Of Time and the River (22 page)

“How mucha we want?” Brill repeated vulgarly as the burble began to play about within his throat. “Why, how mucha you got? . . . You know we’ll take every damn thing you got! It’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got!” And he hurled himself backward, bellowing with laughter. “By God, Reverend,” he yelled as Uncle Bascom entered, “ain’t that right? It’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got! ‘od damn! We ought to take that as our motter. I’ve got a good mind to git it printed on our letterheads. What do you think, Reverend?”

“Hey?” howled Uncle Bascom absently, as he prepared to enter his own office.

“I say we ought to use it for our motter.”

“Your what?” said Uncle Bascom scornfully, pausing as if he did not understand.

“Our motter,” Brill said.

“Not your MOTTER,” Bascom howled derisively. “The word is NOT motter,” he said contemptuously. “Nobody of any refinement would say MOTTER. MOTTER is NOT correct!” he howled finally. “Only an ig-no-RAM-us would say MOTTER. No!” he yelled with final conclusiveness. “That is NOT the way to pronounce it! That is ab- so-lute-ly and em-phat-ic-ally NOT the way to pronounce it!”

“All right, then, Reverend,” said Brill, submissively. “You’re the doctor. What is the word?”

“The word is MOTTO,” Uncle Bascom snarled. “Of course! Any fool knows that!”

“Why, hell,” Mr. Brill protested in a hurt tone. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

“No-o!” Uncle Bascom howled derisively. “No-o! By no means, by no means, by no means! You said MOTTER. The word is NOT motter. The word is motto: m-o-t-t-o! M-O-T-T-O does NOT spell motter,” he remarked with vicious decision.

“What does it spell?” said Mr. Brill.

“It spells MOTTO,” Uncle Bascom howled. “It HAS always spelled motto! It WILL always spell motto! As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: A-a-men!” he howled huskily in his most evangelical fashion. Then, immensely pleased at his wit, he closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and snarled and snuffled down his nose with laughter.

“Well, anyway,” said Brill, “no matter how you spell it, it’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got! That’s the way we feel about it!”

And this, in fact, without concealment, without pretence, without evasion, was just how Brill DID feel about it. He wanted everything that was his and, in addition, he wanted as much as he could get. And this rapacity, this brutal and unadorned gluttony, so far from making men wary of him, attracted them to him, inspired them with unshakable confidence in his integrity, his business honesty. Perhaps the reason for this was that concealment did not abide in the man: he published his intentions to the world with an oath and a roar of laughter—and the world, having seen and judged, went away with the confidence of this Italian—that Brill was “one fine-a man!” Even Bascom, who had so often turned upon his colleague the weapons of scorn, contempt, and mockery, had a curious respect for him, an acrid sunken affection: often, when the old man and his nephew were alone, he would recall something Brill had said and his powerful and fluent features would suddenly be contorted in that familiar grimace, as he laughed his curious laugh which was forced out, with a deliberate and painful effort, through his powerful nose and his lips, barred with a few large teeth. “Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! . . . Of course!” he said, with a nasal rumination, as he stared over the apex of his great bony hands, clasped in meditation—“of course, he is just a poor ignorant fellow! I don’t suppose—no, sir, I really do not suppose that Brill ever went to school over six months in his life!—Say!” Bascom paused suddenly, turned abruptly with his strange fixed grin, and fastened his sharp old eyes keenly on the boy: in this sudden and abrupt change, this transference of his vision from his own secret and personal world, in which his thought and feeling were sunken, and which seemed to be so far away from the actual world about him, there was something impressive and disconcerting. His eyes were grey, sharp, and old, and one eyelid had a heavy droop or ptosis which, although it did not obscure his vision, gave his expression at times a sinister glint, a malevolent humour. “—Say!” here his voice sank to a deliberate and confiding whisper, “(Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!) Say—a man who would—he told me— Oh, vile! vile! vile! my boy!” his uncle whispered, shutting his eyes in a kind of shuddering ecstasy as if at the memory of things too gloriously obscene to be repeated. “Can you IMAGINE, can you even DREAM of such a state of affairs if he had possessed an atom, a SCINTILLA of delicacy and good breeding! Yes, sir!” he said with decision. “I suppose there’s no doubt about it! His beginnings were very lowly, very poor and humble indeed! . . . Not that that is in any sense to his discredit!” Uncle Bascom said hastily, as if it had occurred to him that his words might bear some taint of snobbishness. “Oh, by no means, by no means, by no means!” he sang out, with a sweeping upward gesture of his long arm, as if he were clearing the air of wisps of smoke. “Some of our finest men—some of the nation’s LEADERS, have come from just such surroundings as those. Beyond a doubt! Beyond a doubt! There’s no question about it whatever! Say!”—here he turned suddenly upon the boy again with the ptotic and sinister intelligence of his eye. “Was LINCOLN an aristocrat? Was he the issue of wealthy parents? Was he brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth? Was our OWN former governor, the Vice-President of the United States today, reared in the lap of luxury! Not on your life!” howled Uncle Bascom. “He came from frugal and thrifty Vermont farming stock, he has never deviated a JOT from his early training, he remains today what he has always been—one of the simplest of men! Finest people on earth, no question about it whatever!”

Again, he meditated gravely with lost stare across the apex of his great joined hands, and the boy noticed again, as he had noticed so often, the great dignity of his head in thought—a head that was high-browed, lean and lonely, a head that not only in its cast of thought but even in its physical contour, and in its profound and lonely earnestness, bore an astonishing resemblance to that of Emerson—it was, at times like these, as grand a head as the young man had ever seen, and on it was legible the history of man’s loneliness, his dignity, his grandeur and despair.

“Yes, sir!” said Bascom, in a moment. “He is, of course, a vulgar fellow and some of the things he says at times are Oh, vile! vile! vile!” cried Bascom, closing his eyes and laughing, “Oh, vile! MOST vile! . . . but (phuh! phuh! phuh!) you can’t help laughing at the fellow at times because he is so. . . . Oh, I could tell you things, my boy! . . . Oh, VILE! VILE!” he cried, shaking his head downwards. “What coarseness! . . . What in-VECT-ive!” he whispered, in a kind of ecstasy.

XII

Eugene was now a member of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, and although he had come into this work by chance, and would in the end discover that his heart and interest were not in it, it had now become for him the rock to which his life was anchored, the rudder of his destiny, the sole and all-sufficient reason for his being here. It now seemed to him that there was only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this work was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this work he had better die, since any other life than the life of the playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.

Accordingly every interest and energy of his life was now fastened on this work with a madman’s passion; he thought, felt, breathed, ate, drank, slept, and lived completely in terms of plays. He learned all the jargon of the art-playwriting cult, read all the books, saw all the shows, talked all the talk, and even became a kind of gigantic eavesdropper upon life, prowling about the streets with his ears constantly straining to hear all the words and phrases of the passing crowd, as if he might hear something that would be rare and priceless in a play for Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course.

Professor James Graves Hatcher was a man whose professional career had been made difficult by two circumstances: all the professors thought he looked like an actor and all the actors thought he looked like a professor. In reality, he was wholly neither one, but in character and temper, as well as in appearance, he possessed some of the attributes of both.

His appearance was imposing: a well-set-up figure of a man of fifty-five, somewhat above the middle height, strongly built and verging toward stockiness, with an air of vital driving energy that was always filled with authority and a sense of sure purpose, and that never degenerated into the cheap exuberance of the professional hustler. His voice, like his manner, was quiet, distinguished, and controlled, but always touched with the suggestions of great latent power, with reserves of passion, eloquence, and resonant sonority.

His head was really splendid; he had a strong but kindly-looking face touched keenly, quietly by humour; his eyes, beneath his glasses, were also keen, observant, sharply humorous; his mouth was wide and humorous but somewhat too tight, thin and spinsterly for a man’s; his nose was large and strong; his forehead shapely and able-looking, and he had neat wings of hair cut short and sparse and lying flat against the skull.

He wore eye-glasses of the pince-nez variety, and they dangled in a fashionable manner from a black silk cord: it was better than going to a show to see him put them on, his manner was so urbane, casual, and distinguished when he did so. His humour, although suave, was also quick and rich and gave an engaging warmth and humanity to a personality that sometimes needed them. Even in his display of humour, however, he never lost his urbane distinguished manner—for example, when someone told him that one of his women students had referred to another woman in the course, an immensely tall angular creature who dressed in rusty brown right up to the ears, as “the queen of the angleworms,” Professor Hatcher shook all over with sudden laughter, removed his glasses with a distinguished movement, and then in a rich but controlled voice remarked:

“Ah, she has a very pretty wit. A very pretty wit indeed!”

Thus, even in his agreeable uses of the rich, subtle and immensely pleasant humour with which he had been gifted, Professor Hatcher was something of an actor. He was one of those rare people who really “chuckle,” and although there was no doubting the spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.

The Hatcherian chuckle was just exactly what the word connotes: a movement of spontaneous mirth that shook his stocky shoulders and strong well-set torso with a sudden hearty tremor. And although he could utter rich and sonorous throat-sounds indicative of hearty mirth while this chuckling process was going on, an even more characteristic form was completely soundless, the tight lips firmly compressed, the edges turned up with the convulsive inclination to strong laughter, the fine distinguished head thrown back, while all the rest of him, throat, shoulders, torso, belly, arms—the whole man—shook in the silent tremors of the chuckle.

It could also be said with equal truth that Professor Hatcher was one of the few men whose eyes could really “twinkle,” and it is likewise true that he probably fancied himself as somewhat of a twinkler.

Perhaps one fact that made him suspect to professors was his air of a distinguished and mature, but also a very worldly, urbanity. His manner, even in the class-room, was never that of the scholar or the academician, but always that of the cultured man of the world, secure in his authority, touched by fine humour and fine understanding, able, knowing and assured. And one reason that he so impressed his students may have been that he made some of the most painful and difficult labours in the world seem delightfully easy.

For example, if there were to be a performance by a French club at the university of a French play, produced in the language of its birth, Professor Hatcher might speak to his class in his assured, yet casual and urbanely certain tones, as follows:

“I understand Le Cercle Français is putting on De Musset’s Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée on Thursday night. If you are doing nothing else, I think it might be very well worth your while to brush up on your French a bit and look in on it. It is, of course, a trifle and perhaps without great significance in the development of the modern theatre, but it is De Musset in rather good form and De Musset in good form is charming. So it might repay you to have a look at it.”

What was there in these simple words that could so impress and captivate these young people? The tone was quiet, pleasant and urbanely casual, the manner easy yet authoritative; what he said about the play was really true. But what was so seductive about it was the flattering unction which he laid so casually to their young souls—the easy off-hand suggestion that people “brush up on their French a bit” when most of them had no French at all to brush up on, that if they had “nothing else to do,” they might “look in” upon De Musset’s “charming trifle,” the easy familiarity with De Musset’s name and the casual assurance of the statement that it was “De Musset in rather good form.”

It was impossible for a group of young men, eager for sophistication and emulous of these airs of urbane worldliness, not to be impressed by them. As Professor Hatcher talked they too became easy, casual and urbane in their manners, they had a feeling of being delightfully at ease in the world and sure of themselves, the words “brush up on your French a bit” gave them a beautifully comfortable feeling that they would really be able to perform this remarkable accomplishment in an hour or two of elegant light labour. And when he spoke of the play as being “De Musset in rather good form” they nodded slightly with little understanding smiles as if De Musset and his various states of form were matters of the most familiar knowledge to them.

What was the effect, then, of this and other such-like talk upon these young men eager for fame and athirst for glory in the great art-world of the city and the theatre? It gave them, first of all, a delightful sense of being in the know about rare and precious things, of rubbing shoulders with great actors and actresses and other celebrated people, of being expert in all the subtlest processes of the theatre, of being travelled, urbane, sophisticated and assured.