YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ natural grace in everything he did; his mind and spirit had been cleat, exuberant, incisive, tempered like a fine Toledo blade. In college, too, he had been the same: he had not only done well in his classes, but had distinguished himself as a swimmer and as quarter-back on the football team.

      But now something caught in George’s throat as he looked at him and saw what time had done. Randy’s lean, thin face was deeply furrowed, and the years had left a grey deposit at his temples. His hair was thinning back on both sides of the forehead, and there were little webbings of fine wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. It saddened George and somehow made him feel a bit ashamed to see how old and worn he looked. But the thing he noticed most was the expression in Randy’s eyes. Where they had once been clear and had looked out on the world with a sharp and level gaze, they were now troubled, and haunted by some deep preoccupation which he could not quite shake off even in the manifest joy he felt at seeing his old friend again.

      While they stood there, Jarvis Riggs, Parson Flack, and the Mayor came slowly down the platform talking earnestly to one of the leading real estate operators of the town, who had come down to meet them. Randy saw them and, still grinning, he winked at George and prodded him in the ribs.

      “Oh, you’ll get it now!” he cried in his old extravagant way. “At all hours, from daybreak to three o’clock in the morning — no holds barred! They’ll be waiting for you when you get there!” he chortled.

      “Who?” said George.

      “Haw-w!” Randy laughed. “Why, I’ll bet they’re all lined up there on the front porch right now, in a reception committee to greet you and to cut your throat, every damned mountain grill of a real estate man in town! Old Horse-face Barnes, Skin-‘emalive Mack Judson, Skunk-eye Tim Wagner, The Demon. Promoter, and Old Squeeze-your-heart’s-blood Simms, The Widder and Orphan Man from Arkansas — they’re all there!” he said gloatingly. “She told them you’re a prospect, and they’re waiting for you! It’s your turn now!” he yelled. “She told them that you’re on the way, and they’re drawing lots right now to see which one gets your shirt and which one takes the pants and B.V.D.s! Haw-w!”— and he poked his friend in the ribs again.

      “They’ll get nothing out of me,” George said, laughing, “for I haven’t got it to begin with.

      “That doesn’t matter!” Randy yelled. “If you’ve got an extra collar button, they’ll take that as the first instalment, and then — haw-w! they’ll collect your cuff-links, socks, and your suspenders in easy payments as the years roll on!”

      He stood there laughing at the astounded look on his friend’s face. Then, seeing his sister’s reproving eye, he suddenly prodded her in the ribs, at which she shrieked in a vexed manner and slapped at his hand.

      “I’ll vow, Randy!” she cried fretfully. “What on earth’s the matter with you? Why, you act like a regular idiot! I’ll vow you do!”

      “Haw-w!” he yelled again. Then, more soberly, but still grinning: “I guess we’ll have to sleep you out over the garage, Monk, old boy. Dave Merrit’s in town, and he’s got the spare room.” There was a slight note of deference in his voice as he mentioned Merrit’s name, but he went on lightly: “Or if you like — haw-w! — there’s a nice room at Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper’s, and she’d be glad to have you!”

      George looked rather uncomfortable at the mention of Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper. She was a worthy lady and he remembered her well, but he didn’t want to stay at her boarding-house. Margaret saw his expression and laughed:

      “Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! You see what you’re in for, don’t you? The prodigal comes home and we give him his choice of Mrs. Hopper or the garage! Now is that life or not?”

      “I don’t mind a bit,” protested George. “I think the garage is swell. And besides”— they all grinned at each other again with the affection of people who know each other so well that they are long past knowledge —“if I get to helling around at night, I won’t feel that I’m disturbing you when I come in . . . But who is Mr. Merrit, anyway?”

      “Why,” Randy answered, and now he had an air of measuring his words with thoughtful deliberation, “he — he’s the Company’s man — my boss, you know. He travels around to all the branches to check up and see that everything’s O.K. He’s a fine fellow. You’ll like him,” said Randy seriously. “We’ve told him all about you and he wants to meet you.”

      “And we knew you wouldn’t mind,” Margaret said. “You know, it’s business, he’s with the Company, and of course it’s good policy to be as nice to him as we can.” But then, because such designing was really alien to her hospitable and whole-hearted spirit, she added: “Mr. Merrit is all right. I like him. We’re glad to have him, anyway.”

      “Dave’s a fine fellow,” Randy repeated. “And I know he wants to see you . . . Well,” he said, and the preoccupied look was in his eyes again, “if we’re all ready, let’s get going. I’m due back at the office now. Merrit’s there, of course. Suppose I run you out to the house and drop you, then I’ll see you later.”

      This was agreed upon. Randy grinned once more — a little nervously, George thought — and picked up the valise and started rapidly across the station platform towards his car, which was parked at the kerb.

      At the funeral that afternoon the little frame house which old Lafayette Joyner — Aunt Maw’s father, and George Webber’s grandfather — had built with his own hands years ago looked just as it had always looked when George had lived there as a boy. Nothing about it had been changed. Yet it seemed smaller, meaner, more shabby than he remembered it. It was set some distance back from the street, between the Shepperton house on one side and the big brick house in which his Uncle Mark Joyner lived on the other. The street was lined with cars, many of them old and decrepit and covered with the red clay of the hills. In the yard in front of the house many men stood solemnly knotted in little groups, talking quietly, their bare heads and stiff Sunday clothes of austere black giving them an air of self-conscious shyness and restraint.

      Inside, the little rooms were jammed with people, and the hush of death was on the gathering, broken now and then by muffled coughs and by stifled sobs and sniffles. Many of them were Joyners, who for three days had been coming in from the hills — old men and women with the marks of toil and pain upon their faces, cousins, inlaws, distant relatives of Aunt Maw. George had never seen some of them before, but they all bore the seal of the Joyner clan upon them, the look of haunting sorrow and something about the thin line of the lips that proclaimed their grim triumph in the presence of death.

      In the tiny front room, where on wintry nights Aunt Maw had always sat by the light of a kerosene lamp before a flickering fire, telling the boy her endless stories of death and sorrow, she now lay in her black coffin, the top and front of which were open to display as much of her as possible to the general view. And instantly, as George entered, he knew that one of her main obsessions in life had been victorious over death. A spinster and a virgin all her years, she had always had a horrible fear that, somehow, some day, some man would see her body. As she grew older her thoughts had been more and more preoccupied with death, and with her morbid shame lest someone see her in the state of nature after she was dead. For this reason she had a horror of undertakers, and had made her brother, Mark, and his wife, Mag, solemnly promise that no man would see her unclothed corpse, that her laying out would be done by women, and, above all else, that she was not to be embalmed. By now she had been dead three days — three days of long hot sun and sultriness — and it seemed to George a grim but fitting ending that the last memory he would have of that little house, which in his childhood had been so filled with the stench of death-inlife, should now be the stench of death itself.

      Mark СКАЧАТЬ