Читать книгу Man of Strife - Grove Wilson - Страница 6

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A NORTHWEST wind swept down Hennepin Avenue; an October wind, dust laden, touched with ice. Bruce faced it on his way home and shivered, unconsciously, as it tore at his light overcoat and whipped the tears into his eyes. The morning had been fine, with no promise of this bitter evening. But that was Minnesota in the fall: one could be sure of nothing except that cold weather was near. At Seventh Street he paused to let one of the big, yellow interurban cars go around the corner. There were steel gates on the car. Bruce hated those gates—unreasonably, intensely, blindly hated them. He cursed them, seen or unseen; he cursed them when they clanged to, shutting him in. He cursed them long and passionately when they clanged to, shutting him out. They were a small red spot in the midst of his mind’s whiteness.

Just now he was bitter enough to shake his fist at them and rage, impotently. He was bitter at everything. Across the street the Greek’s fruit store awakened his wrath anew. The October wind, with its sifted dirt, had coated the southern offerings with disgusting grime. Only air-tight glass could keep out that powdered loam.

At every step, as he went up the avenue, he drank wormwood. He was enduring, in fierce anticipation, the pain soon to be inflicted on his mother. His imagination sent his organs into cramps that tore and wrenched him. He was mad of his self-inflicted agonies. This could not last. He put a curb on his mind, directing his thoughts into new channels. He considered Clarence, older by sixteen months, actually younger, less mature, far less independent.

They had been great friends long ago. Twelve? Fourteen years? Yes, fourteen years ago. They were mere kids then. He was nearing twelve, Clarence thirteen, or a little more, and they were happy, untouched by the poverty in which they lived. He could recall that time by an incident, a turning point in his young life. His visual memory brought it back to him, clear in every detail.

In the midst of Hennepin avenue appeared a large, round, wooden tank at which the farmers watered their horses. There were no horses there now. It was harvest time and the hot August sun had turned the water tepid. He and Clarence hung over the edge of the trough, idly stirring the algæ, the green stuff that clung to the wet wood. In the water he saw his face, freckled beyond belief, and Clarence’s, burned to an Indian color. They were barefooted and sketchily clad in shirt and overalls. Neither of them wore a hat and Clarence’s hair was sleek (or was this an after image from the recent scene? No matter, he had an impression of sleekness). His own hair was frightful—a shock, unruly. It was a grim, painful business, combing out the snarls in the morning, where the “mice had slept.”

A crowd of boys approached the tank. They were strangers or almost strangers and the town champion was at their head. They were not bad boys, they were just boys. So they fell to tormenting the outsiders. Bruce and Clarence endured their gibes, grinning deprecatorially. Their non-resistance stirred the tormentors to new outrages until one of them, Bay Dayer, threw a double handful of water into Clarence’s face. The poor boy, choking, gasping, half-strangled, looked imploringly at Bruce. And Bay laughed.

It required the combined efforts of Dick Shepherd, the town champion, and Old Bert Brunn and Brick Pierce to drag Bruce off the screaming, blood-stained Dayer.

That was his first fight. It was more, he realized later, than that: It was his first hard clash with life, it was the thin edge biting into the granite of reality. At the time he had taken pride in this discovery of a fierce temper that unthroned reason, destroyed fear and lent him strength and skill. Pride touched with alarm. Even to his boyish mind it had seemed a terrible thing to go briefly unleashed, irresponsible. There met, thus, in him his father and his mother. His father, three years dead at the time of that first fight, to whom the word “restraint” had had no meaning, to whom “self-control” was unbecoming a gentlemen, came of Virginia ancestors, and all his life boasted of an outrageous temper. He had, apparently, but two articles in his creed: that a gentleman must drink and, since the Civil War, hate Virginia. To each of these he adhered with passionate devotion. Bruce was unable to account for his alcoholic mania—that was a trait, perhaps passed on by a buccaneering ancestor, who had drunk wine and cutthroats on the Spanish Main, with a tendency to indulge in other excesses—a tendency not entirely lost to his descendant. It was easier to understand the hatred. For some obscure reason, his father had turned his back upon slavery and had gone to Ohio, where, when Fort Sumpter’s guns roared, he had enlisted as surgeon, or assistant surgeon, in an Ohio regiment, giving his services to those whose rifles were trained against the breasts of his family.

To his Welsh-English mother, self-control was the spirit that quickened. It was the chief virtue, it was all the virtues. She had it. Through what bitterness she had attained to this perfection Bruce did not know. To him the twenty years of her married life before his birth were mysterious, unreal. Looking at her white face (he had no recollection of ever seeing in it a touch of color), at her strong Roman nose, wide firm-lipped mouth and clear gray eyes, it was possible to trace, back of her serenity, the scars left by pain and grief and outrage. No matter. She had risen above her calamities. The horrors that had peopled her nights had fled.

So it was to Clarence, a creature land-locked, that he owed a knowledge of himself. That first fight bred introspection. He was terrified into a consideration of the thing he was. That inward looking had not been pleasant. Even now it was not pleasant to remember the black period through which he had passed.

Later on, it was Clarence who had thrust him out into the world, had hurried the struggle for existence. Clarence wanted to learn a trade and set his heart on printing. At that time, in the nineties, the wages of a printer’s devil were small or nothing. There was no aid for his mother in that line. Yet he had gone ahead, and it was Bruce who took up the burden. Somehow they worried through. The cold wind, hurling itself down the Avenue, emphasized the hardships of those nightmarish days. It was then, he knew, that his face had lost its roundness and his heart its laughter. They had worried through....

After all, Clarence may have been right. It was his trade that took him to Winona where he was followed shortly by his mother. When he had saved a little money out of the stress of hardships, Bruce joined them. Still work dogged him. He had literally fought his way through school, holding a small place on the morning newspaper in his effort to meet unavoidable expenses.

And his mother had worked. Those were trying years with the goal still distant. They ended, and he moved on to Minneapolis and to the University. There was more work on a morning paper, the same paper of which he was now City Editor. But there had been more money, more for him, more for Clarence and, at last, ease, comparative ease, for his mother. Even the University was now behind him and he was entitled to write several letters after his name. He might easily have gone farther, had dreamed of going farther; but suddenly the futility of his efforts in that direction dawned upon him. He was stunned by the discovery that the University was not an entrance to life. If he was to pick the lock that closed that door, he must set about it in an entirely new way. That is to say, he discovered himself standing apart from the crowd an entity, sharply differentiated. It was the door to his life that was to be opened. For that he could substitute the life of no university, no clique, no guild, trade or art. In some way, in his own way, he must break that lock or remain outside, endlessly conscious of the fact that he was outside.

It might not matter to others that they were outside; did not apparently matter to Clarence, who had called him a damned fool when he gave up his work for a Ph.D. degree. It had shocked him to realize that people did not know they were outside, did not know that there was a door to be opened, a lock to be picked—a subtle, delicate lock, opened only once in a hundred years. He had sensed, when for the first time he had stood trembling before that closed door, that his mother had opened it, had opened it gently, skillfully and had passed in to become, day by day, more deeply initiated into the mysteries hidden from the mob. She knew. Ah, yes, she knew.

He paused on the doorstep of his own home, held for a moment by a realization of the things she knew. What was there in heaven or earth or hell that had not been spread before her? She had traversed the seven circles, proved their meaning and returned, white-faced and white-haired, but enlightened.