That year the youth was twenty, it had been his first year in New England, and the winter had seemed very long. In the man-swarm he felt alone and lost, a desolate atom in the streets of life. That year he went to see his uncle many times.
Sometimes he would find him in his dusty little cubicle, bent over the intricacy of a legal form, painfully and carefully, with compressed lips, filling in the blank spaces with his stiff, angular and laborious hand. Bascom would speak quietly, without looking up, as he came in: “Hello, my boy. Sit down, won’t you? I’ll be with you in a moment.” And for a time the silence would be broken only by the heavy rumble of Brill’s voice outside, by the minute scratching of his uncle’s pen, and by the immense and murmurous sound of time, which rose above the city, which caught up in the upper air all of the city’s million noises, and yet seemed remote, essential, imperturbable and everlasting—fixed and unchanging, no matter what men lived or died.
Again, the boy would find his uncle staring straight before him, with his great hands folded in a bony arch, his powerful gaunt face composed in a rapt tranquillity of thought. At these times he seemed to have escaped from every particular and degrading thing in life—from the excess of absurd and eccentric speech and gesture, from all demeaning parsimonies, from niggling irascibilities, from everything that contorted his face and spirit away from its calmness and unity of thought. His face at such a time might well have been the mask of thought, the visage of contemplation. Sometimes he would not speak for several minutes, his mind seemed to brood upon the lip and edge of time, to be remote from every dusty moment of the earth.
One day the boy went there and found him thus: after a few moments he lowered his great hands and, without turning toward his nephew, sat for some time in an attitude of quiet relaxation. At length he said:
“What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late, with a magical northern suddenness. It seemed to have burst out of the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.
Spring came that year like a triumph and like a prophecy—it sang and shifted like a moth of light before the youth, but he was sure that it would bring him a glory and fulfilment he had never known.
