Yet it always seemed to George that there was in the man a cruelly wasted power. There was in him a strong light and a hidden glory. He seemed with deliberate fatalism to have trapped himself among petty things. Despite his great powers, he wasted himself compiling anthologies for use in colleges.
But the students who swarmed about him sensed the tenderness and beauty below his stolid and ironic mask. And once George, going in to see him at his house, found him at the piano, his blunt, heavy body erect, his putty face dreaming like a Buddha, as his pudgy fingers drew out with passion and wisdom the great music of Beethoven. Then George remembered what Alcibiades had said to Socrates: “You are like the god Silenus—outwardly a paunched and ugly man, but concealing inwardly the figure of a young and beautiful divinity.”
IN SPITE OF the twaddle that the prominent educators of the time were always talking about “democracy and leadership,” “ideals of service,” “the place of the college in modern life,” and so on, there wasn’t much reality about the direction of such “education” as George had had. And that’s not to say there had been no reality in his education. There was, of course—not only because there’s reality in everything, but because he had come in contact with art, with letters, and with a few fine people. Maybe that’s about as much as you can expect.
It would also be unfair to say that the real value of this, the beautiful and enduring thing, he had had to “dig out” for himself, and this fact was “beautiful”—a lot of young fellows all together, not sure where they were going, but sure that they were going somewhere.
So he had this, and this was a lot.
CHAPTER 13
The Rock
Some fifteen or more years ago (as men measure, by those diurnal instruments which their ingenuity has created, the immeasurable universe of time), at the end of a fine, warm, hot, fair, fresh, fragrant, lazy, furnacelike day of sweltering heat across the body, bones, sinews, tissues, juices, rivers, mountains, plains, streams, lakes, coastal regions, and compacted corporosity of the American continent, a train might have been observed by one of the lone watchers of the Jersey Flats approaching that enfabled rock, that ship of life, that swarming, million-footed, tower-masted, and sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan, at terrific speed.
At this moment, indeed, one of the lone crayfishers, who ply their curious trade at this season of the year throughout the melancholy length and breadth of those swamplike moors which are characteristic of this section of the Jersey coast, lifted his seamed and weather-beaten face from some nets which he had been mending in preparation for the evening’s catch, and, after gazing for a moment at the projectile fury of the Limited as it thundered past, turned and, speaking to the brown-faced lad beside him, said quietly:
“It is the Limited.”
And the boy, returning his father’s look with eyes as sea-far and as lonely as the old man’s own, and in a voice as quiet, said:
“On time, father?”
The old man did not answer for a moment. Instead, he thrust one gnarled and weather-beaten hand into the pocket of his peajacket, fumbled a moment, and then pulled forth an enormous silver watch with compass dials, an heirloom of three generations of crayfishing folk. He regarded it a moment with a steady, reflective gaze.
“Aye, lad,” he said simply, “on time—or thereabouts. She will not miss it much tonight, I reckon.”
But already the great train was gone in a hurricane of sound and speed. The sound receded into silence, leaving the quiet moors as they had always been, leaving them to silence, the creaking of the gulls, the low droning of the giant mosquitoes, the melancholy and funereal pyres of burning trash here and there, and to the lonely fisher of the moors and his young son. For a moment, the old man and the lad regarded the receding projectile of the train with quiet eyes. Then, silently, they resumed their work upon their nets again. Evening was coming, and with it the full tide, and, with the coming of the tide, the cray. So all was now as it had always been. The train had come and gone and vanished, and over the face of the flats brooded as it had always done the imperturbable visage of eternity.