OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 splendour” 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 grey 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 greyly, 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, laboured 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.

      time_

      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 numbers 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 labour 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: “Come again, boy! Always glad to see you!”

      And in the dull cold Sunday light he strode away, his spirit braced by the biting air, the Northern cold, the ragged bloody sky, which was somehow prophetic to him of glorious fulfilment, and at the same time depressed by the grey enormous weight of Sunday tedium and dreariness all around him.

      And yet, he never lost heart that out of this dullness he would draw some rich adventure. He strode away with quickening pulse, hoping to see it issue from every warmly lighted house, to find it in the street cars, the subway or at a restaurant. Then he would go back into the city and dine at one of the restaurants where the pretty waitresses served him. Later he would go out on the sparsely peopled Sunday streets, turning finally, as a last resort, into Washington Street, where the moving-picture places and cheap vaudeville houses were filled with their Sunday Irish custom.

      Sometimes he went in, but as one weary act succeeded the other, and the empty brutal laughter of the people echoed in his ears, seeming to him forced and dishonest, as if people laughed at the ghosts of mirth, the rotten husks of stale wit, the sordidness, hopelessness, and sterility of their lives oppressed him hideously. On the stage he would see the comedian again display his red neck-tie with a leer, and hear the people laugh about it; he would hear again that someone was a big piece of cheese, and listen to them roar; he would observe again the pert and cheap young comedian with nothing to offer waste time portentously, talk in a low voice with the orchestra leader; and the only thing he liked would be the strength and balance of the acrobats.

      Finally, drowned in a sea-depth of grey СКАЧАТЬ