The Dwelling Place of Light | Page 5

Thus had virtue failed to hold its own.
One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates
staring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the
opposite bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain
degree of enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's
bewilderment never cleared, and the unformed question was ever
clamouring for an answer--how had it happened? Job's cry. How had it
happened to an honest and virtuous man, the days of whose forebears
had been long in the land which the Lord their God had given them?
Inherently American, though lacking the saving quality of push that
had been the making of men like Ditmar, he never ceased to regard
with resentment and distrust the hordes of foreigners trooping between
the pillars, though he refrained from expressing these sentiments in
public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of that unmistakable
physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly
deserted the old England for the new. The ancestral features were there,
the lips--covered by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise
formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and
sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the
corners. But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from
which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the
indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been
so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the
Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.
Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a
certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost
amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who
have slipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family

in America. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations,
he wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he
bought at Hartshorne's drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and
Illinois and Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original
immigrant, of Dolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not so
the magisterial Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of
Beacon, whom likewise he had ventured to address,--to the indignation
and disgust of his elder daughter, Janet.
"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.
"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"
"How many generations?"
"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.
Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.
"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of
Ebenezer's time, haven't you?"
Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his
ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had
become his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday
mornings poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration,
making careful notes on the ruled block.
This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had
somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was
also a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of
sympathy of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the
situation more grimly: she was a logical projection in a new
environment of the religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a
God of vengeance. She did not concern herself as to what all this
vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked
sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,--a round of
household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have

made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family. It is bad to
be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one's
destiny,--which Hannah had not. But she kept the little flat with its
worn furniture,--which had known so many journeys--as clean as a
merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to her
satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi's grocery and
provision store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with
the Italian housewives of the neighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to
pause outside for a moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured
prints of red and yellow jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with
slices of orange, the gaudy boxes of cereals and buckwheat flour, the
"Brookfield" eggs in packages. Significant, this modern package
system, of an era of flats with little storage space. She took in at a
glance the blue lettered placard announcing the current price of
butterine, and walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes
Street, where the beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were
filled,