Theophilus North (14 page)

“Thank you,” she finally said, interrupting me in an assassination. She rose and apparently without design closed the door beside me. “Your reading has much to recommend it. I am sorry to have to tell you that my father finds a reading with intermittent emphasis very tiring. I don't think I should waste your time any longer.”

From behind the closed door an old man's voice could be heard calling, “Sarah! Sarah!” She put out her hand to me and said, “Thank you, Mr. North. Good morning!”

“Sarah! Sarah!” In the next room a handbell rang; a hurled object smote the door. It opened revealing a trained nurse. I looked about the floor as though I had lost something. Willis appeared. Persis appeared.

“Willis, go about your work. Persis, this is none of your affair!”

Whereupon the old man himself appeared. He was wearing a quilted dressing-gown; his pince-nez danced on his nose; his Vandyke beard pointed toward the horizon.

“Send that young man in to me, Sarah. Finally we have found someone who can read. The only readers you've ever found are retired librarians with mice in their throats, God help us!”

“Father, I
will
send Mr. North in to you directly. You go back to your desk at once. You're an ill man. You mustn't get excited. Nurse, take my father's arm.”

For the second time I had introduced discord into “Nine Gables.” I must change my ways. When the bystanders had withdrawn, Mrs. Bosworth resumed her seat and asked me to sit down. How she hated me!

“In the event that Dr. Bosworth approves of you as a reader there are some things you should know. My father is an old man; he is seventy-four. He is not a well man. His health has caused us great concern. In addition, he has a number of idiosyncrasies to which you must pay
no
attention. He tends to make large promises and to enter into extravagant projects. Any interest in them on your part could only lead you into serious difficulties.”

“Sarah! Sarah!”

She rose. “I want you to remember what I have said. Have you heard me?”

I looked her in the eye and said amiably, “Thank you, Mrs. Bosworth.”

That was not the answer she expected nor the tone to which she was accustomed. She replied sharply, “Any further trouble from you and you go out of this house at once.” She opened the door. “Father, this is Mr. North.”

Dr. Bosworth was sitting in a heavily cushioned chair before a great table. “Please sit down, Mr. North. I am Dr. Bosworth. You may have heard my name. I have been able to be of some service to my country.”

“Indeed, I know of your distinguished career, Dr. Bosworth.”

“Hm . . . very good . . . May I ask where you were born?”

“In Madison, Wisconsin, sir.”

“What was your father's occupation?”

“He owned and edited a newspaper.”

“Indeed! Did your father also attend a university?”

“He graduated from Yale and obtained a doctorate there.”

“Did he? . . .
Vous parlez français, monsieur?
”

“J'ai passé une année en France.”

There followed: what occupation had I been engaged in since leaving school? . . . my age? . . . my marital status? . . . what plans I entertained for later life, et cetera, et cetera.

I rose. “Dr. Bosworth, I came to this house to apply for a position as a reader. I was told that you have had many unsatisfactory readers. I foresee that I shall disappoint you also. Good morning.”

“What? What?”

“Good morning, sir.”

He appeared to be highly astonished. I left the room. As I progressed down the great hall, he called after me: “Mr. North! Mr. North! Kindly let me explain myself.” I returned to the door of his study. “Please sit down, sir. I did not intend to be intrusive. I ask your apology. I have not left this house for seven years except to visit the hospital. We who are shut in tend to develop an excessive curiosity about those who attend us. Will you accept my apology?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Thank you . . . Are you free to read to me this morning until twelve-thirty?”

I was. He placed before me an early work of George Berkeley. When a variety of bells struck the half hour before one I finished a paragraph and rose. He said, “We have been reading from a first edition of this work. You may be interested in seeing the inscription on the title page.” I reopened the book and saw that it had been inscribed by the author to his esteemed friend Dean Jonathan Swift. It took me some time to recover from my astonishment and veneration. Dr. Bosworth asked me if I had heard of Bishop Berkeley previously. I told him that at Yale University I had roomed in Berkeley Hall, that all Yale men were proud that the philosopher had left a part of his library to enrich our own—the books had been transported by bullock cart from Rhode Island to Connecticut; that moreover I had spent much of my boyhood in Berkeley, California, where we were often reminded that the town was named after the Bishop. We were pronouncing the name differently but had no doubt that it was the same man.

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Dr. Bosworth. It is difficult for a Harvard man to believe that sober scholarly interests are pursued elsewhere.

It was arranged that I was to read for two hours on four days of the week. George Berkeley is not easy reading and neither of us had been trained in rigorous philosophical discussion, but we allowed no paragraph to be left behind without thorough digestion.

Two days later he interrupted our reading to whisper to me conspiratorially; he rose and opened the door to the great hall abruptly and peered about as though to surprise eavesdroppers; he repeated this manoeuvre at the door leading into his bedroom. Then he returned to his table and, lowering his voice, asked me, “You know that Bishop Berkeley lived three years in Newport?” I nodded. “I am planning to buy his house ‘Whitehall' and fifty surrounding acres. There are many difficulties about it. It is still a
great secret
. I plan to build an Academy of Philosophers here. I was hoping that you would help me draft the invitations to the leading philosophers in the world.”

“To come and lecture here, Dr. Bosworth?”

“Sh! . . . Sh! . . . No, to come and live here. Each would have his own house. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Bergson. Benedetto Croce, and Gentile. Wittgenstein—do you know if he is still alive?”

“I am not sure, sir.”

“Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. You must help me draft the letters. The Masters are to have full liberty. They may teach or not teach, lecture or not lecture. They would not even be required to meet one another. Newport would become like a great lighthouse on a hill—a Pharos of Mind, of elevated thought. There is so much planning to be done! Time! Time! They tell me I am not well.”

He heard—or thought he heard—a step outside the door. He put his forefinger against his mouth warningly, and we returned to our reading. The subject of the Academy did not arise again for some time. He seemed to fear that we were surrounded by too many spies.

At the end of the second week he asked if I was averse to late hours; he enjoyed a long siesta in the afternoon and felt no need to retire before midnight. This suited me very well as there were increasing requests for my time in the morning. The Bosworths gave several dinner parties a week, but it was the host's custom to rise from the table at ten-thirty—having partaken of some invalid's diet—and to join me in the library. As the season advanced these occasions became more frequent and more elaborate. It was a childish vanity on the part of the former diplomat to commemorate at these meals the national holidays of the countries where he had served; he was thus enabled to wear the decorations that had been conferred upon him. Neither our Independence Day nor the Fall of the Bastille happened to coincide with my visits to the house, but often enough he arrived resplendent in the study, murmuring modestly that “Poland had had a tragic but gallant history” or that “one could not overestimate the contributions of Garibaldi,” or of Bolivar or of Gustavus Adolphus.

We continued our studies relative to
Dean
Berkeley's visit to the western hemisphere. He could see that my interest was almost equal to his own. Imagine our delight when, reading
The Analyst
, we discovered that “our boy”—now
Bishop Berkeley
—had
smashed
and
pulverized
Sir Isaac Newton and the mighty Leibnitz on the matter of infinitesimals. Both Dr. Bosworth and I were babes-in-arms in the realm of cosmological physics, but we got the point. Newton's friend Edmund Halley (of the comet) had mockingly spoken of the “inconceivability of the doctrines of Christianity” as held by Bishop Berkeley, and the Bishop replied that Newton's infinitesimal “fluxions” were as “obscure, repugnant and precarious” as any point they could call attention to in divinity, adding, “What are these fluxions . . . these velocities of evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” Crash! Bang! The structure of the universe, like the principles of the Christian faith—according to the Bishop—were perceived only by the intuition. It could not be said that Dr. Bosworth and I danced about his study, but the spies listening at the doors must have reported that something strange was going on—at midnight! These were giants indeed! Including Swift—my patron since I had begun to think of myself as Gulliver. We were in the heart of the Second City, in the eighteenth century.

At our first interview I had rebuked Dr. Bosworth's excessive curiosity about myself; our intermittent conversations were limited to historical subjects, but I was aware that he continued to be “consumed with curiosity” about me. When the very wealthy take a liking to any one of us belonging to the less fortunate orders they are filled with a pitying wonder as to how we “make out” in those conditions of squalor and deprivation to which we are condemned—to put it briefly they try to figure out
how much money we make
. Do we get enough to eat? I was to meet this concern over and over again during the summer. Plates of sandwiches, bowls of fruit, were constantly placed before me. Only once (at another house) did I consent to take as much as a cup of tea in any of my employers' homes or in their friends' homes, though invitations to luncheons, dinners, and parties began to arrive in considerable numbers.

I was uneasily aware that I had become an object of exaggerated curiosity on the Avenue by reason of the indefatigable pen of Flora Deland. As I have related, she lost no time in endearing herself to Newport. Her nation-wide (and local) audience had been enthralled by her account of the nine cities and the glorious trees on Aquidneck Island, and of the wonders of the Wyckoff House. I had revisited “The Sandpiper” a number of times, but the flower of friendship had lost its bloom; she nagged at me and then quarreled with me. She could not understand why I did not strain every nerve to become a social success among the “cottages,” presumably with herself on my arm. I told her firmly that I had never accepted an invitation and that I never would. But before we parted company she had published a sixth article—a glowing picture of the cultural renaissance that had taken place in this earthly paradise. This had been sent to me, but I failed to read it until long after. Without naming me she wrote of an unbelievably learned young man who had become the “rage” of the summer colony and was reading Homer, Goethe, Dante, and Shakespeare with young and old. He had revived the Browning Club and his French
matinées
were depopulating Bailey's Beach. Her article opened with a scornful repudiation of a witticism twenty years old to the effect that “the ladies of Newport had never heard the first act of an opera nor read the last half of a book.” Newport was—and always has been—she affirmed, one of the most enlightened communities in the country, the foster home of George Bancroft, Longfellow, Lowell, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and of Mrs. Edward Venable, author of that moving volume of verse,
Dreams in an Aquidneck Garden
.

Nor did I know at the time that there was a less flattering reason why I had become in those circles an object of almost morbid curiosity.

It was a custom of the house that toward midnight Dr. Bosworth's guests would file into the study to take a second leave of their distinguished host. I stood against the wall in that self-effacement that became my station. Mrs. Bosworth did not accompany them, but Dr. Bosworth and Persis saw to it that I was presented to them all. Among them were some who were, or had been, my employers: I received from Miss Wyckoff a radiant smile, from Bodo (a frequent guest) a fraternal and inelegant greeting in German. Ladies whom I had never met told me of their children's progress:

“My Michael's set his heart on becoming a tennis champion, thanks to you, Mr. North.”

Mrs. Venable: “Bodo tells me that you're reading Bishop Berkeley—how fascinating!”

Another: “Mr. North, Mr. Weller and I are giving a small dance on Saturday week. To what address may I send a card?”

“That's very kind of you, Mrs. Weller, but my days are so filled that I'm unable to accept any invitations.”

“No parties
at all?
”

“No—thank you very much—no parties.”

Another: “Mr. North, is it too late for me to join your Robert Browning Society. I've always loved the Brownings.”

“Ma'am, I don't know of any Browning Society in Newport.”

“Oh? . . . Oh? . . . Perhaps I was misinformed.”

The Fenwicks, whom you will meet later, were very cordial with a smile of complicity. I was presented to the parents of Diana Bell who did not acknowledge the introduction. I leaned forward to Mrs. Bell and said in a low voice but very distinctly: “I have twice sent my bill to Mr. Bell for services which he agreed upon. If he does not pay my bill, I shall tell the whole story to Miss Flora Deland and sixty million Americans will learn of that purloined letter. Good evening, Mrs. Bell.”