If, however, it had been one of his more fortunate mornings, if he had blindly but successfully threaded the peril of roaring traffic, Uncle Bascom proceeded rapidly down State Street, still clutching his raw bony hands across his meagre waist, still contorting his remarkable face in its endless series of pursed grimaces, and presently turned in to the entrance of a large somewhat dingy-looking building of blackened stone, one of those solid, unpretentious, but very valuable properties which smell and look like the early 1900’s, and which belong to that ancient and enormously wealthy corporation across the river known as Harvard University.
Here, Uncle Bascom, still clutching himself together across the waist, mounted a flight of indented marble entry steps, lunged through revolving doors into a large marble corridor that was redolent with vibrating waves of hot steamy air, wet rubbers and galoshes, sanitary disinfectant and serviceable but somewhat old-fashioned elevators and, entering one of the cars which had just plunged down abruptly, banged open its door, belched out two or three people and swallowed a dozen more, he was finally deposited with the same abruptness on the seventh floor, where he stepped out into a wide dark corridor, squinted and grimaced uncertainly to right and left as he had done for twenty-five years, and then went left along the corridor, past rows of lighted offices in which one could hear the preliminary clicking of typewriters, the rattling of crisp papers, and the sounds of people beginning their day’s work. At the end of the corridor Bascom Pentland turned right along another corridor and at length paused before a door which bore this inscription across the familiar glazed glass of American business offices: “The John T. Brill Realty Co. — Houses For Rent or Sale.” Below this bold legend in much smaller letters was printed: “Bascom Pentland — Att’y at Law — Conveyancer and Title Expert.”
The appearance of this strange figure in State Street, or anywhere else, had always been sufficient to attract attention and to draw comment. Bascom Pentland, if he had straightened to his full height, would have been six feet and three or four inches tall, but he had always walked with a stoop and as he grew older the stoop had become confirmed: he presented a tall, gnarled, bony figure, cadaverous and stringy, but tough as hickory. He was of that race of men who seem never to wear out, or to grow old, or to die: they live with almost undiminished vitality to great ages, and when they die they die suddenly. There is no slow wastage and decay because there is so little to waste or decay: their mummied and stringy flesh has the durability of granite.
Bascom Pentland clothed his angular figure with an assortment of odd garments which seemed to have the same durability: they were immensely old and worn, but they also gave no signs of ever wearing out, for by their cut and general appearance of age, it seemed that his frugal soul had selected in the ‘nineties materials which it hoped would last for ever. His coat, which was originally of a dark dull pepper-and-salt grey, had gone green at the seams and pockets, and moreover it was a ridiculously short skimpy coat for a gaunt big-boned man like this: it was hardly more than a jacket, his great wristy hands burst out of it like lengths of cordwood, and the mark of his high-humped narrow shoulders cut into it with a knife-like sharpness. His trousers were also tight and skimpy, of a lighter grey and of a rough woolly texture from which all fuzz and fluff had long ago been rubbed; he wore rough country brogans with raw-hide laces, and a funny little flat hat of ancient black felt, which had also gone green along the band. One understands now why the policeman called him “Bud”: this great bony figure seemed ruthlessly to have been crammed into garments in which a country fledgling of the ‘eighties might have gone to see his girl, clutching a bag of gumdrops in his large red hand. A stringy little neck-tie, a clean but dilapidated collar which by its bluish and softly mottled look Bascom Pentland must have laundered himself (a presumption which is quite correct since the old man did all his own laundry work, as well as his mending, repairing, and cobbling)— this was his costume, winter and summer, and it never changed, save that in winter he supplemented it with an ancient blue sweater which he wore buttoned to the chin and whose frayed ends and cuffs projected inches below the scanty little jacket. He had never been known to wear an overcoat, not even on the coldest days of those long, raw, and formidable winters from which Boston suffers.
The mark of his madness was plain upon him: intuitively men knew he was not a poor man, and the people who had seen him so many times in State Street would nudge one another, saying: “You see that old guy? You’d think he was waitin’ for a hand-out from the Salvation Army, wouldn’t you? Well, he’s not. He’s GOT it, brother. Believe me, he’s GOT it good and plenty: he’s GOT it salted away where no one ain’t goin’ to touch it. That guy’s got a sock full of dough!”
“Jesus!” another remarks. “What good’s it goin’ to do an old guy like that? He can’t take any of it with him, can he?”
“You said it, brother,” and the conversation would become philosophical.
Bascom Pentland was himself conscious of his parsimony, and although he sometimes asserted that he was “only a poor man,” he realized that his exaggerated economies could not be justified to his business associates on account of poverty: they taunted him slyly, saying, “Come on, Pentland, let’s go to lunch. You can get a good meal at the Pahkeh House for a couple of bucks.” Or: “Say, Pentland, I know a place where they’re havin’ a sale of winter overcoats: I saw one there that would just suit you — you can get it for sixty dollars.” Or: “Do you need a good laundry, Reverend? I know a couple of Chinks who do good work.”
To which Bascom, with the characteristic evasiveness of parsimony, would reply, snuffling derisively down his nose: “No, sir! You won’t catch me in any of their stinking restaurants. You never know what you’re getting: if you could see the dirty, nasty, filthy kitchens where your food is prepared you’d lose your appetite quick enough.” His parsimony had resulted in a compensating food mania: he declared that “in his young days” he “ruined his digestion by eating in restaurants,” he painted the most revolting pictures of the filth of these establishments, laughing scornfully down his nose as he declared: “I suppose you think it tastes better after some dirty, nasty, stinking NIGGER has wiped his old hands all over it” (phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)— here he would contort his face and snuffle scornfully down his nose; and he was bitter in his denunciation of “rich foods,” declaring they had “destroyed more lives than all the wars and all the armies since the beginning of time.”
As he had grown older he had become more and more convinced of the healthy purity of “raw foods,” and he prepared for himself at home raw revolting messes of chopped-up carrots, onions, turnips, even raw potatoes, which he devoured at table, smacking his lips with an air of keen relish, and declaring to his wife: “You may poison YOURSELF on your old roasts and oysters and turkeys if you please: you wouldn’t catch ME eating that stuff. No, sir! Not on your life! I think too much of my stomach!” But his use of the pronoun “you” was here universal rather than particular, because if that lady’s longevity had depended on her abstinence from “roasts and oysters and turkeys” there was no reason why she should not have lived for ever.
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 walk around done up in old Chinaman’s spit!”—(Phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)—