OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ upon his knees, his black eyes glittering with suspicion under his knitted inch of brow. At length, he shifted nervously, rubbed his paws tentatively across his knees and then, with a smile mixed of ingratiation and mistrust, said: “How mucha you want, eh?”

      “How mucha we want?” Brill repeated vulgarly as the burble began to play about within his throat. “Why, how mucha you got? . . . You know we’ll take every damn thing you got! It’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got!” And he hurled himself backward, bellowing with laughter. “By God, Reverend,” he yelled as Uncle Bascom entered, “ain’t that right? It’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got! ‘od damn! We ought to take that as our motter. I’ve got a good mind to git it printed on our letterheads. What do you think, Reverend?”

      “Hey?” howled Uncle Bascom absently, as he prepared to enter his own office.

      “I say we ought to use it for our motter.”

      “Your what?” said Uncle Bascom scornfully, pausing as if he did not understand.

      “Our motter,” Brill said.

      “Not your MOTTER,” Bascom howled derisively. “The word is NOT motter,” he said contemptuously. “Nobody of any refinement would say MOTTER. MOTTER is NOT correct!” he howled finally. “Only an ig-no-RAM-us would say MOTTER. No!” he yelled with final conclusiveness. “That is NOT the way to pronounce it! That is abso-lute-ly and emphat-ic-ally NOT the way to pronounce it!”

      “All right, then, Reverend,” said Brill, submissively. “You’re the doctor. What is the word?”

      “The word is MOTTO,” Uncle Bascom snarled. “Of course! Any fool knows that!”

      “Why, hell,” Mr. Brill protested in a hurt tone. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

      “No-o!” Uncle Bascom howled derisively. “No-o! By no means, by no means, by no means! You said MOTTER. The word is NOT motter. The word is motto: m-o-t-t-o! M-O-T-T-O does NOT spell motter,” he remarked with vicious decision.

      “What does it spell?” said Mr. Brill.

      “It spells MOTTO,” Uncle Bascom howled. “It HAS always spelled motto! It WILL always spell motto! As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: A-a-men!” he howled huskily in his most evangelical fashion. Then, immensely pleased at his wit, he closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and snarled and snuffled down his nose with laughter.

      “Well, anyway,” said Brill, “no matter how you spell it, it’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got! That’s the way we feel about it!”

      And this, in fact, without concealment, without pretence, without evasion, was just how Brill DID feel about it. He wanted everything that was his and, in addition, he wanted as much as he could get. And this rapacity, this brutal and unadorned gluttony, so far from making men wary of him, attracted them to him, inspired them with unshakable confidence in his integrity, his business honesty. Perhaps the reason for this was that concealment did not abide in the man: he published his intentions to the world with an oath and a roar of laughter — and the world, having seen and judged, went away with the confidence of this Italian — that Brill was “one fine-a man!” Even Bascom, who had so often turned upon his colleague the weapons of scorn, contempt, and mockery, had a curious respect for him, an acrid sunken affection: often, when the old man and his nephew were alone, he would recall something Brill had said and his powerful and fluent features would suddenly be contorted in that familiar grimace, as he laughed his curious laugh which was forced out, with a deliberate and painful effort, through his powerful nose and his lips, barred with a few large teeth. “Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! . . . Of course!” he said, with a nasal rumination, as he stared over the apex of his great bony hands, clasped in meditation —“of course, he is just a poor ignorant fellow! I don’t suppose — no, sir, I really do not suppose that Brill ever went to school over six months in his life! — Say!” Bascom paused suddenly, turned abruptly with his strange fixed grin, and fastened his sharp old eyes keenly on the boy: in this sudden and abrupt change, this transference of his vision from his own secret and personal world, in which his thought and feeling were sunken, and which seemed to be so far away from the actual world about him, there was something impressive and disconcerting. His eyes were grey, sharp, and old, and one eyelid had a heavy droop or ptosis which, although it did not obscure his vision, gave his expression at times a sinister glint, a malevolent humour. “— Say!” here his voice sank to a deliberate and confiding whisper, “(Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!) Say — a man who would — he told me — Oh, vile! vile! vile! my boy!” his uncle whispered, shutting his eyes in a kind of shuddering ecstasy as if at the memory of things too gloriously obscene to be repeated. “Can you IMAGINE, can you even DREAM of such a state of affairs if he had possessed an atom, a SCINTILLA of delicacy and good breeding! Yes, sir!” he said with decision. “I suppose there’s no doubt about it! His beginnings were very lowly, very poor and humble indeed! . . . Not that that is in any sense to his discredit!” Uncle Bascom said hastily, as if it had occurred to him that his words might bear some taint of snobbishness. “Oh, by no means, by no means, by no means!” he sang out, with a sweeping upward gesture of his long arm, as if he were clearing the air of wisps of smoke. “Some of our finest men — some of the nation’s LEADERS, have come from just such surroundings as those. Beyond a doubt! Beyond a doubt! There’s no question about it whatever! Say!”— here he turned suddenly upon the boy again with the ptotic and sinister intelligence of his eye. “Was LINCOLN an aristocrat? Was he the issue of wealthy parents? Was he brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth? Was our OWN former governor, the Vice–President of the United States today, reared in the lap of luxury! Not on your life!” howled Uncle Bascom. “He came from frugal and thrifty Vermont farming stock, he has never deviated a JOT from his early training, he remains today what he has always been — one of the simplest of men! Finest people on earth, no question about it whatever!”

      Again, he meditated gravely with lost stare across the apex of his great joined hands, and the boy noticed again, as he had noticed so often, the great dignity of his head in thought — a head that was high-browed, lean and lonely, a head that not only in its cast of thought but even in its physical contour, and in its profound and lonely earnestness, bore an astonishing resemblance to that of Emerson — it was, at times like these, as grand a head as the young man had ever seen, and on it was legible the history of man’s loneliness, his dignity, his grandeur and despair.

      “Yes, sir!” said Bascom, in a moment. “He is, of course, a vulgar fellow and some of the things he says at times are Oh, vile! vile! vile!” cried Bascom, closing his eyes and laughing, “Oh, vile! MOST vile! . . . but (phuh! phuh! phuh!) you can’t help laughing at the fellow at times because he is so. . . . Oh, I could tell you things, my boy! . . . Oh, VILE! VILE!” he cried, shaking his head downwards. “What coarseness! . . . What inVECT-ive!” he whispered, in a kind of ecstasy.

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      Eugene was now a member of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, and although he had come into this work by chance, and would in the end discover that his heart and interest were not in it, it had now become for him the rock to which his life was anchored, the rudder of his destiny, the sole and all-sufficient reason for his being here. It now seemed to him that there was only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this work was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this work he had better die, since any other life than the life of the playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.

      Accordingly every СКАЧАТЬ