# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 1

IN the fading October twilight Grandpa Tolliver sat eating an apple and reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The ponderous book (volume III) lay spread open upon his bony knees, for it was too heavy to be supported in any other way, and he read by leaning far over and peering at the pages through steel rimmed spectacles which were not quite clear, as they never were. The dimness of lens, however, did not appear to annoy him; undisturbed he read on as if the spectacles sharpened his vision instead of dimming it. Things were, after all, what you believed them to be; therefore the spectacles served their purpose. He was not one to be bothered by such small things. . . .
The room in which he sat was square and not too large. On two sides there were windows and in one corner an enormous and funereal bed of black walnut (the nuptial bed of three generations in the Tolliver family) which bore at the moment the imprint of the perverse and angular old body. He had lain there to think. Sometimes he lay thus for hours at a time in a sort of coma, ruminating the extraordinary and imbecile diversity of life. But it was the number of books which contributed the dominating characteristic of the room. There was row upon row of them rising from floor to ceiling, rows added year by year out of Grandpa's infinitesimal income until at last they had walled him in. There were books bound in fine leather and books in cheap leather, worn and frayed at the corners, books in cheap boards and an immense number of books bound in yellow paper. ​Pressed close against the books on the north wall of the room there stood an enormous desk of the same funereal black walnut—a desk filled with innumerable pigeonholes into which had been stuffed without order or sequence bits of paper scribbled over with a handwriting that was fine and erratic like the tracks of a tiny bird strayed into an inkpot. The papers ranged through every variety of shade from the yellowish bisque of ancient documents to the gray white of comparatively new ones. Of all the room it was the desk alone that had an appearance of untidiness; it lay under a pall of dust save for two small spots rubbed clean by the sharp elbows of Grandpa Tolliver.
What did he write? What was contained in this immense collection of documents? No one knew that; not even the curiosity of his daughter-in-law Hattie, who entered the room each morning to throw open the windows (an action he detested) and force the old man out into the chill air of the streets, had been able to penetrate the mysteries of the extraordinary bird tracks. A word with luck, here or there. . . . Nothing more. And she had examined them often enough in a fierce effort to penetrate the secret of his strength. From years of breathless, headlong writing the words had lost all resemblance to combinations of letters. The letters themselves were obscured; they flowed into one another until each one, in the fashion of the Chinese, had become a symbol, a mystery to which the old man alone held the key. It was the writing of a man whose pen had never been able to keep pace with the lightning speed of his thoughts. It may have been that the old man himself could not have deciphered the writing on those sheets which long since had turned to a yellow bisque. So far as any one could discover, he never took them from the pigeonholes and read them a second time. They were simply thrust away to turn yellow and gather dust, for Grandpa Tolliver had suffered for years from a sense of the immense futility of everything.
As he sat in the fading light in his decrepit rocking chair the appearance of the old man struck faintly a note of the sinister. ​Something in the shape of his great, bony head, in the appearance of his unkempt gray beard, in the remarkable angularity of his lean body gave him the appearance of one in alliance with the powers of darkness. The peculiar gray green of his glittering eyes had a way of piercing through pretense, through barriers of reserve and secrecy. They were the eyes of one who knew far too much. They were the eyes that got somehow at the core of things, so that a person—even his bitterest enemy, the vigorous and unsubtle Hattie—winced before the shattering light that gathered in their depths. They looked out from under shaggy brows with a knowledge bred of solitude that was something more than human. And he had a terrible way of using them, of watching people, of silently and powerfully prying open their shells. For Grandpa Tolliver there were no longer any illusions; he was therefore a horrid and intolerable old man.
At length when the light grew too dim even for the unearthly eyes of the old man, he closed The Decline and Fall and devoted himself to finishing his apple, absorbed for the time being in reflecting triumphantly upon passages in the ponderous work which proved without any doubt that the human race lay beyond the possibility of improvement.
When his strong pointed teeth had finished with the apple, he cast it aside for Hattie to sweep out in the morning and, lifting The Decline and Fall as high as possible, he dropped it to the floor with a resounding crash. As the echo died there rose from belowstairs the sound of clattering pans shaken by the crash from the startled hands of Hattie, and then an inarticulate rumble of exasperation at this latest bit of minute deviltry.
The old man leaned back in his chair and chuckled, wickedly. It was one more skirmish in the state of war which had existed between him and his daughter-in-law over a period of years.
Through the closed window the homely sounds of a dozen backyards filtered into the room . . . the sharp slam of a refrigerator door, the sudden mad barking of a dog playing with a ​child, the faint whicker of a horse in one of the stables and then the sound of Hattie's vigorous voice, still carrying a persistent, unmistakable note of irritation, summoning her small sons from the far reaches of the neighborhood.
The sound of the voice rose and hung in the autumn night, rich, full-blooded, vigorous, redolent of energy, beautiful in its primitive strength. At the faint note of irritation Grandpa Tolliver, rubbing his teeth with a skinny finger, chuckled again.
The voice wavered, penetrating the remote distances of the back yards, and presently there came an answering cry in the shrill, high treble of a boy of twelve arrested suddenly in the midst of his play.
"Yay-us! Yay-us! We're coming!"
Primitive it was, like a ewe calling to her lambs, or more perhaps (thought the old man) like a lioness summoning her cubs. It was Robert who answered, the younger of the two. It was difficult for Fergus to yell in the same lusty fashion; his voice had reached the stage where it trembled perilously between a treble and a bass. The sounds he made shamed him. Fergus, like his father, disliked making a spectacle of himself. (Too sensitive, thought Grandpa Tolliver. Like his father he would be a failure in life, because he had no indifference.)
The room grew darker and after a time the sweet, acrid odor of smoldering leaves, stirred into flame by the children who played beneath the window, drifted through the cracks in the glass. As if the scent, the soft twilight, the sound of Hattie's voice, had set fire to a train of memories, Grandpa Tolliver began to rock gently. The chair made a faint squeaking sound which filled the room as if it had been invaded by a flock of bats which, circling wildly above the old man's head, uttered a chorus of faint shrill cries. . . . The old man chuckled again. It was a bitter, unearthly sound. . . .
The room in which Grandpa Tolliver sat had been added to ​the Tolliver house during one of those rare intervals, years ago, when his son had prospered for a time. The house itself stood back from the street in the older part of a town which within a generation had changed from a frontier settlement into a bustling city whose prosperity centered about the black mills and the flaming furnaces of a marshy district known as The Flats, a district black and unsightly and inhabited by hordes of Italians, Poles, Slovaks and Russians who never emerged from its sooty environs into the clear air of the Hill where the old citizens had their homes. Among these houses the Tollivers' was marked by the need of paint, though this shameful fault was concealed somewhat by masses of vines—roses, honeysuckle, ivy—which overran all the dwelling and in summer threw a cloud of beauty over the horrid, imaginative trimmings conceived by some side-whiskered small town architect of the eighties. There was in the appearance of the house nothing of opulence. It was gray, commonplace and ornamented with extravagant jig-saw decorations. Also it suffered from a slate roof of a depressing shade of blue gray. But it was roomy and comfortable.
Houses occupied for a long period by the same family have a way of taking on imperceptibly but surely the characteristics of their owners. The Tollivers, Hattie and Charles, had come into the house as bride and bridegroom, in the days when Charles Tolliver had before him a bright future, years before he gave up, at the urging of his powerful wife, a commonplace adequate salary for a more reckless and extravagant career in the politics of the growing county. By now, twenty years after, the house, the lawn and the garden expressed the essence of the Tolliver family. The grass sometimes went in grave need of cutting. The paint had peeled here and there where it lay exposed to the middle-western winter. At the eaves there were streaks of black made by soot which drifted from the roaring Mills in the distant Flats. The shrubs were unpruned and the climbing roses would have been improved by a little cutting; yet these things, ​taken all in all, produced an effect of charm far greater than any to be found in the other neat, painted, monotonous houses that stood in unspectacular rows on either side of Sycamore Street. In the careless growth of the shrubs and vines there was a certain wildness and inspiring vigor, something full-blooded and lush which elsewhere in the block was absent. There was nothing ordered, pruned or clipped into a state of patterned mediocrity. Here, within the hedge that enclosed the Tolliver property there reigned a marked abandon, a sense of life lived recklessly with a shameless disregard for smug security. The Tollivers clearly had no time for those things which lay outside the main current.
Yet there was no rubbish in evidence. The whole was spotlessly clean from the linden trees which stood by the curb to the magenta-colored stable at the end of the garden. You might have walked the length of the block without consciousness of the other houses; but in front of the Tollivers' you would have halted, thinking, "Here is a difference indeed. Some careless householder without proper pride in his grounds!"
Yet you would have stopped to notice it. At least it would have interested you by the wild, vigorous, disheveled character of its difference.
In the beginning the room which Gramp occupied had been built for a servant and through its doors, in the spasmodic periods of Tolliver prosperity, had passed a procession of weird and striking "hired girls" . . . country maidens come to town in search of excitement, Bohemian and Russian girls, the offspring of the Flat-dwellers; one or two who had been, to Hattie's shocked amazement, simply daughters of joy. With the passing of Myrtle, the last of these, who was retired in order to bear a child of uncertain paternity, the Tollivers' ship of fortune had slipped into one of the periodical doldrums and the stormy, unsatisfactory era of the hired girl came to an end forever. Almost as if he had divined the event, Grandpa Tolliver appeared on ​the same day seated beside the driver on a wagon laden with books, to announce that he had come to take up his abode with the family of his son. There was nothing to be done. The books were moved into the room above the kitchen and there the old man settled himself. He had been there now for ten years, a gadfly to torment the virtuous, bustling existence of his daughter-in-law. He seldom stirred from his room. He had, indeed, done nothing in all his life which might be scored under the name of accomplishment. As a young man he had been trained for the church, but when his education had been completed, he discovered that he had learned too much and so believed nothing. He bothered no one. His crime was inertia. He possessed an indifference of colossal proportions.
As the room fell into a thick blackness, the rocking chair, under the urge of flooding memories, acquired a greater animation. It may have been that there was something in the homely sounds of the backyard vista and the pleasant smell of burning leaves that pierced by way of his senses the wall of the old man's impregnable solitude. Presently he chuckled again in a triumphant fashion, as if the memory of Hattie Tolliver's irritation still rang in his ears.
Ah, how she hated him! How they all scorned him! Even on his rare and solitary ramblings along the sidewalks of the Town, prosperous citizens regarded him with hostile looks. "Old Man Tolliver . . . The Failure!" They pointed him out to their children as the awful example of a man without ambition, a man who drifted into a lonely and desolate old age, abhorred and unwanted, a burden to his own children and grandchildren. That's what came of not having energy and push!
Old Man Tolliver . . . The Failure! At the thought, the wicked old man chortled more loudly than ever. Failure! Failure! What did they know of whether he was a failure or not. Failure! That was where he had the joke on the lot of them. He ​alone had fixed his ambition, captured his ideal; he had done always exactly what he wanted to do.
In sudden satisfaction over his secret triumph the old man was very nearly overcome by his own chuckling.
Old? Yes, he felt very old to-night. Perhaps he hadn't many years before him. Maybe it was only a matter of months. Then he would die. What was it like to die? Just a passing out probably, into something vast and dark. Oblivion! That was it. Why wasn't that the ideal end? Oblivion, where you were nothing and had no mind and no memory and no books, where you simply did not exist. Just nothingness and eternal peace. Aratu, that kingdom where reigned mere oblivion. He wasn't looking forward to Heaven and harps. (Imagine Hattie strumming a harp!) He was filled with a sense of great completeness, of having done everything there was to do, of having known all of life that it was possible for one man to know. Sin? What was sin? He didn't regret anything he had done. He had no remorse, no regrets. On the contrary he was glad of all the things he had done which people called sin. It gave him a satisfactory feeling of completeness. Now when he was so old, he needn't wish he had done this or done that. He had. To be sure, he hadn't murdered any one! He hadn't been guilty of theft. It was very satisfactory . . . that feeling of completeness.
Nothing remained. Death . . . Deadness . . . Why he was dead already. Death must be like this room, blank, dark, negative, neither one thing nor the other. He had been dead for weeks, for months, for years; and here he was walled up in a tomb of books. "La Pucelle" (a rare edition). What would become of it? Like as not Hattie would burn it, never knowing its value. Think how she would suffer if ever she discovered she had burned up a great pile of banknotes! Candide, The Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza, Montaigne, Darwin, Huxley. (What a a row they'd caused! How well he remembered the chatter.) Plato. And there was Verlaine and George Sand and all of Thackeray. Colonel Newcome and Rebecca Sharp with her ​pointed nose and green eyes. What an amusing creature she was! Amelia Sedley, that tiresome, uninteresting, virtuous bore! And Charles Honeyman. (Ah! He knew things they didn't dream of in this town!) And there in the corner by the old desk, Emma Bovary tearing voluptuously at her bodice.
But they were not all ghosts of books. There were ghosts too of reality, ghosts born of memories, which came dimly out of the past, out of a youth that, dried now at its source, had been hot-blooded and romantic and restless; such ghosts as one called Celeste (in a poke bonnet with a camelia pinned just above the brim) who seemed forever peeping round the corner of a staircase as she had once peeped, in a glowing reality round the corner of a staircase in the Rue de Clichy. Nina who was more alive now than she had ever been. . . . And they thought him a failure!
Yes, they were amusing ghosts. He had lived with them so many years. Lonely? How was it possible to be lonely among such fascinating companions? He had lived with them too long. He knew them too well, inside and out. They kept him company in this tomb of books. He seldom left it. Once a week, perhaps, to walk around the block; and then the children ran from him as if they saw the Devil himself.
Grandpa Tolliver began to rock more gently now. Yes, he'd been wicked enough. He'd known everything there was to know and didn't regret it. They shut him up in this room and didn't address him for days at a time, but he had Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp to amuse him; and Celeste who belonged to him alone. Grandpa Barr didn't even have them. His children had left him—all but his daughter Hattie—to go to Iowa, to Oregon, to Wyoming, always toward the open country. Your friends might die and your children might go away, but your memories couldn't desert you, nor such friends as Emma and Becky.
Outside it began presently to rain, at first slowly with isolate, hesitating drops, and then more and more steadily until at last the whole parched earth drank up the autumn downpour.