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’,’ I says. If I’ve got to go thaw that damned thing out,’ I says, ‘I’m ready to quit.’ Chee! Well, suh, I neveh had a bit of trouble: she stahted right up an’ the way that ole moteh was workin’ is nobody’s business.”
During the course of this monologue Miss Brill would give ear and assent from time to time by the simple interjection: “Uh!” It was a sound she uttered frequently, it had somewhat the same meaning as “Yes,” but it was more non-committal than “Yes.” It seemed to render assent to the speaker, to let him know that he was being heard and understood, but it did not commit the auditor to any opinion, or to any real agreement.
The third member of this office staff, who was likely to be present at this time, was a gentleman named Stanley P. Ward. Mr. Stanley P. Ward was a neat middling figure of a man, aged fifty or thereabouts; he was plump and had a pink tender skin, a trim Vandyke, and a nice comfortable little pot of a belly which slipped snugly into the well-pressed and well-brushed garments that always fitted him so tidily. He was a bit of a fop, and it was at once evident that he was quietly but enormously pleased with himself. He carried himself very sprucely, he took short rapid steps and his neat little paunch gave his figure a movement not unlike that of a pouter pigeon. He was usually in quiet but excellent spirits, he laughed frequently and a smile — rather a subtly amused look — was generally playing about the edges of his mouth. That smile and his laugh made some people vaguely uncomfortable: there was a kind of deliberate falseness in them, as if what he really thought and felt was not to be shared with other men. He seemed, in fact, to have discovered some vital and secret power, some superior knowledge and wisdom, from which the rest of mankind was excluded, a sense that he was “chosen” above other men, and this impression of Mr. Stanley Ward would have been correct, for he was a Christian Scientist, he was a pillar of the Church, and a very big Church at that — for Mr. Ward, dressed in fashionable striped trousers, rubber soles, and a cut-away coat, might be found somewhere under the mighty dome of the Mother Church on Huntingdon Avenue every Sunday suavely, noiselessly, and expertly ushering the faithful to their pews.
This completes the personnel of the first office of the John T. Brill Realty Company, and if Bascom Pentland arrived late, if these three people were already present, if Mr. Bascom Pentland had not been defrauded of any part of his worldly goods by some contriving rascal of whom the world has many, if his life had not been imperilled by some speed maniac, if the damnable New England weather was not too damnable, if, in short, Bascom Pentland was in fairly good spirits he would on entering immediately howl in a high, rapid, remote and perfectly monotonous tone: “Hello, Hello, Hello! Good morning, Good morning, Good-morning!”— after which he would close his eyes, grimace horribly, press his rubbery lip against his big horse-teeth, and snuffle with laughter through his nose, as if pleased by a tremendous stroke of wit. At this demonstration the other members of the group would glance at one another with those knowing, subtly supercilious nods and winks, that look of common self-congratulation and humour with which the more “normal” members of society greet the conduct of an eccentric, and Mr. Samuel Friedman would say: “What’s the mattah with you, Pop? You look happy. Some one musta give you a shot in the ahm.”
At which, a course powerful voice, deliberate and rich with its intimation of immense and earthy vulgarity, might roar out of the depth of the inner office: “No, I’ll tell you what it is.” Here the great figure of Mr. John T. Brill, the head of the business, would darken the doorway. “Don’t you know what’s wrong with the Reverend? It’s that widder he’s been takin’ around.” Here, the phlegmy burble that prefaced all of Mr. Brill’s obscenities would appear in his voice, the shadow of a lewd smile would play around the corner of his mouth: “It’s the widder. She’s let him have a little of it.”
At this delicate stroke of humour, the burble would burst open in Mr. Brill’s great red throat, and he would roar with that high, choking, phlegmy laughter that is frequent among big red-faced men. Mr. Friedman would laugh drily (“Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!”), Mr. Stanley Ward would laugh more heartily, but complacently, and Miss Brill would snicker in a coy and subdued manner as became a modest young girl. As for Bascom Pentland, if he was really in a good humour, he might snuffle with nosy laughter, bend double at his meagre waist, clutching his big hands together, and stamp at the floor violently several times with one stringy leg; he might even go so far as to take a random ecstatic kick at objects, still stamping and snuffling with laughter, and prod Miss Brill stiffly with two enormous bony fingers, as if he did not wish the full point and flavour of the jest to be lost on her.
Bascom Pentland, however, was a very complicated person with many moods, and if Mr. Brill’s fooling did not catch him in a receptive one, he might contort his face in a pucker of refined disgust, and mutter his disapproval, as he shook his head rapidly from side to side. Or he might rise to great heights of moral denunciation, beginning at first in a grave low voice that showed the seriousness of the words he had to utter: “The lady to whom you refer,” he would begin, “the very charming and cultivated lady whose name, sir”— here his voice would rise on its howling note and he would wag his great bony forefinger —“whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened —”
“No, I wasn’t, Reverend. I was only tryin’ to whiten it,” said Mr. Brill, beginning to burble with laughter.
“— Whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened with your smutty suggestions,” Bascom continued implacably, “— that lady is known to me, as you very well know, sir,” he howled, wagging his great finger again, “solely and simply in a professional capacity.”
“Why, hell, Reverend,” said Mr. Brill innocently, “I never knew she was a perfessional. I thought she was an amatoor.”
At this conclusive stroke, Mr. Brill would make the whole place tremble with his laughter, Mr. Friedman would laugh almost noiselessly, holding himself weakly at the stomach and bending across a desk, Mr. Ward would have short bursts and fits of laughter, as he gazed out the window, shaking his head deprecatingly from time to time, as if his more serious nature disapproved, and Miss Brill would snicker, and turn to her machine, remarking: “This conversation is getting too rough for me!”
And Bascom, if this jesting touched his complex soul at one of those moments when such profanity shocked him, would walk away, confiding into vacancy, it seemed, with his powerful and mobile features contorted in the most eloquent expression of disgust and loathing ever seen on any face, the while he muttered, in a resonant whisper that shuddered with passionate revulsion: “Oh, BAD! Oh, BAD! Oh, BAD! BAD! BAD!”— shaking his head slightly from side to side with each word.
Yet there were other times, when Brill’s swingeing vulgarity, the vast coarse sweep of his profanity not only found Uncle Bascom in a completely receptive mood, but evoked from him gleeful responses, counter-essays in swearing which he made slyly, craftily, snickering with pleasure and squinting around at his listeners at the sound of the words, and getting such stimulus from them as might a renegade clergyman exulting in a feeling of depravity and abandonment for the first time.
To the other people in this office — that is, to Friedman, Ward, and Muriel, the stenographer — the old man was always an enigma; at first they had observed his peculiarities of speech and dress, his eccentricity of manner, and the sudden, violent, and complicated fluctuation of his temperament, with astonishment and wonder, then with laughter and ridicule, and now, with dull, uncomprehending acceptance. Nothing he did or said surprised them any more, they had no understanding and little curiosity, they accepted him as a fact in the grey schedule of their lives. Their relation to him was habitually touched by a kind of patronizing banter —“kidding the old boy along,” they would have called it — by the communication of smug superior winks and the conspiracy of feeble jests. And in this there was something base and ignoble, for Bascom was a better man than any of them.
He did not notice any of this, it is not likely he would have cared if he had, for, like most eccentrics, his thoughts were usually buried in a world of his own creating to whose every fact and feeling and motion he was the central actor. Again, as much as any of his extraordinary family, he had carried with him throughout his life the sense that he was “fated”— a sense that was strong in all of them — that his life was pivotal to all the actions of providence, that, in short, the time might be out of joint, but not himself. Nothing but death could shake his powerful egotism, and his occasional storms of fury, his railing at the world, his tirades of invective at some motorist, pedestrian, or labourer occurred only when he discovered that these people were moving in a world at cross-purposes to his own and that some action of theirs had disturbed or shaken the logic of his universe.
It was curious that, of all the people in the office, the person who had the deepest understanding and respect for him was John T. Brill. Mr. Brill was a huge creature of elemental desires and passions: a river of profanity rushed from his mouth with the relentless sweep and surge of the Mississippi, he could no more have spoken without swearing than a whale could swim in a frog-pond — he swore at everything, at everyone, and with every breath, casually and unconsciously, and yet when he addressed Bascom his oath was always impersonal and tinged subtly by a feeling of respect.
Thus, he would speak to Uncle Bascom somewhat in this fashion: “God-damn it, Pentland, did you ever look up the title for that stuff in Maiden? That feller’s been callin’ up every day to find out about it.”
“Which fellow?” Bascom asked precisely. “The man from Cambridge?’”
“No,” said Mr. Brill, “not him, the other son of a bitch, the Dorchester feller. How the hell am I goin’ to tell him anything if there’s no goddamn title for the stuff?”
Profane and typical as this speech was, it was always shaded nicely with impersonality toward Bascom — conscious to the full of the distinction between “damn IT” and “damn YOU.” Toward his other colleagues, however, Mr. Brill was neither nice nor delicate.
Brill was an enormous man physically: he was six feet two or three inches tall, and his weight was close to three hundred pounds. He was totally bald, his skull was a gleaming satiny pink; above his great red moon of face, with its ponderous and pendulous jowls, it looked almost egg-shaped. And in the heavy, deliberate, and powerful timbre of his voice there was always lurking this burble of exultant, gargantuan obscenity: it was so obviously part of the structure of his life, so obviously his only and natural means of expression, that it was impossible to condemn him. His epithet was limited and repetitive — but so, too, was Homer’s, and, like Homer, he saw no reason for changing what had already been used and found good.
He was a lewd and innocent man. Like Bascom, by comparison with these other people, he seemed to belong to some earlier, richer and grander period of the earth, and perhaps this was why there was more actual kinship and understanding between them than between any of the other members of the office. These other people — Friedman, Brill’s daughter Muriel, and Ward — belonged to the myriads of the earth, to those numberless swarms that with ceaseless pullulation fill the streets of life with their grey immemorable tides. But Brill and Bascom were men in a thousand, a million: if one had seen them in a crowd he would have looked after them, if one had talked with them, he could never have forgotten them.
It is rare in modern life that one sees a man who can express himself with such complete and abundant certainty as Brill did — completely and without doubt or confusion. It is true that his life expressed itself chiefly by three gestures — by profanity, by his great roar of full-throated, earth-shaking laughter, and by flatulence, an explosive comment on existence which usually concluded and summarized his other means of expression.
Although the other people in the office laughed heartily at this soaring rhetoric of obscenity, it sometimes proved too much for Uncle Bascom. When this happened he would either leave the office immediately or stump furiously into his own little cupboard that seemed silted over with the dust of twenty years, slamming the door behind him so violently that the thin partition rattled, and then stand for a moment pursing his lips, and convolving his features with incredible speed, and shaking his gaunt head slightly from side to side, until at length he whispered in a tone of passionate disgust and revulsion: “Oh, BAD! BAD! BAD! By every GESTURE! by every ACT! he betrays the BOOR, the VULGARIAN! Can you imagine”— here his voice sank even lower in its scale of passionate whispering repugnance —“can you for one MOMENT imagine a man of BREEDING and the social graces breaking wind publicly? — And before his own daughter. Oh, BAD! BAD! BAD! BAD!”
And in the silence, while Uncle Bascom stood shaking his head in its movement of downcast and convulsive distaste, they could hear, suddenly, the ripping noise Brill would make as his pungent answer to all the world — and his great bellow of throaty laughter. Later on, if Bascom had to consult him on any business, he would open his door abruptly, walk out into Brill’s office clutching his hands together at his waist, and with disgust still carved upon his face, say: “Well, sir. . . . If you have concluded your morning devotions,” here his voice sank to a bitter snarl, “we might get down to the transaction of some of the day’s business.”
“Why, Reverend!” Brill roared. “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
And the great choking bellow of laughter would burst from him again, rattling the windows with its power as he hurled his great weight backward, with complete abandon, in his creaking swivel-chair.
It was obvious that he liked to tease the old man, and never lost an opportunity of doing so: for example, if anyone gave Uncle Bascom a cigar, Brill would exclaim with an air of innocent surprise: “Why, REVEREND, you’re not going to smoke that, are you?”
“Why, certainly,” Bascom said tartly. “That is the purpose for which it was intended, isn’t it?”
“Why, yes,” said Brill, “but you know how they make ’em, don’t you? I didn’t think you’d touch it after some dirty old Spaniard has wiped his old hands all over it — yes! an’ SPIT upon it, too, because that’s what they do!”
“Ah!” Bascom snarled contemptuously. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! There is nothing cleaner than good tobacco! Finest and healthiest plant on earth! No question about it!”
“Well,” said Brill, “I’ve learned something. We live and learn, Reverend. You’ve taught me somethin’ worth knowing: when it’s free it’s clean; when you have to pay for it it stinks like hell!” He pondered heavily for a moment, and the burble began to play about in his great throat: “And by God!” he concluded, “tobacco’s not the only thing that applies to, either. Not by a damned sight!”
Again, one morning when his nephew was there, Bascom cleared his throat portentously, coughed, and suddenly said to him: “Now, Eugene, my boy, you are going to have lunch with me today. There’s no question about it whatever!” This was astonishing news, for he had never before invited the youth to eat with him when he came to his office, although the boy had been to his house for dinner many times. “Yes, sir!” said Bascom, with an air of conviction and satisfaction. “I have thought it all over. There is a splendid establishment in the basement of this building — small, of course, but everything clean and of the highest order! It is conducted by an Irish gentleman whom I have known for many years. Finest people on earth: no question about it!”
It was an astonishing and momentous occasion; the boy knew how infrequently he went to a restaurant. Having made his decision, Uncle Bascom immediately stepped into the outer offices and began to discuss and publish his intentions with the greatest satisfaction.
“Yes, sir!” he said in a precise tone, smacking his lips in a ruminant fashion, and addressing himself to everyone rather than to a particular person. “We shall go in and take our seats in the regular way, and I shall then give appropriate instructions to one of the attendants —” again he smacked his lips as he pronounced this word with such an indescribable air of relish that immediately the boy’s mouth began to water, and the delicious pangs of appetite and hunger began to gnaw his vitals —“I shall say: ‘This is my nephew, a young man now enrolled at Harvard Un-i-ver-sit-tee!’"— here Bascom smacked his lips together again with that same maddening air of relish —”‘Yes, sir’ (I shall say!)—‘You are to fulfil his order without STINT, without DELAY, and without QUESTION, and to the UTMOST of your ability’"— he howled, wagging his great bony forefinger through the air —“As for myself,” he declared abruptly, “I shall take nothing. Good Lord, no!” he said with a scornful laugh. “I wouldn’t touch a thing they had to offer. You couldn’t pay me to: I shouldn’t sleep for a month if I did. But you, my boy!” he howled, turning suddenly upon his nephew, “— are to have everything your heart desires! Everything, everything, everything!” He made an inclusive gesture with his long arms; then closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and began to snuffle with laughter.
Mr. Brill had listened to all this with his great-jowled face slack-jawed and agape with astonishment. Now, he said heavily: “He’s goin’ to have everything, is he? Where are you goin’ to take him to git it?”
“Why, sir!” Bascom said in an annoyed tone, “I have told you all along — we are going to the modest but excellent establishment in the basement of this very building.”
“Why, Reverend,” Brill said in a protesting tone, “you ain’t goin’ to take your nephew THERE, are you? I thought you said you was goin’ to git somethin’ to EAT.”
“I had supposed,” Bascom said with bitter sarcasm, “that one went there for that purpose. I had not supposed that one went there to get shaved.”
“Well,” said Brill, “if you go there you’ll git shaved, all right. You’ll not only git SHAVED, you’ll git SKINNED alive. But you won’t git anything to eat.” And he hurled himself back again, roaring with laughter.
“Pay no attention to him!” Bascom said to the boy in a tone of bitter repugnance. “I have long known that his low and vulgar mind attempts to make a joke of everything, even the most sacred matters. I assure you, my boy, the place is excellent in every way:— do you suppose,” he said now, addressing Brill and all the others, with a howl of fury —“do you suppose, if it were not, that I should for a single moment DREAM of taking him there? Do you suppose that I would for an instant CONTEMPLATE taking my own nephew, my sister’s son, to any place in which I did not repose the fullest confidence? Not on your life!” he howled. “Not on your life!”
And they departed, followed by Brill’s great bellow, and a farewell invitation which he shouted after the young man. “Don’t worry, son! When you git through with that cockroach stew, come back an’ I’ll take you out to lunch with ME!”
Although Brill delighted in teasing and baiting his partner in this fashion, there was, at the bottom of his heart, a feeling of deep humility, of genuine respect and admiration for him: he respected Uncle Bascom’s intelligence, he was secretly and profoundly impressed by the fact that the old man had been a minister of the gospel and had preached in many churches.
Moreover, in the respect and awe with which Brill greeted these evidences of Bascom’s superior education, in the eagerness he showed when he boasted to visitors, as he often did, of his partner’s learning, there was a quality of pride that was profoundly touching and paternal: it was as if Bascom had been his son and as if he wanted at every opportunity to display his talents to the world. And this, in fact, was exactly what he did want to do. Much to Bascom’s annoyance, Brill was constantly speaking of his erudition to strangers who had come into the office for the first time, and constantly urging him to perform for them, to “say some of them big words, Reverend.” And even when the old man answered him, as he frequently did, in terms of scorn, anger, and contempt, Brill was completely satisfied if Uncle Bascom would only use a few of the “big words” in doing it. Thus, one day, when one of his boyhood friends, a New Hampshire man whom he had not seen in thirty-five years, had come in to renew their acquaintance Brill, in describing the accomplishments of his partner, said with an air of solemn affirmation: “Why, hell yes, Jim! It’d take a college perfesser to know what the Reverend is talkin’ about half the time! No ordinary son of a bitch is able to understand him! So help me God, it’s true!” he swore solemnly, as Jim looked incredulous. “The Reverend knows words the average man ain’t never heard. He knows words that ain’t even in the dictionary. Yes, sir! — an’ uses ’em, too — all the time!” he concluded triumphantly.
“Why, my dear sir!” Bascom answered in a tone of exacerbated contempt, “What on earth are you talking about? Such a man as you describe would be a monstrosity, a heinous perversion of natural law! A man so wise that no one could understand him:— so literate that he could not communicate with his fellow-creatures:— so erudite that he led the inarticulate and incoherent life of a beast or a savage!”— here Uncle Bascom squinted his eyes tightly shut, and laughed sneeringly down his nose: “Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! — Why, you consum-mate fool!” he sneered, “I have long known that your ignorance was bottomless — but I had never hoped to see it equalled — Nay, surpassed!” he howled, “by your asininity.”
“There you are!” said Brill exultantly to his visitor, “What did I tell you? There’s one of them words, Jim: ‘asserninity,’ why, damn it, the Reverend’s the only one who knows what that word means — you won’t even find it in the dictionary!”
“Not find it in the dictionary!” Bascom yelled. “Almighty God, come down and give this ass a tongue as Thou didst once before in Balaam’s time!”
Again, Brill was seated at his desk one day engaged with a client in those intimate, cautious, and confidential preliminaries that mark the consummation of a “deal” in real estate. On this occasion the prospective buyer was an Italian: the man sat awkwardly and nervously in a chair beside Brill’s desk while the great man bent his huge weight ponderously and persuasively toward him. From time to time the Italian’s voice, sullen, cautious, disparaging, interrupted Brill’s ponderous and coaxing drone. The Italian sat stiffly, his thick, clumsy body awkwardly clad in his “good” clothes of heavy black, his thick, hairy, blunt-nailed hands cupped nervously upon his knees, his black eyes glittering with suspicion under his knitted inch of brow. At length, he shifted nervously, rubbed his paws tentatively across his knees and then, with a smile mixed of ingratiation and mistrust, said: “How mucha you want, eh?”
“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 abso-lute-ly and emphat-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 inVECT-ive!” he whispered, in a kind of ecstasy.