“But it is a pity, you know, a GREAT pity,” Francis Starwick remarked languidly, using effectively his trick of giving a tired emphasis to certain words which conveyed a kind of sad finality, a weary earnestness to what he said. He turned to go.
“But — but — but — how — how — how very interesting! Why IS it, Frank?” Hugh Dodd demanded with his earnest stammering eagerness. He was profoundly respectful of Starwick’s critical ability.
“Why is what?” said Starwick in his curiously mannered voice, his air of languid weariness.
“Why is it a great pity about Barrie?” knitting his bushy brows together, and scowling with an air of intense concentration over his words as he spoke. “Because,” said the appraiser of Values, as he prepared to depart, arranging with feminine luxuriousness the voluptuous folds of his blue silk scarf, “the man really had something one time. He really did. Something strange and haunting — the genius of the Celt.” Swinging his cane slowly, acutely and painfully conscious that he was being watched, with the agonizing stiffness that was at the bottom of his character, he strolled off across the Yard, stark and lovely with the harsh white snow and wintry branches of bleak winter.
“You know — you know — you know — that’s very interesting,” said Dodd, intent upon his words. “I’d — I’d — I’d never thought of it in JUST that way.”
“Barrie,” drawled Wood, the maker of epigrams, “is a stick of taffy, floating upon a sea of molasses.”
There was laughter.
He was for ever making these epigrams; his face had a somewhat saturnine cast, his lips twisted ironically, his eyes shot splintered promises of satiric wisdom. He looked like a very caustically humorous person; but unhappily he had no humour. But they thought he had. No one with a face like that could be less than keen.
So he had something to say for every occasion. He had discovered that the manner counted for wit. If the talk was of Shaw’s deficiencies as a dramatist, he might say:
“But, after all, if one is going in for all that sort of thing, why not have lantern slides and a course of lectures?”
Thus he was known, not merely as a subtle-souled and elusive psychologist but also as a biting wit.
“Galsworthy wrote something that looked like a play once,” someone remarked. “There were parts of Justice that weren’t bad.”
“Yes. Yes,” said Dodd, peering intently at his language. “Justice — there were some interesting things in that. It’s — it’s — it’s rather a PITY about him, isn’t it?” And as he said these words he frowned earnestly and intently. There was genuine pity in his voice, for the man’s spirit had great charity and sweetness in it.
As they dispersed, someone remarked that Shaw might have made a dramatist if he had ever known anything about writing a play.
“But he DATES so — how he DATES!” Scoville remarked.
“Those earlier plays —”
“Yes, I agree”— thus Wood again. “Almost Mid–Victorian. Shaw:— a prophet with his face turned backwards.” Then they went away in small groups.
xi
To reach his own “office,” as Bascom Pentland called the tiny cubicle in which he worked and received his clients, the old man had to traverse the inner room and open a door in a flimsy partition of varnished wood and glazed glass at the other end. This was his office: it was really a very narrow slice cut off from the larger room, and in it there was barely space for one large dirty window, an ancient dilapidated desk and swivel chair, a very small battered safe buried under stacks of yellowed newspapers, and a small bookcase with glass doors and two small shelves on which there were a few worn volumes. An inspection of these books would have revealed four or five tattered and musty law books in their ponderous calf-skin bindings — one on Contracts, one on Real Property, one on Titles — a two-volume edition of the poems of Matthew Arnold, very dog-eared and thumbed over; a copy of Sartor Resartus, also much used; a volume of the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the Iliad in Greek with minute yellowed notations in the margins; a volume of the World Almanac several years old; and a very worn volume of the Holy Bible, greatly used and annotated in Bascom’s small, stiffly laborious, and meticulous hand.
If the old man was a little late, as sometimes happened, he might find his colleagues there before him. Miss Muriel Brill, the typist, and the eldest daughter of Mr. John T. Brill, would be seated in her typist’s chair, her heavy legs crossed as she bent over to undo the metal latches of the thick galoshes she wore during the winter season. It is true there were also other seasons when Miss Brill did not wear galoshes, but so sharply and strongly do our memories connect people with certain gestures which, often for an inscrutable reason, seem characteristic of them, that any frequent visitor to these offices at this time of day would doubtless have remembered Miss Brill as always unfastening her galoshes. But the probable reason is that some people inevitably belong to seasons, and this girl’s season was winter — not blizzards or howling winds, or the blind skirl and sweep of snow, but grey, grim, raw, thick, implacable winter: the endless successions of grey days and grey monotony. There was no spark of colour in her, her body was somewhat thick and heavy, her face was white, dull, and thick-featured and instead of tapering downwards, it tapered up: it was small above, and thick and heavy below, and even in her speech, the words she uttered seemed to have been chosen by an automaton, and could only be remembered later by their desolate banality. One always remembered her as saying as one entered: “ . . . Hello! . . . You’re becoming quite a strangeh! . . . It’s been some time since you was around, hasn’t it? . . . I was thinkin’ the otheh day it had been some time since you was around. . . . I’d begun to think you had forgotten us. . . . Well, how’ve you been? Lookin’ the same as usual, I see. . . . Me? . . . Oh, can’t complain. . . . Keepin’ busy? I’LL say! I manage to keep goin’. . . . Who you lookin’ for? Father? He’s in THERE. . . . Why, yeah! Go right on in.”
This was Miss Brill, and at the moment that she bent to unfasten her galoshes, it is likely that Mr. Samuel Friedman would also be there in the act of rubbing his small dry hands briskly together, or of rubbing the back of one hand with the palm of the other in order to induce circulation. He was a small youngish man, a pale somewhat meagre-looking little Jew with a sharp ferret face: he, too, was a person who goes to “fill in” those vast swarming masses of people along the pavements and in the subway — the mind cannot remember them or absorb the details of their individual appearance, but they people the earth, they make up life. Mr. Friedman had none of the richness, colour, and humour that some members of his race so abundantly possess; the succession of grey days, the grim weather seemed to have entered his soul as it enters the souls of many different races there — the Irish, the older New England stock, even the Jews — and it gives them a common touch that is prim, drab, careful, tight and sour. Mr. Friedman also wore galoshes, his clothes were neat, drab, a little worn and shiny, there was an odour of thawing dampness and warm rubber about him as he rubbed his dry little hands saying: “Chee! How I hated to leave that good wahm bed this morning! When I got up I said, ‘HOLY Chee!’ My wife says, ‘Whatsa mattah?’ I says, ‘Holy Chee! You step out heah a moment where I am an’ you’ll see whatsa mattah.’ ‘Is it cold?’ she says. ‘Is it cold! I’ll tell the cock-eyed wuhld!’ I says. Chee! You could have cut the frost with an axe: the wateh in the pitchehs was frozen hahd; an’ she has the nuhve to ask me if it’s cold! Is it cold!’ I says. ‘Do you know any more funny stories?’ I says. Oh, how I do love my bed! Chee! I kept thinkin’ of that guy in Braintree I got to go see today an’ the more I thought about him, the less I liked him! I thought my feet would tu’n into two blocks of ice before I got the funniss stahted! ‘Chee! I hope the ole bus is still workin’,’