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

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СКАЧАТЬ think that this must come upon me,” Gant sniffled, responding mechanically to her grief, as he rocked back and forth on his cane and stared into the fire. “O boo-hoo-hoo! What have I done that God should —”

      “You shut up!” she cried, turning upon him in a blaze of fury. “Shut your mouth this minute. I don’t want to hear any more from you! I’ve given my life to you! Everything’s been done for you, and you’ll be here when we’re all gone. You’re not the one who’s sick.” Her feeling toward him had, for the moment, gone rancorous and bitter.

      “Where’s mama?” Eugene asked.

      “She’s back in the kitchen,” Helen said. “I’d go back and say hello before you see Ben if I were you.” In a low brooding tone, she continued: “Well, forget about it. It can’t be helped now.”

      He found Eliza busy over several bright bubbling pots of water on the gas-stove. She bustled awkwardly about, and looked surprised and confused when she saw him.

      “Why, what on earth, boy! When’d you get in?”

      He embraced her. But beneath her matter-of-factness, he saw the terror in her heart: her dull black eyes glinted with bright knives of fear.

      “How’s Ben, mama?” he asked quietly.

      “Why-y,” she pursed her lips reflectively, “I was just saying to Doctor Coker before you came in. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I tell you what, I don’t believe he’s half as bad off as he looks. Now, if only we can hold on till morning. I believe there’s going to be a change for the better.’”

      “Mama, in heaven’s name!” Helen burst out furiously. “How can you bear to talk like that? Don’t you know that Ben’s condition is critical? Are you never going to wake up?”

      Her voice had its old cracked note of hysteria.

      “Now, I tell you, son,” said Eliza, with a white tremulous smile, “when you go in there to see him, don’t make out as if you knew he was sick. If I were you, I’d make a big joke of it all. I’d laugh just as big as you please and say, ‘See here, I thought I was coming to see a sick man. Why, pshaw!’ (I’d say) ‘there’s nothing wrong with you. Half of it’s only imagination!’”

      “O mama! for Christ’s sake!” said Eugene frantically. “For Christ’s sake!”

      He turned away, sick at heart, and caught at his throat with his fingers.

      Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.

      “N-n-n-now, I wouldn’t stay but a m-m-m-minute,” whispered Luke. “It m-m-might make him nervous.”

      Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.

      “Look who’s come to see you,” her voice came heartily. “It’s Highpockets.”

      For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow skull’s-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben. And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen, that Ben was dying.

      Ben’s long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And Ben’s thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, about his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.

      And the sound of this gasping — loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it — gave to the scene its final note of horror.

      Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a naturalist’s table, fighting, while they looked at him, to save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. It was monstrous, brutal.

      As Eugene approached, Ben’s fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy’s wrists fiercely in the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child: “Why have you come? Why have you come home, ‘Gene?”

      The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.

      “They gave us a vacation, Ben,” he said presently. “They had to close down on account of the flu.”

      Then he turned away suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor lie, and unable to face the fear in Ben’s gray eyes.

      “All right, ‘Gene,” said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority. “Get out of here — you and Helen both. I’ve got one crazy Gant to look after already. I don’t want two more in here.” She spoke harshly, with an unpleasant laugh.

      She was a thin woman of thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant’s nephew, Gilbert. She was of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar, with little pity in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness and death. These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism, saying:

      “If I gave way to my feelings, where would the patient be?”

      When they got out into the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen: “Why have you got that death’s-head here? How can he get well with her around? I don’t like her!”

      “Say what you like — she’s a good nurse.” Then, in a low voice, she said: “What do you think?”

      He turned away, with a convulsive gesture. She burst into tears, and seized his hand.

      Luke was teetering about restlessly, breathing stertorously and smoking a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the door of the sick-room. She was holding a useless kettle of hot water.

      “Huh? Hah? What say?” asked Eliza, before any one had said anything. “How is he?” Her eyes darted about at them.

      “Get away! Get away! Get away!” Eugene muttered savagely. His voice rose. “Can’t you get away?”

      He was infuriated by the sailor’s loud nervous breathing, his large awkward feet. He was angered still more by Eliza’s useless kettle, her futile hovering, her “huh?” and “hah?”

      “Can’t you see he’s fighting for his breath? Do you want to strangle him? It’s messy! Messy! Do you hear?” His voice rose again.

      The ugliness and discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming family, whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding with its terrible hunger for death on Ben’s СКАЧАТЬ