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At any rate, the thing the boy feels who comes here at the day’s end is not completion, weariness, and sterility, but a sense of swelling ecstasy, a note of brooding fulfilment. The air will have in it the wonderful odours of the market and the smell of the sea; as he walks over the bare cobbled pavement under the corrugated tin awnings of the warehouses and produce stores a hundred smells of the rich fecundity of the earth will assail him: the clean sharp pungency of thin crated wood and the citric nostalgia of oranges, lemons, and grape-fruit, the stench of a decayed cabbage and the mashed pulp of a rotten orange. There will be also the warm coarse limy smell of chickens, the strong coddy smell of cold fish and oysters; and the crisp moist cleanliness of the garden smells — of great lettuces, cabbages, new potatoes, with their delicate skins loamy with sweet earth, the wonderful sweet crispness of crated celery; and then the melons — the ripe golden melons bedded in fragrant straw — and all the warm infusions of the tropics: the bananas, the pineapples and the alligator pears.
The delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odours with a new and delicious vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses the compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piny scents of packing-boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar, turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines and roots and old piled sacking; the clean, ground strength of fresh coffee, brown, sultry, pungent, and exultantly fresh and clean; the smell of oats, baled hay and bran, of crated eggs and cheese and butter; and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen beeves, slick porks, and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys, of haunch, paunch, and jowl; of meat that is raw and of meat that is cooked, for upstairs in that richly dingy block of buildings there is a room where the butchers, side by side with the bakers, the bankers, the brokers and the Harvard boys, devour thick steaks of the best and tenderest meat, smoking-hot breads, and big, jacketed potatoes.
And then there is always the sea. In dingy blocks, memoried with time and money, the buildings stretch down to the docks, and there is always the feeling that the sea was here, that this is built-on earth. A single truck will rattle over the deserted stones, and then there is the street that runs along the harbour, the dingy little clothing shops and eating places, the powerful strings of freight cars, agape and empty, odorous with their warm fatigued planking and the smells of flanges and axles that have rolled great distances.
And finally, by the edges of the water, there are great piers and storehouses, calm and potent with their finished work: they lie there, immense, starkly ugly, yet touched with the powerful beauty of enormous works and movements; they are what they are, they have been built without a flourish for the work they do, their great sides rise in level cliffs of brick, they are pierced with tracks and can engulf great trains; and now that the day is done they breathe with the vitality of a tired but living creature. A single footfall will make remote and lonely echoes in their brooding depths, there will be the expiring clatter of a single truck, the sound of a worker’s voice as he says “Good night,” and then the potent and magical silence.
And then there is the sea — the sea, beautiful and mysterious as it is only when it meets the earth in harbours, the sea that bears in swell and glut of tides the odorous savour of the earth, the sea that swings and slaps against encrusted piles, the sea that is braided with long ropes of scummy weed, the sea that brings the mast and marly scent of shelled decay. There is the sea, and there are the great ships — the freighters, the fishing schooners, the clean white one-night boats that make the New York run, now also potent and silent, a glitter of bright lights, of gleaming brasses, of opulent saloons — a token of joy and splendour in dark waters, a hint of love and the velvet belly upon dark tides — and the sight of all these things, the fusion of all these odours by the sprite of May is freighted with unspeakable memories, with unutterable intuitions for the youth: he does not know what he would utter, but glory, love, power, wealth, flight, and movement and the sight of new earth in the morning, and the living corporeal fulfilment of all his ecstasy is in his wish and his conviction.
Certainly, these things can be found in New England, but perhaps the person who finds this buried joy the most is this lonely visitor — and particularly the boy from the South, for in the heart of the Southerner alone, perhaps, is this true and secret knowledge of the North: it is there in his dreams and his childhood premonition, it is there like the dark Helen, and no matter what he sees to cheat it, he will always believe in it, he will always return to it. Certainly, this was true of the gnarled and miserly old man who now sat not far from all this glory in his dingy State Street office, for Bascom Pentland, although the stranger on seeing him might have said, “There goes the very image of a hard-bitten old Down–Easter,” had come, as lonely and wretched a youth as ever lived, from the earth of Old Catawba, he had known and felt these things and, in spite of his frequent bitter attacks on the people, the climate, the life, New England was the place to which he had returned to live, and for which he felt the most affection.
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Now, ruminant and lost, he stared across the archway of his hands. In a moment, with what was only an apparent irrelevance, with what was really a part of the coherent past, a light plucked from dark adyts of the brain, he said: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”
He was silent and thoughtful for a moment; then he added sadly: “I am an old man. I have lived a long time. I have seen so many things. Sometimes everything seems so long ago.”
Then his eye went back into the wilderness, the lost earth, the buried men.
Presently he said: “I hope you will come out on Sunday. O, by all means! By all means! I believe your aunt is expecting you. Yes, sir, I believe she said something to that effect. Or perhaps she intends to pay a visit to one of her children. I do not know, I have not the REMOTEST— not the FAINTEST idea, of what she proposes to do,” he howled. “Of course,” he said impatiently and scornfully, “I never have any notion what she has in mind. No, sir, I really could not tell you. I no longer pay any attention to what she says — O! not the slightest!” he waved his great hand through the air —“SAY!” stiffly and harshly he tapped the boy’s knee, grinning at him with the combative glitter of his ptotic eye — “SAY! did you ever find ONE of them with whom it was possible to carry on a coherent conversation? Did you ever find one of them who would respond to the processes of reason and ordered thought? My dear boy!” he cried, “you cannot talk to them. I assure you, you cannot talk to them. You might as well whistle into the wind or spit into the waters of the Nile, for all the good it will do you. In his youth man will bare the riches of his spirit to them, will exhaust the rich accumulations of his genius — his wisdom, his learning, his philosophy — in an effort to make them worthy of his companionship — and in the end, what does he ALWAYS find? Why,” said Uncle Bascom bitterly, “that he has spent his powers in talking to an imbecile”— and he snarled vengefully through his nose. In a moment more, he contorted his face, and nasally whined in a grotesque and mincing parody of a woman’s voice, “O, I feel SO sick! O, deary ME, now! I think my TIME is coming on again! O, you don’t LOVE me any mo-o-ore! O, I WISH I was dead! O, I can’t get UP today! O, I wish you’d bring me something NICE from TA-OWN! O, if you loved me you’d buy me a NEW hat! O, I’ve got nothing to WE-E-AR!” here his voice had an added snarl of bitterness —“I’m ashamed to go out on