Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ Several prosperous merchants went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan’s drone.

      “Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?”

      “Hello, Jim. No, I’m running up to Richmond for a few days.” But even the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that hot chariot to the East.

      “‘Board!”

      He got up trembling.

      “In a few days, dear.” She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved palms.

      “You will write as soon as you get there? Please!”

      “Yes. To-morrow — at once.”

      He bent down suddenly and whispered, “Laura — you will come back. You will come back!”

      She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more; she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.

      “My dear, my dear! Don’t forget me ever!”

      “Never. Come back. Come back.”

      The salt print of her kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.

      “Come back again!”

      But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.

      Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious little American flags, this:

      “My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I couldn’t sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little Richmond is too ghastly for words — everything burned up and every one gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for a week!” (Good! he thought. If the weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.) “It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air. Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?” (Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.) “Will you promise to look after your hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again but, don’t worry, I’ll have my own way in the end. I always do. I don’t know any one at home any more — all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married already. That leaves only the kids.” (He winced. As old as I am, maybe older.) “Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are.

      LAURA.”

      He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.

      There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:

      “July 4.

      “Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I’ve been engaged to him almost a year. We’re going off quietly to Norfolk tomorrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn’t tell you! I tried to, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn’t been so young, but what’s the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don’t forget me. Good-by and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you.”

      When he had finished the letter, he reread it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun’s vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day’s distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.

      And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew’s great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of death — alone, alone.

      “Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. “Your girl went and got married, didn’t she? She fooled you. You got left.”

      “Wh-a-a-a-t!” said Eliza banteringly, “has my boy been — as the fellow says” (she sniggered behind her hand) “has my boy been a-courtin’?” She puckered her lips in playful reproach.

      “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily. “What fellow says!”

      His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister’s eye. They laughed.

      “Well, ‘Gene,” said the girl seriously, “forget about it. You’re only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman.”

      “Why, son,” said Eliza with a touch of malice, “that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on.”

      “Oh, stop it, please.”

      “Cheer up!” said Helen heartily. “Your time’s coming. You’ll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you’re a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation.”

      “Why, yes,” said Eliza, “I’d make a big joke of it all. I wouldn’t let on to her that it affected me. I’d write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I’d show them! That’s what I’d —”

      “Oh, for God’s sake!” he groaned, starting up. “Leave me alone, won’t you?”

      He left the house.

      But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:

      “ . . . and I hope he’s worth having you — he can’t deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that’s something. How lucky he СКАЧАТЬ