Bascom. When his mother had told him he should go to see his uncle and his family as soon as he could he had nodded his head mechanically and muttered a few words of perfunctory assent, but so busy were his mind and heart with his shining vision of the city and all the magic he was sure to find there that it had never seriously occurred to him that he would turn eagerly to the old man for companionship and help.
But now, the day after his arrival in the city, he found himself pawing eagerly through the pages of the phone book for his uncle’s business address: he found it—the familiar words, “Bascom Pentland” stared up out of the crowded page with a kind of unreal shocking incandescence, and in another moment he heard himself speaking across the wire to a puzzled voice that came to him with its curious and unearthly remoteness as if from some planetary distance—and suddenly the howling recognition of the words—words whose unearthly quality now came back to him in a searing flash of memory, although he had not heard his uncle’s voice for eight years, when he was twelve years old:
“Oh, hello! hello! hello!” that unearthly voice howled faintly at him. “How are you, my boy, how are you, how are you, how are you?… And say!” the voice yelled with a sudden comical transition to matter of factness—“I had a letter from your mother just this morning. She told me you were on your way…. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Can I come over to see you now, Uncle Bascom?”
“Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!” that unearthly and passionate voice howled back at once enthusiastically. “Come over at once, my boy, at once! Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!… And now, my boy!” the voice became faintly and comically precise, and he could hear his uncle smacking his large rubbery lips with pedantic relish as he pronounced the words: “Know-ing you are a young man alone in this great city for the first time, I shall give you a few brief—and, I trust, reasonably clear, di-rections,” again Bascom smacked his lips with audible relish as he pronounced this lovely word—“concerning your i-tin-er-ary”—his joy as he smacked his lips over this last word was almost indecently evident, and he went on with meticulous elaboration through a bewildering labyrinth of instructions until even he was satisfied at the confusion he had caused. Then he said good-bye, upon the assurance of his nephew that he would come at once. And it was in this way, after eight years of absence, that the boy again met his uncle.
He found the old man hardly changed at all. He was, indeed, a member
