“H’m!” the other says, stroking his chin in an impressed manner. “Interesting! In that case, I shall go!”
The SETS! The SETS! One should not go to see the play; the only thing that matters is the sets. And this is the theatre — the magic-maker and the world of dreams; and these the men that are to fashion for it — with their trivial ape’s talk about “sets.” Did anyone ever hear such damned stuff as this since time began?
False, trivial, glib, dishonest, empty, without substance, lacking faith — is it any wonder that among Professor Hatcher’s young men few birds sang?
xiii
That year the youth was twenty, it had been his first year in New England, and the winter had seemed very long. In the man-swarm he felt alone and lost, a desolate atom in the streets of life. That year he went to see his uncle many times.
Sometimes he would find him in his dusty little cubicle, bent over the intricacy of a legal form, painfully and carefully, with compressed lips, filling in the blank spaces with his stiff, angular and laborious hand. Bascom would speak quietly, without looking up, as he came in: “Hello, my boy. Sit down, won’t you? I’ll be with you in a moment.” And for a time the silence would be broken only by the heavy rumble of Brill’s voice outside, by the minute scratching of his uncle’s pen, and by the immense and murmurous sound of time, which rose above the city, which caught up in the upper air all of the city’s million noises, and yet seemed remote, essential, imperturbable and everlasting — fixed and unchanging, no matter what men lived or died.
Again, the boy would find his uncle staring straight before him, with his great hands folded in a bony arch, his powerful gaunt face composed in a rapt tranquillity of thought. At these times he seemed to have escaped from every particular and degrading thing in life — from the excess of absurd and eccentric speech and gesture, from all demeaning parsimonies, from niggling irascibilities, from everything that contorted his face and spirit away from its calmness and unity of thought. His face at such a time might well have been the mask of thought, the visage of contemplation. Sometimes he would not speak for several minutes, his mind seemed to brood upon the lip and edge of time, to be remote from every dusty moment of the earth.
One day the boy went there and found him thus: after a few moments he lowered his great hands and, without turning toward his nephew, sat for some time in an attitude of quiet relaxation. At length he said:
“What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late, with a magical northern suddenness. It seemed to have burst out of the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.
Spring came that year like a triumph and like a prophecy — it sang and shifted like a moth of light before the youth, but he was sure that it would bring him a glory and fulfilment he had never known.
His hunger and thirst had been immense: he was caught up for the first time in the midst of the Faustian web — there was no food that could feed him, no drink that could quench his thirst. Like an insatiate and maddened animal he roamed the streets, trying to draw up mercy from the cobble-stones, solace and wisdom from a million sights and faces, or he prowled through endless shelves of high-piled books, tortured by everything he could not see and could not know, and growing blind, weary, and desperate from what he read and saw. He wanted to know all, have all, be all — to be one and many, to have the whole riddle of this vast and swarming earth as legible, as tangible in his hand as a coin of minted gold.
Suddenly spring came, and he fell at once exultant certainty and joy. Outside his uncle’s dirty window he could see the edge of Faneuil Hall, and hear the swarming and abundant activity of the markets. The deep roar of the markets reached them across the singing and lyrical air, and he drank into his lungs a thousand proud, potent, and mysterious odours which came to him like the breath of certainty, like the proof of magic, and like the revelation that all confusion had been banished — the world that he longed for won, the word that he sought for spoken, the hunger that devoured him fed and ended. And the markets, swarming with richness, joy, and abundance, thronged below him like a living evidence of fulfilment. For it seemed to him that nowhere more than here was the passionate enigma of New England felt: New England, with its harsh and stony soil, and its tragic and lonely beauty; its desolate rocky coasts and its swarming fisheries, the white, piled, frozen bleakness of its winters with the magnificent jewellery of stars, the dark firwoods, and the warm little white houses at which it is impossible to look without thinking of groaning bins, hung bacon, hard cider, succulent bastings and love’s warm, white and opulent flesh.
There was the rustle of gingham by day and sober glances; then, under low eaves and starlight, the stir of the satiny thighs in feather beds, the white small bite and tigerish clasp of secret women — always the buried heart, the sunken passion, the frozen heat. And then, after the long, unendurably hard-locked harshness of the frozen winter, the coming of spring as now, like a lyrical cry, like a flicker of rain across a window glass, like the sudden and delicate noises of a spinet — the coming of spring and ecstasy, and overnight the thrum of wings, the burst of the tender buds, the ripple and dance of the roughened water, the light of flowers, the sudden, fleeting, almost captured, and exultant spring.
And here, within eighty yards of the dusty little room where his uncle Bascom had his desk, there was living evidence that this intuition was not false: the secret people, it was evident, did not subsist alone on codfish and a jugful of baked beans — they ate meat, and large chunks of it, for all day long, within the market district, the drivers of big wagons were standing to their chins in meat, boys dragged great baskets of raw meat along the pavements, red-faced butchers, aproned with gouts of blood, and wearing the battered straw hats that butchers wear, toiled through the streets below with great loads of loin or haunch or rib, and in “chill” shops with sawdust floors the beeves were hung in frozen regimental rows.
Right and left, around the central market, the old buildings stretched down to the harbour and the smell of ships: this was built-on land; in old days ships were anchored where these cobbles were, but the warehouses were also old — they had the musty, mellow, blackened air and smell of the ‘seventies, they looked like Victorian prints, they reeked of ancient ledgers, of “counting-houses,” of proud, moneyed merchants, and the soft-spoked rumble of victorias.
By day, this district was one snarled web of chaos: a gewirr of deep-bodied trucks, powerful dappled horses, cursing drivers, of loading, unloading, and shipping, of dispatch and order, of the million complicated weavings of life and business.
But if one came here at evening, after the work of the day was done, if one came here at evening on one of those delicate and sudden days of spring that New England knows, if one came here as many a lonely youth had come here in the past, some boy from the inland immensity of America, some homesick lad from the South, from the marvellous hills of Old Catawba, he might be pierced again by the bitter ecstasy of youth, the ecstasy that tears him apart with a cry that has no tongue, the ecstasy that is proud, lonely, and exultant, that is fierce with joy and a moment, that the intangible cannot be touched, the ungraspable cannot be grasped — the imperial and magnificent minute is gone for ever which, with all its promises, its million intuitions, he wishes to clothe with the living substance of beauty. He wishes to flesh the moment with the thighs and breast and belly of a wonderful mistress, he wishes to be great and glorious and triumphant, to distil the ether of this ecstasy in a liquor, and to drink strong joy for ever; and at the heart of all this is the bitter knowledge of death — death of the moment,