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

Чтение книги онлайн.

      19

       Table of Contents

      One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon the rail, talking to Jannadeau. He was getting on to sixty-five, his erect body had settled, he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he wept in his tirades now because of his stiffened hand. Soaked in pity, he referred to himself as “the poor old cripple who has to provide for them all.”

      The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping over him. He now rose a full hour late, he came to his shop punctually, but he spent long hours of the day extended on the worn leather couch of his office, or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old Liddell, Cardiac, and Fagg Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in two big buildings on the Square and was at the present moment tilted comfortably in a chair before the fire department, gossiping eagerly with members of the ball club, whose chief support he was. It was after five o’clock, the game was over.

      Negro laborers, grisly with a white coating of cement, sloped down past the shop on their way home. The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed down the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken negress. Life buzzed slowly like a fly.

      The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope, the ecstasy of evening in the air. In slow pulses the thick plume of fountain rose, fell upon itself, and slapped the pool in lazy rhythms. A wagon rattled leanly over the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the grocer Bradley wound up his awning with slow creaking revolutions.

      Across the Square, at its other edge, the young virgins of the eastern part of town walked lightly home in chattering groups. They came to town at four o’clock in the afternoon, walked up and down the little avenue several times, entered a shop to purchase small justifications, and finally went into the chief drugstore, where the bucks of the town loafed and drawled in lazy alert groups. It was their club, their brasserie, the forum of the sexes. With confident smiles the young men detached themselves from their group and strolled back to booth and table.

      “Hey theah! Wheahd you come from?”

      “Move ovah theah, lady. I want to tawk to you.”

      Eyes as blue as Southern skies looked roguishly up to laughing gray ones, the winsome dimples deepened, and the sweetest little tail in dear old Dixie slid gently over on the polished board.

      Gant spent delightful hours now in the gossip of dirty old men — their huddled bawdry exploded in cracked high wheezes on the Square. He came home at evening stored with gutter tidings, wetting his thumb and smiling slyly as he questioned Helen hopefully:

      “She’s no better than a regular little chippie — eh?”

      “Ha-ha-ha-ha,” she laughed mockingly. “Don’t you wish you knew?”

      His age bore certain fruits, emoluments of service. When she came home in the evening with one of her friends, she presented the girl with jocose eagerness to his embrace. And, crying out paternally, “Why, bless her heart! Come kiss the old man,” he planted bristling mustache kisses on their white throats, their soft lips, grasping the firm meat of one arm tenderly with his good hand and cradling them gently. They shrieked with throaty giggle-twiddles of pleasure because it tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-TICKLED so.

      “Ooh! Mr. Gant! Whah-whah-whah!”

      “Your father’s such a nice man,” they said. “Such lovely manners.”

      Helen’s eyes fed fiercely on them. She laughed with husky-harsh excitement.

      “Hah-ha-ha! He likes that, doesn’t he? It’s too bad, old boy, isn’t it? No more monkey business.”

      He talked with Jannadeau, while his fugitive eyes roved over the east end of the Square. Before the shop the comely matrons of the town came up from the market. From time to time they smiled, seeing him, and he bowed sweepingly. Such lovely manners.

      “The King of England,” he observed, “is only a figurehead. He doesn’t begin to have the power of the President of the United States.”

      “His power is severely li-MITed,” said Jannadeau gutturally, “by custom but not by statute. In actua-LITY he is still one of the most powerful monarchs in the world.” His thick black fingers probed carefully into the viscera of a watch.

      “The late King Edward for all his faults,” said Gant, wetting his thumb, “was a smart man. This fellow they’ve got now is a nonentity and a nincompoop.” He grinned faintly, craftily, with pleasure at the big words, glancing slily at the Swiss to see if they had told.

      His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish carriage of “Queen” Elizabeth’s well clad figure as she went down by the shop. She smiled pleasantly, and for a moment turned her СКАЧАТЬ