had also gone green along the band. One understands now why the policeman called him “Bud”: this great bony figure seemed ruthlessly to have been crammed into garments in which a country fledgling of the’eighties might have gone to see his girl, clutching a bag of gumdrops in his large red hand. A stringy little neck-tie, a clean but dilapidated collar which by its bluish and softly mottled look Bascom Pentland must have laundered himself (a presumption which is quite correct since the old man did all his own laundry work, as well as his mending, repairing, and cobbling)—this was his costume, winter and summer, and it never changed, save that in winter he supplemented it with an ancient blue sweater which he wore buttoned to the chin and whose frayed ends and cuffs projected inches below the scanty little jacket. He had never been known to wear an overcoat, not even on the coldest days of those long, raw, and formidable winters from which Boston suffers.
The mark of his madness was plain upon him: intuitively men knew he was not a poor man, and the people who had seen him so many times in State Street would nudge one another, saying: “You see that old guy? You’d think he was waitin’for a hand-out from the Salvation Army, wouldn’t you? Well, he’s not. He’s got it, brother. Believe me, he’s got it good and plenty: he’s got it salted away where no one ain’t goin’to touch it. That guy’s got a sock full of dough!”
“Jesus!” another remarks. “What good’s it goin’to do an old guy like that? He can’t take any of it with him, can he?”
“You said it, brother,” and the conversation would become philosophical.
Bascom Pentland was himself conscious of his parsimony, and although he sometimes asserted that he was “only a poor man,” he realized that his exaggerated economies could not be justified to his business associates on account of poverty: they taunted him slyly, saying, “Come on, Pentland, let’s go to lunch. You can get a good meal at the Pahkeh House for a couple of bucks.” Or: “Say, Pentland, I know a place where they’re havin’a sale of winter overcoats: I saw one there that would just suit you—you can get it for sixty dollars.” Or: “Do you need a good laundry, Reverend? I know a couple of Chinks who do good work.”
To which Bascom, with the characteristic evasiveness of parsimony, would reply, snuffling derisively down his nose: “No, sir! You won’t catch me in any of their stinking restaurants. You never know what you’re getting: if you could see the dirty, nasty, filthy kitchens where your
