Bascom also noticed that she held a large carving-knife in her hand. With a loud yell he turned and fled toward his room, where he locked the door, crying out strongly in an agony of terror: “O Momma! Momma! Save me!”
All this had amused Louise enormously. She played the record over time after time, for ever snuffling with laughter and the high cackle: “Who-oo-oo!” She bent double with it.
And now, as the boy looked at the old man, he had a sense of union with the past. It seemed to him if he would only speak, the living past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and despair, the million scenes and faces of the buried life—all that an old man ever knew—would be revealed to him, would be delivered to him like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all living. His savage hunger was a kind of memory: he thought if he could speak, it would be fed.
And for a moment, it seemed, he saw the visages of time, dark time, the million lock-bolts shot back in man’s memory, the faces of the lost Americans, and all the million casual moments of their lives, with Bascom blazing at them from a dozen pulpits, Bascom, tortured by love and madness, walking the streets of the nation, stumping the rutted roads, muttering through darkness with clasped bony hands, a gaunt and twisted figure reeling across the continent below immense and cruel skies. Light fell upon his face and darkness crossed it:—he came up from the wilderness, from derbied men and bustled women, from all of the memories of lavish brown, and from time, dark time—from a time that was further off than Saxon thanes, all of the knights, the spearheads, and the horses.
Was all this lost?
“It was so long ago,” the old man said.
Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: the flying leaf, the broken cloud. Was no love crying in the wilderness?
“—So long ago. I have lived so long. I have seen so much. I could tell you so many things,” his uncle said huskily, with weariness and indifference. His eye was lustreless and dead, he looked for a moment tired and old.
All at once, a strange and perplexing vision, which was to return many times in the years that followed, came to the boy. It was this: there was
