Then, as he sat there staring dully and feebly out upon the city, his great hairy hands quietly at rest upon the sides of his chair, the door opened and his two sons came out upon the porch.
“W-w-w-well, Papa,” Luke sang out in his rich stammering tones. “Wy-wy wy, wy, I fought we’d just c-c-c-come by for a m-m-m-moment to let Gene say g-g-good-bye to you.” In a low tone to his younger brother he added nervously, “Wy, I fink, I fink I’d m-m-make it short and snappy if I were you. D-d-don’t say anyf’ing to excite him, wy, wy, wy, I’d just say good-bye.”
“Hello, son,” said Gant quietly and dully, looking up at him. For a moment his great hand closed over the boy’s, and he said quietly:
“Where are you going?”
“Wy, wy, wy, he’s on his way up Norf . . . wy . . . he’s g-g-going to Harvard, Papa.”
“Be a good boy, son,” Gant said gently. “Do the best you can. If you need anything let your mother know,” he said wearily and indifferently, and turned his dead eyes away across the city.
“Wy . . . wy . . . wy he’d like to tell you —”
“Oh, Jesus. . . . I don’t want to hear about it,” Gant began to sniffle in a whining tone. . . . “Why must it all be put on me . . . sick and old as I am? . . . If he wants anything let him ask his mother for it . . . it’s fearful, it’s awful, and it’s cruel that you should afflict a sick man in this way.” He was sniffling petulantly and his chin, on which a wiry stubble of beard was growing, trembled and shook like that of a whining child.
“I . . . I . . . I fink I’d just say g-g-good-bye now, Gene . . . m-m-make it, wy make it quick if you can: he’s not f-f-feeling good today.”
“Good-bye, Papa,” the boy said, and, bending, took his father’s great right hand.
“Good-bye, son,” Gant now said quietly as before, looking up at him. He presented his grizzled moustache, and the boy kissed him briefly, feeling the wiry bristles of the moustache brush his cheek as they had always done.
“Take care of yourself, son,” said Gant kindly. “Do the best you can.” And for a moment he covered the boy’s hand with one great palm, and gestured briefly across the city: “I was a boy here,” Gant said quietly, “over fifty years ago . . . old Jeff Streeter’s hotel where I lived was there,” he pointed briefly with his great forefinger. “. . . . I was alone in this great city like the city you are going to — a poor friendless country boy who had come here to learn his trade as apprentice to a stone-cutter . . . and I had come from . . . THERE!” as he spoke these words, a flash of the old power and life had come into Gant’s voice, and now he was pointing his great finger strongly towards the sun-hazed vistas of the North and West.
“There!” cried Gant, strongly now, his eye bright and shining as he followed the direction of his pointing finger. “Do you see, son? . . . Pennsylvania . . . Gettysburg . . . Brant’s Mill . . . the country that I came from is THERE! . . . Now I shall never see it any more,” he said. “I’m an old man and I’m dying. . . . The big farms . . . the orchards . . . the great barns bigger than houses. . . . You must go back, son, someday to see the country that your father came from. . . . I was a boy there,” the old man muttered. “Now I’m an old man. . . . I’ll come back no more. . . . No more . . . it’s pretty strange when you come to think of it,” he muttered, “by God it is!”
“Wy, wy, P-p-p-papa,” Luke said nervously, “I . . . I fink if he’s g-g-going to get his train wy we’d better —”
“Good-bye, son,” Gant said quietly again, giving the boy the pressure of his great right hand. “Be a good boy, now.”
But already all the fires of life, so briefly kindled by this memory of the past, had died away: he was an old sick man again, and he had turned his dead eyes away from his son and was staring dully out across the city.
“Good-bye, Papa,” the boy said, and then paused uncertainly, not knowing further what to say. From the old man there had come suddenly the loathsome stench of rotting death, corrupt mortality, and he turned swiftly away with a feeling of horror in his heart, remembering the good male smell of childhood and his father’s prime — the smell of the old worn sofa, the chairs, the sitting-room, the roaring fires, the plug tobacco on the mantelpiece.
At the screen door he paused again and looked back down the porch. His father was sitting there as he had left him, among the other old dying men, his long chin loose, mouth half open, his dead dull eye fixed vacantly across the sun-hazed city of his youth, his great hand of power quietly dropped upon his cane.
Down in the city’s central web, the boy could distinguish faintly the line of the rails, and see the engine smoke above the railroad yards, and as he looked, he heard far off that haunting sound and prophecy of youth and of his life — the bell, the wheel, the wailing whistle — and the train.
Then he turned swiftly and went to meet it — and all the new lands, morning, and the shining city. Upon the porch his father had not moved or stirred. He knew that he should never see him again.
Book ii
Young Faustus
vii
The train rushed on across the brown autumnal land, by wink of water and the rocky coasts, the small white towns and flaming colours and the lonely, tragic and eternal beauty of New England. It was the country of his heart’s desire, the dark Helen in his blood forever burning — and now the fast approach across October land, the engine smoke that streaked back on the sharp grey air that day!
The coming on of the great earth, the new lands, the enchanted city, the approach, so smoky, blind and stifled, to the ancient web, the old grimed thrilling barricades of Boston. The streets and buildings that slid past that day with such a haunting strange familiarity, the mighty engine steaming to its halt, and the great train-shed dense with smoke and acrid with its smell and full of the slow pantings of a dozen engines, now passive as great cats, the mighty station with the ceaseless throngings of its illimitable life, and all of the murmurous, remote and mighty sounds of time for ever held there in the station, together with a tart and nasal voice, a hand’s-breadth off that said: “There’s hahdly time, but try it if you want.”
He saw the narrow, twisted, age-browned streets of Boston, then, with their sultry fragrance of fresh-roasted coffee, the sight of the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the distant drone and murmur of the great mysterious city all about him, the shining water of the Basin, and the murmur of the harbour and its ships, the promise of glory and of a thousand secret, lovely and mysterious women that were waiting somewhere in the city’s web.
He saw the furious streets of life with their unending flood-tide of a million faces, the enormous library with its million books; or was it just one moment in the flood-tide of the city, at five o’clock, a voice, a face, a brawny lusty girl with smiling mouth who passed him in an instant at the Park Street station, stood printed in the strong October wind a moment — breast, belly, arm, and thigh, and all her brawny lustihood — and then had gone into the man-swarm, lost for ever, never found?
Was it at such a moment — engine-smoke, a station, a street, the sound of time, a face that came and passed and vanished, could not be forgot — HERE or HERE or HERE, at such a moment of man’s unrecorded memory, that he breathed fury from the air, that fury came?
He never knew; but now mad fury gripped his life, and he was haunted by the dream of time. Ten years must come and go without a moment’s rest from fury, ten years of fury, hunger, all of the wandering in a young man’s life. And for what? For what?