declare that he would not send “his shirts and collars to let some dirty old Chinaman spit and hock upon them—yes!” he would gleefully howl, as some new abomination of nastiness suggested itself to his teeming brain—“Yes! and iron it in, too, so you can can walk around done up in old Chinaman’s spit!”—(Phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)—here he would grimace, contort his rubbery lip, and laugh down his nose in forced snarls of gratification and triumph.
This was the old man who now stood clutching his raw bony hands across his waist, before entering his office.
—
This was his history:
Bascom Hawke had been the scholar of his amazing family: he was a man of powerful intelligence and disordered emotions. Even in his youth, his eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, manner had made him an object of ridicule to his Southern kinsmen, but their ridicule was streaked with pride, since they accepted the impact of his personality as another proof that theirs was an extraordinary family. “He’s one of ’em, all right,” they said exultantly, “queerer than any of us!”
Bascom’s youth, following the war between the States, had been seared by a bitter poverty: at once enriched and warped by a life that clung to the earth with a root-like tenacity, that was manual, painful, spare and stricken, and that rebuilt itself—fiercely, cruelly, and richly—from the earth. And, because there burned and blazed in him from the first a hatred of human indignity, a passionate avowal of man’s highness and repose, he felt more bitterly than the others the delinquencies of his father, and the multiplication of his father’s offspring, who came regularly into a world of empty cupboards.
“As each of them made its unhappy entrance into the world,” he would say later, his voice tremulous with passion, “I went out into the woods, striking my head against the trees, and blaspheming God in my anger. Yes, sir,” he continued, pursing his long lip rapidly against his few loose upper teeth, and speaking with an exaggerated pedantry of enunciation, “I am not ashamed to confess that I did. For we were living in conditions un-worthy—unworthy”—his voice rising to an evangelical yell, “I had almost said—of the condition of animals. And—say—what do you think?”—he said, with a sudden shift in manner and tone, becoming, after his episcopal declaration, matter of fact and whisperingly confidential. “Why, do you know, my boy, at one time I had to take my own father aside, and point out to him we were living in no way becoming decent people.”—Here his voice sank to a whisper, and he tapped me on the knee with his big stiff finger, grimacing horribly and pursing his lip against his dry upper teeth.
Poverty had been the mistress of his youth and Bascom Hawke had not forgotten: poverty had burned its way into his heart. He took what education he could find in a backwoods school, read everything he could, taught, for two or three years, in a country school and, at the age of twenty-one, borrowing enough money for railway fare, went to Boston to enroll himself at Harvard. And, somehow, because of the fire that burned in him, the fierce determination of his soul, he had been admitted, secured employment waiting on tables, tutoring, and pressing every one’s trousers but his own, and lived in a room with two other starved wretches on $3.50 a week, cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, and studying in the one place.
At the end of seven years he had gone through the college and the school of theology, performing brilliantly in Greek, Hebrew, and metaphysics.
Poverty, fanatical study, the sexual meagreness of his surroundings, had made of him a gaunt zealot: at thirty he was a lean fanatic, a true Yankee madman, high-boned, with gray thirsty eyes and a thick flaring sheaf of oaken hair—six feet three inches of gangling and ludicrous height, gesticulating madly and obliviously before a grinning world. But he had a grand lean head: he looked somewhat like the great Ralph Waldo Emerson—with the brakes off.
About this time, he married a young Southern woman of a good family: she was from Tennessee, her parents were both dead, in the seventies she had come north and had lived for several years with an uncle in Providence, who had been constituted guardian of her estate, amounting probably to about seventy-five thousand dollars, although her romantic memory later multiplied the sum to two hundred thousand dollars. The man squandered part of her money and stole the rest: she came, therefore, to Bascom without much dowry, but she was pretty, bright, intelligent, and had a good figure. Bascom smote the walls of his room with bloody knuckles, and fell down before God.
When Bascom met her she was a music student in Boston: she had a deep full-toned contralto voice which was wrung from her somewhat tremulously when she sang. She was a small woman, birdlike and earnest, delicately fleshed and boned, quick and active in her movements and with a crisp tart speech which still bore, curiously, traces of a Southern accent. She was a brisk, serious, lady-like little person, without much humor, and she was very much in love with her gaunt suitor. They saw each other for two years: they went to concerts, lectures, sermons; they talked of music, poetry, philosophy and of God, but they never spoke of love. But one night Bascom met her in the parlor of her boarding house on Huntington Avenue, and with a voice vibrant and portentous with the importance of the words he had to utter, began as follows: “Miss Louise!” he said carefully, gazing thoughtfully over the apex of his hands. “There comes a time when a man, having reached an age of discretion and mature judgment, must begin to consider one of the gravest—yes! by all means one of the most important events in human life. The event I refer to is—matrimony.” He paused, a clock was beating out its punctual measured tock upon the mantel, and a horse went by with ringing hoofs upon the street. As for Louise, she sat quietly erect, with dignified and lady-like composure, but it seemed to her that the clock was beating in her own breast, and that it might cease to beat at any moment.
“For a minister of the gospel,” Bascom continued, “the decision is particularly grave because, for him—once made it is irrevocable, once determined upon, it must be followed inexorably, relentlessly—aye! to the edge of the grave, to the uttermost gates of death, so that the possibility of an error in judgment is fraught” his voice sinking to a boding whisper—“is fraught with the most terrible consequences. Accordingly,” Uncle Bascom said in a deliberate tone, “having decided to take this step, realizing to the full—to the full, mind you—its gravity, I have searched my soul, I have questioned my heart. I have gone up into the mountings and out into the desert and communed with my Maker until,” his voice rose like a demon’s howl, “there no longer remains an atom of doubt, a particle of uncertainty, a vestige of disbelief! Miss Louise, I have decided that the young lady best fitted in every way to be my helpmate, the partner of my joys and griefs, the confidante of my dearest hopes, the in-spir-a-tion of my noblest endeavors, the companion of my declining years, and the spirit that shall accompany me along each step of life’s vexed and troubled way, sharing with me whatever God in his inscrutable Providence shall will, whether of wealth or poverty, grief or happiness—I have decided, Miss Louise, that that lady must be—yourself!—and, therefore, I request,” he said slowly and impressively, “the honor of your hand in mar-ri-age.”
She loved him, she had hoped, prayed, and agonized for just such a moment, but now that it had come she rose immediately with lady-like dignity, and said: “Mistah Hawke: I am honuhed by this mahk of yoah esteem and affection, and I pwomise to give it my most unnest considahwation without delay. I wealize fully, Mistah Hawke, the gwavity of the wuhds you have just uttuhed. Foh my paht, I must tell you, Mistah Hawke, that if I accept yoah pwoposal, I shall come to you without the fawchun which was wightfully mine, but of which I have been depwived and defwauded by the wascality—yes! the wascality of my gahdian. I shall come to you, theahfoh, without the dow’y I had hoped to be able to contwibute to my husband’s fawchuns.”
“Oh, my dear Miss Louise! My dear young lady!” Uncle Bascom cried, waving his great hand through the air with a dismissing gesture. “Do not suppose—do not for one instant suppose, I beg of you!—that consideration of a monetary nature could influence my decision. Oh, not in the slightest!” he cried. “Not at all, not at all!”
“Fawchnatly,” Louise continued, “my inhewitance was not wholly dissipated by this scoundwel. A pohtion, a vewy small pohtion, remains.”
“My dear girl! My dear young lady!” Uncle Bascom cried. “It is not of the slightest consequence. . . . How much did he leave?” he added.
Thus they were married.
Bascom immediately got a church in the Middle West: good pay and a house. But during the course of the next twenty years he was shifted from church to church, from sect to sect—to Brooklyn, then back to the Middle West, to the Dakotas, to Jersey City, to Western Massachusetts, and finally back to the small towns surrounding Boston.
When Bascom talked, you may be sure God listened: he preached magnificently, his gaunt face glowing from the pulpit, his rather high, enormously vibrant voice, husky with emotion. His prayers were fierce solicitations of God, so mad with fervor that his audiences felt uncomfortably they came close to blasphemy. But, unhappily, on occasions my uncle’s mad eloquence grew too much for him: his voice, always too near the heart of passion, would burst in splinters, and he would fall violently forward across his lectern, his face covered by his great gaunt fingers, sobbing horribly.
This, in the Middle West, where his first church had been, does not go down so well—yet it may be successful if one weeps mellowly, joyfully—smiling bravely through the tears—at a lovely aisle processional of repentant sinners; but Bascom, who chose uncomfortable titles for his sermons, would be overcome by his powerful feelings on these occasions when his topic was “Potiphar’s Wife,” “Ruth, the Girl in the Corn,” “The Whores of Babylon,” “The Woman on the Roof,” and so on.
His head was too deeply engaged with his conscience—he was in turn Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, searching through the whole roaring confusion of Protestantism for a body of doctrine with which he could agree. And, he was forever finding it, and later forever renouncing what he had 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 Hawke 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.
He regarded the price of everything as exorbitant—his furious anguish over the wages of labor was marvellous to behold: it drove him raging home, where he stamped insanely upon the floors in his fury, declaring that the Italians, Irish, Belgians, Poles, Swiss, and Yankees—or whatever unfortunate race had been represented in the last bill of charges—were infamous scoundrels, foul and dishonest cutthroats, engaged in a conspiracy to empty both his purse and his cupboard. He called upon them the entire and plenteous artillery of his abuse, his high husky voice ascending to a scream until, his own powers failing him, there flashed in him for a moment remembrance of one mightier than he, the most terribly eloquent of all earth’s thunderers—his obscene and gargantuan partner, John T. Brill; and lifting his shaking hands toward Heaven, he would invoke God and Brill at the same time.
Like others in his family seared with a terrible and minute memory of war and hunger, he fled before the skeleton spectre of poverty: he was of that race which expects to avert starvation by eating sparingly.
Therefore, he mended his own shoes and wore historic clothing; he fiercely sowed and reaped the produce of his stony garden, and contrived in countless other ways to thwart the forces of organized extortion.
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 laborers 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 favorite 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 gray-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, passing stolidly by below the blank board fences of a brick yard, crunching doggedly through the lanes of dirty rutted ice, passing before the gray 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 my uncle’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—Hawke Heights—although the only eminence in all that flat and weary waste was a stunted and 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 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 my uncle. 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 receipt—their fractional release from debt and labor, 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!” my uncle 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-a-tions!”
For the first time a dark flush, a flush of outraged patriotism, began to burn upon the swarthy yellow of Mr. Makropolos’ cheek: his manner became heavy and animated, and in a moment he said with passionate conviction:
