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
