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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ trying to, but it won’t, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I’m lost now and I’ll never find the way again. In God’s name write me a line when you get this. Tell me what your name is now — you never have. Tell me where you’re going to live. Don’t let me go entirely, I beg of you, don’t leave me alone.”

      He sent the letter to the address she had given him — to her father’s house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a terrible tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no word came, July ended. The summer waned. She did not write.

      Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh rocked with laughter.

      The boarders said: “Eugene’s lost his girl. He doesn’t know what to do, he’s lost his girl.”

      “Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?”

      The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.

      “Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl.”

      The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their full-meated mouths.

      “Don’t let them kid you, big boy. What’s the matter: did some one get your girl?” asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing with hoarse compassion:

      “Git another girl, ‘Gene. Why, law! I’d not let it bother me two minutes.” He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto, after speaking.

      “You should worry, boy. You should WORRY!” said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. “Women are like street-cars: if you miss one, there’s another along in fifteen minutes. Ain’t that right, lady?” he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. “Oh, aren’t men the awfullest —”

      Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake Clapp, a well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:

      “I thought she was too old for him when I saw her. ‘Gene’s only a kid. He’s taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is. He’s going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He’s thin as a bone. He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first disease that comes along —”

      Her melancholy whine continued as Jake’s stealthy thigh fumbled against her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.

      In the gray darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat’s in the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.

      “He’ll git over it,” said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry. “Every boy has got to go through the Calf–Love stage. When I was about ‘Gene’s age —” He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.

      “He’d better watch out,” whined Florry sadly. “I know what I’m talking about. That boy’s not strong — he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does. He’s on the verge of —”

      Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.

      “Miss Brown” meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little apart from the others. From the dark sun-parlor at the side came swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty-eight, of Tampa, Florida. She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.

      “Where are you going, ‘Gene?” she said quietly. Her eyes of light violet were a little tired. There was a faint exquisite perfume of rosewater.

      “Leave me alone!” he muttered.

      “You can’t go on like this,” she said in a low tone. “She’s not worth it — none of them are. Pull yourself together.”

      “Leave me alone!” he said furiously. “I know what I’m doing!” He wrenched away violently, and leaped down into the yard, plunging around the house in a staggering run.

      “Ben!” said Irene Mallard sharply.

      Ben rose from the dark porch-swing where he had been sitting with Mrs. Pert.

      “See if you can’t do something to stop him,” said Irene Mallard.

      “He’s crazy,” Ben muttered. “Which way did he go?”

      “By there — around the house. Go quick!”

      Ben went swiftly down the shallow steps and loped back over the lawn. The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped upon a dozen rotting columns of whitewashed brick, fourteen feet high. In the dim light, by one of these slender piers, already mined with crumbling ruins of wet brick, the scarecrow crouched, toiling with the thin grapevine of his arms against the temple.

      “I will kill you, House,” he gasped. “Vile and accursed House, I will tear you down. I will bring you down upon the whores and boarders. I will wreck you, House.”

      Another convulsion of his shoulders brought down a sprinkling rain of dust and rubble.

      “I will make you fall down on all the people in you, House,” he said.

      “Fool!” cried Ben, leaping upon him, “what are you trying to do?” He caught the boy’s arms from behind and dragged him back. “Do you think you can bring her back to you by wrecking the house? Are there no other women in the world, that you should let one get the best of you like this?”

      “Let me go! Let me go!” said Eugene. “What does it matter to you?”

      “Don’t think, fool, that I care,” said Ben fiercely. “You’re hurting no one but yourself. Do you think you’ll hurt the boarders by pulling the house down on your own head? Do you think, idiot, that any one cares if you kill yourself?” He shook the boy. “No. No. I don’t care what you do, you know. I simply want to save the family the trouble and expense of burying you.”

      With a great cry of rage and bafflement Eugene tried to free himself. But the older brother held on as desperately as the Old Man of the Sea. Then, with a great effort of his hands and shoulders, the boy lifted his captor off the ground, and dashed him back against the white brick wall of the cellar. Ben collapsed, releasing him, with a fit of dry coughing, holding his hand against СКАЧАТЬ