YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ with his home town, and it was a disconcerting experience. The sleepy little mountain village in which he had grown up — for it had been hardly more than that then — was now changed almost beyond recognition. The very streets that he had known so well, and had remembered through the years in their familiar aspect of early-afternoon emptiness and drowsy lethargy, were now foaming with life, crowded with expensive traffic, filled with new faces he had never seen before. Occasionally he saw somebody that he knew, and in the strangeness of it all they seemed to him like lights shining in the darkness of a lonely coast.

      But what he noticed chiefly — and once he observed it he began watching for it, and it was always there — was the look on the people’s faces. It puzzled him, and frightened him, and when he tried to find a word to describe it, the only thing he could think of was — madness. The nervous, excited glitter in the eyes seemed to belong to nothing else but madness. The faces of natives and strangers alike appeared to be animated by some secret and unholy glee. And their bodies, as they darted, dodged, and thrust their way along, seemed to have a kind of leaping energy as if some powerful drug was driving them on. They gave him the impression of an entire population that was drunk — drunk with an intoxication which never made them weary, dead, or sodden, and which never wore of, but which incited them constantly to new efforts of leaping and thrusting exuberance.

      The people he had known all his life cried out to him along the streets, seizing his hand and shaking it, and saying: “Hi, there, boy! Glad to see you home again! Going to be with us for a while now? Good! I’ll be seeing you! I’ve got to go on now — got to meet a fellow down the street to sign some papers! Good to see you, boy!” Then, having uttered this tempestuous greeting without a pause and without the loss of a stride, pulling and dragging him along with them ‘as they wrung his hand, they vanished.

      On all sides he heard talk, talk, talk — terrific and incessant. And the tumult of voices was united in variations of a single chorus — speculation and real estate. People were gathered in earnestly chattering groups before the drug-stores, before the post office, before the Court House and the City Hall. They hurried along the pavements talking together with passionate absorption, bestowing half-abstracted nods of greeting from time to time on passing acquaintances.

      The real estate men were everywhere. Their motors and buses roared through the streets of the town and out into the country, carrying crowds of prospective clients. One could see them on the porches of houses unfolding blueprints and prospectuses as they shouted enticements and promises of sudden wealth into the ears of deaf old women. Everyone was fair game for them — the lame, the halt, and the blind, Civil War veterans or their decrepit pensioned widows, as well as high school boys and girls, negro truck drivers, soda jerkers, elevator boys, and bootblacks.

      Everyone bought real estate; and everyone was “a real estate man” either in name or practice. The barbers, the lawyers, the grocers, the butchers, the builders, the clothiers — all were engaged now in this single interest and obsession. And there seemed to be only one rule, universal and infallible — to buy, always to buy, to pay whatever price was asked, and to sell again within two days at any price one chose to fix. It was fantastic. Along all the streets in town the ownership of the land was constantly changing; and when the supply of streets was exhausted, new streets were feverishly created in the surrounding wilderness; and even before these streets were paved or a house had been built upon them, the land was being sold, and then resold, by the acre, by the lot, by the foot, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

      A spirit of drunken waste and wild destructiveness was everywhere apparent. The fairest places in the town were being mutilated at untold cost. In the centre of town there had been a beautiful green opulent with rich lawns and lordly trees, with beds of flowers and banks of honeysuckle, and on top of it there had been an immense, rambling, old wooden hotel. From its windows one could look out upon the vast panorama of mountain ranges in the smoky distance.

      George could remember its wide porches and comfortable rockers, its innumerable eaves and gables, its labyrinth of wings and corridors, its great parlours and their thick red carpets, and the lobby with its old red leather chairs, hollowed and shaped by the backs of men, and its smell of tobacco and its iced tinkle of tall drinks. It had a splendid dining-room filled with laughter and quiet voices, where expert negroes in white jackets bent and scraped and chuckled over the jokes of the rich men from the North as with prayerful grace they served them delicious foods out of old silver dishes. George could remember, too, the smiles and the tender beauty of the rich men’s wives and daughters. As a boy he had been touched with the unutterable mystery of all these things, for these wealthy travellers had come great distances and had somehow brought with them an evocation of the whole golden and unvisited world, with its fabulous cities and its promise of glory, fame, and love.

      It had been one of the pleasantest places in the town, but now it was gone. An army of men and shovels had advanced upon this beautiful green hill and had levelled it down to an ugly flat of clay, and had paved it with a desolate horror of white concrete, and had built stores and garages and office buildings and parking spaces — all raw and new — and were now putting up a new hotel beneath the very spot where the old one had stood. It was to be a structure of sixteen storeys, of steel and concrete and pressed brick. It was being stamped out of the same mould, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels, that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country. And, to give a sumptuous — if spurious — distinction to its patterned uniformity, it was to be called The Libya–Ritz.

      One day George ran into Sam Pennock, a boyhood friend and a classmate at Pine Rock College. Sam came down the busy street swiftly at his anxious, lunging stride, and immediately, without a word of greeting, he broke hoarsely into the abrupt and fragmentary manner of speaking that had always been characteristic of him, but that now seemed more feverish than ever:

      “When did you get here? . . . How long are you going to stay? . . . What do you think of the way things look here?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he demanded with brusque, challenging, and almost impatient scornfulness: “Well, what do you intend to do — be a two-thousand-dollar-a-year school-teacher all your life?”

      The contemptuous tone, with its implication of superiority — an implication he had noticed before in the attitude of these people, big with their inflated sense of wealth and achievement — stung George to retort sharply:

      “There are worse things than teaching school! Being a paper millionaire is one of them! As for the two thousand dollars a year, you really get it, Sam! It’s not real estate money, it’s money you can spend. You can buy a ham sandwich with it.”

      Sam laughed. “You’re right!” he said. “I don’t blame you. It’s the truth!” He began to shake his head slowly. “Lord, Lord!” he said. “They’ve all gone clean out of their heads here . . . Never saw anything like it in my life . . . Why, they’re all crazy-as a loon!” he exclaimed. “You can’t talk to them . . . You can’t reason with them . . . They won’t listen to you . . . They’re getting prices for property here that you couldn’t get’ in New York.”

      “Are they getting it?”

      “Well,” he said, with a falsetto laugh, “they get the first five hundred dollars . . . You pay the next five hundred thousand on time.”

      “How much time?”

      “God!” he said. “I don’t know . . . All you want, I reckon . . . For ever! . . . It doesn’t matter . . . You sell it next day for a million.”

      “On time?”

      “That’s it!” he cried, laughing. “You make half a million just like that.”

      “On time?”

      “You’ve got it!” СКАЧАТЬ