Of Time and the River (47 page)

“Mais si, signor! Si,” Nino breathed. “Parfaitement”—and wrote the miraculous order on his order pad. “Et puis, monsieur,” said Nino coaxingly, and with complete humility. “Permettez-moi de recommander—le poulet,” he whispered rapturously—“le poulet rôti,” he breathed, as if unveiling the rarest secrets of cookery that had been revealed since the days of Epicurus—“le poulet rôti . . . de la maison,” again he made the little speechless movement of the finger and the thumb, and rolled his rapturous eyes around— “ah, signor,” said Nino, “Vous n’aurez pas de regrets si vous commandez le poulet.”

“Bon. . . . Bon,” said Starwick quietly and profoundly. “Alors, Nino—deux poulets rôtis, pour moi et pour monsieur,” he commanded.

“Bon, bon,” said Nino, nodding vigorously and writing with enthusiasm—“et pour la salade, messieurs,” he paused—looking inquiringly and yet hopefully at both his lordly young patrons.

And so it went, until the menu had all been gone through in mangled French and monosyllabic Italian. When this great ceremony was over, Frank Starwick had done nothing more nor less than order the one-dollar table-d’hôte dinner which Signor “Pothillippo” provided for all the patrons of his establishment and whose order—soup, fish, spaghetti, roasted chicken, salad, ice-cream, cheese, nuts and bitter coffee—was unchangeable as destiny, and not to be altered by the whims of common men, whether they would or no.

And yet Frank’s manner of ordering his commonplace rather dreary meal was so touched by mystery, strangeness, an air of priceless rarity and sensual refinement, that one would smack his lips over the various dishes with a gourmandizing gusto, as if the art of some famous chef had really been exhausted in their preparation.

And this element of Frank Starwick’s character was one of the finest and most attractive things about him. It was, perhaps as much as anything else, the reason why people of all kinds were drawn to him, delighted to be with him, and why Frank could command the boundless affection, devotion, and support of people more than anyone the other boy had ever known.

For, in spite of all Frank’s affectations of tone, manner, gesture, and accent, in spite of the elaborately mannered style of his whole life—no! really BECAUSE of them (for what were all these manners and affectations except the evidence of Frank’s constant effort to give qualities of strangeness, mystery, rareness, joy and pleasure to common things that had none of these qualities in themselves?)— the deep and passionate desire in Frank’s spirit to find a life that would always be good, beautiful, and exciting was apparent.

And to an amazing degree, Frank Starwick succeeded in investing all the common and familiar acts and experiences of this world with this strange and romantic colour of his own personality.

When one was with him, everything—“le Chianti de la maison,” a cigarette, the performance of a play, a poem or a book, a walk across the Harvard Yard, or along the banks of the Charles River— became strange and rare and memorable, and for this reason Frank, in spite of the corrupt and rotten spot which would develop in his character and eventually destroy him, was one of the rarest and highest people that ever lived, and could never be forgotten by anyone who had ever known him and been his friend.

For, by a baffling paradox, these very affectations of Frank’s speech and dress and carriage, the whole wrought manner of his life, which caused many people who disbelieved him to dismiss him bitterly as an affected and artificial poseur, really came from something innocent and naďve and good in Frank’s character— something as innocent and familiar as the affectations of Tom Sawyer when he told tall stories, invented wild, complicated, and romantic schemes, when none was necessary, or used big words to impress his friends, the nigger Jim, or Huckleberry Finn.

Thus, the two young men would stay in “Pothillippo’s” until late at night when the place closed, drinking that wonderful “Chianti de la maison,” so preciously and lovingly described, which was really nothing but “dago red,” raw, new, and instantaneous in its intoxication, filled with headaches and depression for to-morrow morning, but filled now with the mild, soaring, jubilant and triumphant drunkenness that only youth can know.

And they would leave this place of Latin mystery and languor at one o’clock in the morning, Frank shouting in a high drunken voice before he left, “Nino! Nino!—Il faut quelque chose ŕ boire avant de partir—Nino!—Nino
Encora!”—pronouncing his last Italian word victoriously.

“Mais si, signor,” Nino would answer, smiling somewhat anxiously. “Du vin?”

“Mais non, mais non, Nino” Frank would cry violently. “Pas de vin— du wis-kee, Nino! Du wis-kee!”

Then they would gulp down drinks of the raw and powerful beverage to which the name of whisky had been given in that era, and leaving a dim blur of lights, a few dim blots of swarthy, anxiously smiling faces behind them, they would reel dangerously down the rickety stairs and out into the narrow, twisted streets, the old grimed web of sleeping quietness, the bewildering, ancient, and whited streets of Boston.

Above them, in the cool sweet skies of night, the great moons of the springtime, and New England, blazed with a bare, a lovely and enchanted radiance. And around them the great city and its thousand narrow twisted streets lay anciently asleep beneath that blazing moon, and from the harbour came the sound of ships, the wasting, fresh, half-rotten harbour-smells, filled with the thought of ships, the sea, the proud exultancy of voyages. And out of the cobbled streets and from the old grimed buildings—yes! from the very breast and bareness of that springtime moon and those lovely lilac skies, there came somehow—God knows how—all of the sweet wildness of New England in the month of May, the smell of the earth, the sudden green, the glorious blossoms—all that was wild, sweet, strange, simple, instantly familiar—that impossible loveliness, that irresistible magic, that unutterable hope for the magic that could not be spoken, but that seemed almost in the instant to be seized, grasped, and made one’s own for ever—for the hunger, possession and fulfilment—and for God knows what—for that magic land of green, its white and lovely houses, and the white flesh, the moon-dark hair, the depthless eyes and everlasting silence of its secret, dark, and lavish women.

Dark Helen in our hearts for ever burning—oh, no more!

Then the two young men would thread that maze of drunken moonlit streets, and feel the animate and living silence of the great city all around them, and look then at the moon with drunken eyes, and see the moon, all bare and drunken in the skies, the whole earth and the ancient city drunk with joy and sleep and springtime and the enchanted silences of the moon-drunk squares. And they would come at length to Cambridge, to find the moonlight dark upon the sleeping silence of the university and Harvard Square, and exultancy and joy welled up in them for ever; wild shouts and songs and laughter were torn from their throats and rang out through the sleeping streets of Cambridge, filling the moon-sweet air with jubilation, for they were drunken, young, and twenty—immortal confidence and victorious strength possessed them—and they knew that they could never die.

Immortal drunkenness! What tribute can we ever pay, what song can we ever sing, what swelling praise can ever be sufficient to express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love which we, who have known youth and hunger in America, have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken in America: immense and savage skies bend over us, and we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness, came to us in our youth when all our hearts were sick with hopelessness, our spirits maddened with unknown terrors, and our heads bowed down with nameless shame. You came to us victoriously, to possess us, and to fill our lives with your wild music, to make the goat-cry burst from our exultant throats, to make us know that here upon the wilderness, the savage land, that here beneath immense, inhuman skies of time, in all the desolation of the cities, the grey unceasing flood-tides of the man-swarm, our youth would soar to fortune, fame, and love, our spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry, our work go on triumphantly to fulfilment until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter, then, if since that time of your first coming, magic drunkenness, our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy, and if our flesh has lain battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy when we were twenty, when we reeled home at night through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston and heard our friend, our comrade, and our dead companion shout through the silence of the moon-white square: “You are a poet and the world is yours.”

And victory, joy, wild hope, and swelling certitude and tenderness surged through the conduits of our blood as we heard that drunken cry, and triumph, glory, proud belief were resting like a chrysm around us as we heard that cry, and turned our eyes then to the moon-drunk skies of Boston, knowing only that we were young, and drunk, and twenty, and that the power of mighty poetry was within us, and the glory of the great earth lay before us—because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die!

XXXVI

When Oswald Ten Ecyk left his $8000 job on the Hearst Syndicate and came to Cambridge to enroll in Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, he had saved a sum rare in the annals of journalism—$700. When he got through paying the tuition, admission, and other accessory fees that would entitle him to a membership in good standing in the graduate school of the university, something less than $500 remained. Oswald got an attic room in Cambridge, in a square, smut-grey frame-house which was the home of an Irish family named Grogan. To reach his room, he had to mount a rickety flight of stairs that was almost as steep as a ladder, and when he got there, he had to manage his five feet five of fragile stature carefully in order to keep from cracking his head upon the sloping white-washed walls that followed the steep pitch of the roof with painful fidelity. The central part of Oswald’s room, which was the only place in which the little man could stand erect, was not over four feet wide: there was a single window at the front where stood his writing table. He had a couple of straight chairs, a white iron cot pushed in under the eave of the left side, a few bookshelves pushed in under the eave of the right. It could literally be said that the playwright crawled to bed, and when he read he had to approach the poets as a poet should—upon his knees.

For this austere cell, Professor Hatcher’s dramatist paid Mrs. Mary Grogan fifteen dollars every month. Therefore, when the primary fees of tuition and matriculation and the cell in Mrs. Grogan’s house had been accounted for, Oswald Ten Eyck had all of $300 left to take care of clothing, food, tobacco, books, and plays during the ensuing period of nine months. This sum perhaps was adequate, but it was not grand, and Ten Eyck, poet though he was, was subject to all those base cravings of sensual desire that 100 pounds of five feet five is heir to.

This weakness of the flesh was unhappily reflected in the artist’s work. During the brief period of his sojourn in Professor Hatcher’s class, his plays were numerous but for the most part low. Ten Eyck turned them out with the feverish haste which only a trained newspaper-man can achieve when driven on by the cherished ambition of a lifetime and the knowledge that art is long and $300 very fleeting. He had started out most promisingly in the fleshless ethers of mystic fantasy, but he became progressively more sensual until at the end he was practically wallowing in a trough of gluttony.

The man, in fact, became all belly when he wrote—and this was strange in a frail creature with the large burning eyes of a religious zealot, hands small-boned, fleshless as a claw, and a waist a rubber band would have snapped round comfortably. He seemed compact of flame and air and passion and an agonizing shyness. Professor Hatcher had great hopes for him—the whole atom was framed, Professor Hatcher thought, for what the true Hatcherian called “the drama of revolt,” but the flaming atom fooled him, fooled him cruelly. For after the brilliant promise of that first beginning—a delicate, over-the-hills-and-far-away fantasy reminiscent of Synge, Yeats, and the Celtic Dawn—brain bowed to belly, Ten Eyck wrote of food.

His second effort was a one-act play whose action took place on the sidewalk in front of a Childs restaurant, while a white-jacketed attendant deftly flipped brown wheat-cakes on a plate. The principal character, and in fact the only speaker in this play, was a starving poet who stood before the window and delivered himself of a twenty-minute monologue on a poet’s life and the decay of modern society, in the course of which most of the staple victuals on the Childs menu were mentioned frequently and with bitter relish.

Professor Hatcher felt his interest waning: he had hoped for finer things. Yet a wise caution learned from errors in the past had taught him to forbear. He knew that out of man’s coarse earth the finer flowers of his spirit sometimes grew. Some earlier members of his class had taught him this, some who had written coarsely of coarse things. They wrote of sailors, niggers, thugs, and prostitutes, of sunless lives and evil strivings, of murder, hunger, rape, and incest, a black picture of man’s life unlighted by a spark of grace, a ray of hope, a flicker of the higher vision. Professor Hatcher had not always asked them to return—to “come back for a second year,” which was the real test of success and future promise in the Hatcherian world. And yet, unknighted by this accolade, some had gone forth and won renown: their grim plays had been put on everywhere and in all languages. And the only claim the true Hatcherian could make of them was: “Yes, they were with us but not of us: they were not asked to come back for a second year.”