Thomas Wolfe, page 93
“The Book of Wevelations,” cried Aunt Louise, suddenly rushing out of the kitchen with a carving knife in her hand, having returned to earth for a moment to hear him. “The Book of Wevelations!” she said in a hoarse whisper, her mouth puckered with disgust. “Eugene! A wicked, bloo-o-edy, kwu-u-el monument to supahstition. Twibute to an avenging and muh-duh-wous Gawd!” The last word uttered in a hoarse almost inaudible whisper would find his aunt bent double, clutching a knife in one hand, with her small bright eyes glaring madly at us.
“Oh no, my dear, oh no,” said Uncle Bascom, with astonishing, unaccustomed sadness, with almost exquisite gentleness. And, his vibrant passionate voice thrilling suddenly with emotion, he added:
“The triumphant music of one of the mightiest of earth’s poets: the sublime utterance of a man for whom God had opened the mysteries of heaven and hell.”
He paused a moment, then quietly in a remote voice—in that remote and magnificent voice which could thrill men so deeply when it uttered poetry, he continued: “‘I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’—the mightiest line, my dear boy, the most magnificent poetry, that was ever written.” And suddenly Uncle Bascom threw his gaunt hands before his face, and wept in strong hoarse sobs: “Oh, my God, my God!—the beauty, the pity of it all! . . . You must pardon me,” he whispered after a moment, drawing his faded sweater sleeve across his eyes. “You must pardon me. It brought back—memories.”
Aunt Louise, who had been stricken with a kind of fear and horror when he began to weep, now looked at Eugene with an expression of strong physical disgust, almost of nausea, shaking her head slightly in an affronted and lady-like manner as might one who, having achieved healthy and courageous discipline over all the excesses of emotion, feels only contempt for him who gives way to them.
She retired now with exaggerated dignity to the kitchen, served the meal, and addressed Eugene for some time thereafter with absurd quietness and restraint of manner, and a kind of stiff primness about her backbone. She was an excellent cook; there was magic in her treatment of food, and on the occasions when Eugene was coming out, she insisted that Bascom get her a decent piece of meat to work with.
There would be a juicy fragrant piece of lamb, or a boiled leg of mutton with currant jelly, or perhaps a small crisply browned roast of beef, with small flaky biscuits, smoking hot, two or three vegetables, and rich coffee. Uncle Bascom, quite unperturbed by his outbreak, would stamp into the kitchen, where he could be heard swearing and muttering to himself, as he searched for various things. Later he would appear at the table bearing a platter filled with some revolting mess of his own concoction,—a mixture of raw vegetables, chopped up—onions, carrots, beans, and raw potatoes—for he had the full strength of his family’s mania concerning food, violent prejudices about its preparation, and deep-seated distrust of everybody’s cleanliness but his own.
“Have some, my boy. Have some!” he would yell huskily, seating himself, and lunging toward Eugene with the awful mess, in a gesture of violent invitation.
“Thank you, no.” Eugene would try to keep his eyes averted from the mess, and focus on the good food heaping his plate.
“You may eat that slop if you want to,” Uncle Bascom would exclaim with a scornful and sneering laugh. “It would give me my death of dyspepsia.” And the silence of their eating would be broken by the recurrent snuffling whoops of Aunt Louise, accompanied by many pitying looks and head-shakes as she trembled with laughter and hid her mouth
Or, suddenly, in the full rich progress of the meal, Eugene would be shocked out of his pleasure in the food by the mad bright eyes of Aunt Louise bearing fiercely down upon him:
“Eugene!—don’t bwood, boy! Don’t bwood! You’ve got it in you—it’s in the blood! You’re one of them. You’re one of them!—a Pentland,” she croaked fatally.
“Ah-h—you don’t know what you’re talking about”—thus suddenly in fierce distemper Uncle Bascom. “Scotch! Scotch-Irish! Finest people on earth! No question about it whatever.”
“Fugitive ideation! Fugitive ideation,” she chattered like a monkey over a nut. “Mind goes off in all diwections. Can’t stick to anything five minutes at a time. The same thing that’s wong with the moduhn decadents. Wead Nordau’s book, Eugene. It will open yoah eyes,” and she whispered hoarsely again: “You’re ovah-sexed—all of you!”
“Bosh! Bosh!” growled Uncle Bascom. “Some more of your psychology—the bastard of superstition and quackery: the black magic of little minds—the effort of a blind man (phuh! phuh! phuh!) crawling about in a dark room (phuh! phuh!) looking for a black cat (phuh! phuh!) that isn’t there,” he yelled triumphantly, and closed his eyes and snarled and snuffled down his nose with laughter.
He knew nothing about it: occasionally he still read Kant, and he could be as deep in absolute categories, moments of negation, and definitions of a concept, as she with all of her complicated and extensive paraphernalia of phobias, complexes, fixations, and repressions.
“Well, Eugene,” thus Aunt Louise with light raillery and yet with eager curiosity, “have you found you a nice wosy-cheeked New England gul yet? You had bettah watch out, boy! I tell you, you had bettah watch out! she declared, kittenishly, wagging her finger at him, before he had time to answer.
“If he has,” said Uncle Bascom grimly, “he will find her sadly lacking in the qualities of delicacy, breeding, and womanly decorum that the Southern girl has. Oh, yes! No question about that whatever!” for Uncle Bascom still had the passionate loyalty and sentimental affection for the South that many Southerners have who could not be induced, under any circumstances, to return.
“Take a Nawthun gul, Eugene.” Aunt Louise became at once combative. “They’re bettah for you! They are bettah. They are bettah!” she declared, shaking her head in an obdurate manner, as if further argument was useless. “Moah independence! Bettah minds! They won’t choke yoah life out by hanging awound yoah neck,” she concluded crisply.
“I will tell you a story,” Uncle Bascom continued deliberately as if she had not spoken, “that will illustrate admirably what I mean.” Here he cleared his throat, as if he were preparing to deliver a set speech, and began in a deliberate and formal tone, “Some years ago I had occasion to go to Portland, Maine, on business. When I arrived at the North Station I found a crowd waiting before the window: it was necessary for me to wait in line. I was carrying a small valise which I placed on the floor between my legs in order to get out the money for my ticket. At this moment, the woman who stood behind me, apparently not given to noticing very well where she was going,” he snarled bitterly, “started to move forward and stubbed her toe against the valise. Before I had time to turn around and apologize”—he stopped abruptly, then, leaning forward with a horrible grimace, he tapped Eugene stiffly with his great bony fingers and continued in a lowered voice: “Say! Have you any idea what she did, my boy?”
“No,” Eugene said.
“Why I give you my word, my boy,” he whispered solemnly, “without so much as ‘By your leave,’ she lifted her leg and kicked me, kicked me”—he howled, “in the stern! And she, my boy, was a New England woman.”
“Whoo-o-op!” Aunt Louise was off again, rocking back and forth, holding her napkin over her mouth.
“Can you imagine, can you dream,” said Bascom, his voice an intense whisper of disgust, “of a Southern lady, the flower of modesty and the old aristocracy, doing such a thing as that?”
“Yes-s,” hissed Aunt Louise, her cackle subsiding, leaning intensely across the table and glaring at him, “and it suhved you wight! It suhved you wight! It suhved you wight! These things would nevah happen if you thought of any one’s convenience but yoah own. What wight did you have to put yoah baggage there? What wight?”
“Ah,” he replied, with a kind of precise snarl, profoundly contemptuous of her opinion, “you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talk-ing-about! What right? she says—Why all the right in the world,” he yelled. “Have you ever read the conditions enumerated upon the back of railway tickets concerning the transportation of baggage?”
“Suttinly not!” she retorted crisply. “One does not need to wead the backs of wailway tickets to learn how to behave like a civilized pusson!”
“Well, I will tell them to you,” said Uncle Bascom, licking his lips, and with a look of joy upon his face. And, at great length, with infinite gusto, lip-pursing, and legal pedantry of elocution, he would enumerate them all.
“And say, by the way, Eugene,” he would continue without a halt, “there is a very charming young lady who occasionally comes to my office (with her mother, of course) who is very anxious to meet you. She is a musician: she appears quite often in public. They live in Melrose, but they came, originally, I believe, from New Hampshire. Finest people in the world: no question about it,” his uncle said.
And suddenly alert, scenting adventure and seduction, the young man got the address from him immediately.
“Yes, my boy,” here Uncle Bascom fumbled through a mass of envelopes, “you may call her, without indiscretion, over the telephone at any time. I have spoken to her frequently about you: no doubt you’ll find much in common. Or, say!” here a flash of inspiration aroused him to volcanic action, “I could call her now and let you talk to her.” And he plunged violently toward the telephone.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Eugene sprang after him and checked him. For he wanted to make his own appointment luxuriously in private, sealed darkly in a telephone booth, craftily to feel his way, speculating on the curve of the unseen hip by the sound of the voice; probing, with the most delicate innuendo, the depth and richness of the promise. He loathed all family intercession and interference: they placed, he felt, at the outset, a crushing restraint upon the adventure from which it could never recover.
“I had rather call her myself,” he added, “when I have more time. I don’t know when I could see her now: it might be awkward calling at just this time.”
Later, while Uncle Bascom was poking furiously at the meagre coals of the tiny furnace in the cellar, setting up a clangorous and smoky din all through the house, Aunt Louise would bear down madly upon the boy, whispering:
“Did you hear him! Did you hear him! Still mad about the women at his age! Can’t keep his hands off them! The lechewous old fool!” and she cackled bitterly. Then, with a fierce change: “He’s mad about them, Eugene. He’s had one after anothah for the last twenty yeahs! He has spent faw-chuns on them! Have you seen that gul in his office yet? The stenographer?”
He had, and believed he had rarely seen a more solidly dull unattractive female than this pallid coarse-featured girl. But he only said: “Yes.”
“He has spent thousands on her, Gene! Thousands! The old fool! And all they do is laugh at him behind his back. Why even at home heah,” her eyes darting madly about the place, “he can hardly keep his hands off me at times! I have to lock myself in my woom to secure pwotection” and her bright old eyes muttered crazily about in her head.
He thought these outbursts the result of frantic and extravagant jealousy: fruit of some passionate and submerged affection that his aunt still bore for her husband. This, perhaps, was true, but later he was to find there was a surprising modicum of fact in what she had said.
During the wintry afternoon, he would sit and smoke one of his uncle’s corn-cob pipes, filling it with the coarse cheap powerful tobacco that lay, loosely spread, upon a bread-board in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, his aunt, on these usual Sundays when she must remain at home, played entire operas from Wagner on her small victrola.
Most of the records had been given her by her two daughters, and during the week the voices of the music afforded her the only companionship she had. The boy listened attentively to all she said about music, because he knew little about it, and had got from poetry the kind of joy that music seemed to give to others. Shifting the records quickly, his aunt would point out the melodramatic effervescence of the Italians, the metallic precision, the orderly profusion, the thrill, the vibration, the emptiness of French composition. She liked the Germans and the Russians. She liked what she called the “barbaric splendor” of Rimsky, but was too late, of course, either to have heard or to care much for the modern composers.
She would play Wagner over and over again, lost in the enchanted forests of the music, her spirit wandering drunkenly down vast murky aisles of sound, through which the great hoarse throats of horns were baying faintly. And occasionally, on Sundays, on one of her infrequent excursions into the world, when her daughters bought her tickets for concerts at Symphony Hall—that great gray room lined on its sides with pallid plaster shells of Greece—she would sit perched high, a sparrow held by the hypnotic serpent’s eye of music—following each motif, hearing minutely each subtle entry of the mellow flutes, the horns, the spinal ecstasy of violins—until her lonely and desolate life was spun out of her into aerial fabrics of bright sound.
During this time, Uncle Bascom, who also knew nothing about music, and cared so little for it that he treated his wife’s passion for it with contempt, would bury himself in the Sunday papers, or thumb deliberately through the pages of an ancient edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in search of arbitrament for some contested point.
“Ah! Here we are, just as I thought,” he would declare suddenly, with triumphant satisfaction. “‘Upon the fifth, however, in spite of the heavy rains which had made of the roads quaking bogs, Jackson appeared suddenly from the South, at the head of an army of 33,000 men.’”
Then they would wrangle furiously over the hour, the moment, the place of dead event: each rushing from the room fiercely to produce the document which would support his own contention.
“Your aunt, my boy, is not the woman she once was,” Bascom would say regretfully during her absence. “No question about that! At one time she was a very remarkable woman! Yes, sir, a woman of very considerable intelligence—considerable, that is, for a woman,” he said, with a slight sneer.
And she, whispering, when he had gone: “You have noticed, of course, Gene?”
“What?”
“His mind’s going,” she muttered. “What a head he had fifteen years ago! But now!—Senile decay—G. Stanley Hall—forgets everything—” she whispered hoarsely, as she heard his returning footfalls.
Or, as the winter light darkened grayly, slashed on the western sky by fierce cold red, his uncle passed sheaf after sheaf of his verse to him, sniggering nosily, and prodding the boy with his great fingers, while his aunt cleared the table, or listened to the music. The great majority of these verses, labored and pedantic as they were, were variations of the motif of agnosticism, the horn on which his ministry in the Church had fatally gored itself—and still a brand that smouldered in his brain—not now so much from an all-mastering conviction, as from some desire to justify himself. These verses, which he asserted were modelled on those of his great hero, Matthew Arnold, were all remarkably like this one:
MY CREED
“Is there a land beyond the stars
Where we may find eternal day,
Life after death, peace after wars?
Is there? I cannot say.
Shall we find there a happier life,
All joy that here we never know,
Love in all things, an end of strife?
Perhaps: it may be so.”
And so on.
And sniggering down his nose, Bascom would prod the young man stiffly with his great fingers, saying, as he slyly thrust another verse into his hand:
“Something in a lighter vein, my boy. Just a little foolishness, you know. (Phuh! Phuh! Phuh! Phuh! Phuh!)” Which was:
“Mary had a little calf,
It followed up her leg,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The boys were sure to beg.”
And so on.
Uncle Bascom had hundreds of them: Poems—Chiefly Religious, he sent occasionally to the morning papers. They were sometimes printed in the Editor’s Correspondence or The Open Forum. But Poems—Chiefly Profane he kept apparently for his own regalement.
Then, as it darkened, toward five o’clock, the boy would depart leaving them at times bitterly involved in a political wrangle, with the strewn Sunday members of The Boston Herald and The Boston Post around them, she parroting intensely the newspaper jargon, assaulting Borah and “the Senate iwweconcilables,” he angrily defending Senator Lodge as a scholar and a gentleman, with whom he had not always been in agreement, but from whom he had once received a most courteous letter—a fact which seemed to distinguish him in Bascom’s mind as the paragon of statesmanship.
And as Eugene left, he would note, with a swift inchoate pang, the sudden mad loneliness in Aunt Louise’s eyes, doomed for another week to her grim imprisonment. But he did not know that her distended and exhausted heart hissed audibly each time she ascended from futile labor on the cold furnace, stoked with cheap slag and coke, and that her thin blood was fed by gristly butcher’s leavings, in answer to the doctor’s call for meat.
And his aunt would go with Eugene to the frost-glazed door, open it, and stand huddled meagrely and hugging herself together beneath the savage desolation of the Northern cold; talking to him for a moment and calling brightly after him as he went down the icy path:
