YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ is — like you! . . . He is tramp-ling! . . . Yis! . . . He is tramp-ling!”

      Then he took George up the stairs on to the balcony, which George dutifully admired.

      “Yis? — You like?” He smiled at George eagerly, a little doubtfully, then pointed at his couch and said: “I sleep here!” Then he pointed to the ceiling, which was so low that George had to stoop. “You sleep there?” said Katamoto eagerly.

      George nodded.

      Katamoto went on again with a quick smile, but with embarrassed hesitancy and a painful difficulty in his tone that had not been there before:

      “I here,” he said, pointing, “you there — yis?”

      He looked at George almost pleadingly, a little desperately — and suddenly George began to catch on.

      “Oh! You mean I am right above you —” Katamoto nodded with instant relief —“and sometimes when I stay up late you hear me?”

      “Yis! Yis!” He kept nodding his head vigorously. “Sometimes —” he smiled a little painfully —“sometimes — you will be tramp-ling!” He shook his finger at George with coy reproof and giggled.

      “I’m awfully sorry,” George said. “Of course, I didn’t know you slept so near — so near the ceiling. When I work late I pace the floor. It’s a bad habit. I’ll do what I can to stop it.”

      “Oh, no-o!” he cried, genuinely distressed. “I not want — how you say it? — change your life! . . . If you ple-e-ese, sir! Just little thing — not wear shoes at night!” He pointed at his own small felt-shod feet and smiled up at George hopefully. “You like slippers yis?” And he smiled persuasively again.

      After that, of course, George wore slippers. But sometimes he would forget, and the next morning Katamoto would be rapping at his door again. He was never angry, he was always patient and good-humoured, he was always beautifully courteous — but he would always call George to account. “You were tramp-ling!” he would cry. “Last night — again — tramp-ling!” And George would tell him he was sorry and would try not to do it again, and Katamoto would go away giggling, pausing to turn and wag his finger roguishly and call out once more, “Tramp-ling!”— after which he would flee downstairs, shrieking with laughter.

      They were good friends.

      In the months that followed, again and again George would come in the house to find the hall below full of sweating, panting movers, over whom Katamoto, covered from head to foot with clots and lumps of plaster, would hover prayerfully and with a fearful, pleading grin lest they mar his work, twisting his small hands together convulsively, aiding the work along by slight shudders, quick darts of breathless terror, writhing and shrinking movements of the body, and saying all the while with an elaborate, strained, and beseeching courtesy:

      “Now, if —you— gentleman — a little! . . . You . . . yis — yis — yis-s!” with a convulsive grin. “Oh-h-h! Yis — yis-s! If you ple-e-ese, sir! . . . If you would down — a little — yis-s! — yis-s! — yis-s!” he hissed softly with that prayerful and pleading grin.

      And the movers would carry out of the house and stow into their van the enormous piecemeal fragments of some North Dakota Pericles, whose size was so great that one wondered how this dapper, fragile little man could possibly have fashioned such a leviathan.

      Then the movers would depart, and for a space Mr. Katamoto would loaf and invite his soul. He would come out in the backyard with his girl, the slender, agile little Japanese — who looked as, if she had some Italian blood in her as well — and for hours at a time they would play at handball. Mr. Katamoto would knock the ball up against the projecting brick wall of the house next door, and every time he scored a point he would scream with laughter, clapping his small hands together, bending over weakly and pressing his hand against his stomach, and staggering about with delight and merriment. Choking with laughter, he would cry out in a high, delirious voice as rapidly as he could:

      “Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis!”

      Then he would catch sight of George looking at him from the window, and this would set him off again, for he would wag his finger and fairly scream:

      “You were tramp-ling! . . . Yis, yis, yis! . . . Last night — again tramp-ling!”

      This would reduce him to such a paroxysm of mirth that he would stagger across the court and lean against the wall, all caved in, holding his narrow stomach and shrieking faintly.

      It was now the full height of steaming summer, and one day early in August George came home to find the movers in the house again. This time it was obvious that a work of more than usual magnitude was in transit. Mr. Katamoto, spattered with plaster, was of course hovering about in the hall, grinning nervously and fluttering prayerfully around the husky truckmen. As George came in, two of the men were backing slowly down the hall, carrying between them an immense head, monstrously jowled and set in an expression of farseeing statesmanship. A moment later three more men backed out of the studio, panting and cursing as they grunted painfully around the flowing fragment of a long frock coat and the vested splendour of a bulging belly. The first pair had now gone back in the studio, and when they came out again they were staggering beneath the trousered shank of a mighty leg and a booted Atlantean hoof, and as they passed, one of the other men, now returning for more of the statesman’s parts, pressed himself against the wall to let them by and said:

      “Jesus! If the son-of-a-bitch stepped on you with that foot, he wouldn’t leave a grease spot, would he, Joe?”

      The last piece of all was an immense fragment of the Solon’s arm and fist, with one huge forefinger pointed upwards in an attitude of solemn objurgation and avowal.

      That figure was Katamoto’s masterpiece; and George felt as he saw it pass that the enormous upraised finger was the summit of his art and the consummation of his life: Certainly it was the apple of his eye. George had never seen him before in such a state of extreme agitation. He fairly prayed above the sweating men: It was obvious that the coarse indelicacy of their touch made him shudder. The grin was frozen on his face in an expression of congealed terror. He writhed, he wriggled, he wrung his little hands, he crooned to them. And if anything had happened to that fat, pointed finger, George felt sure that he would have dropped dead on the spot.

      At length, however, they got everything stowed away in their big van without mishap and drove off with their Ozymandias, leaving Mr. Katamoto, frail, haggard, and utterly exhausted, looking at the kerb. He came back into the house and saw George standing there and smiled wanly at him.

      “Tramp-ling,” he said feebly, and shook his finger, and for the first time there was no mirth or energy in him.

      George had never seen him tired before. It had never occurred to him that he could get tired. The little man had always been so full of inexhaustible life. And now, somehow, George felt an unaccountable sadness to see him so weary and so strangely grey. Katamoto was silent for a moment, and then he lifted his face and said, almost tonelessly, yet with a shade of wistful eagerness:

      “You see statue — yis?”

      “Yes, Kato, I saw it.”

      “And you like?”

      “Yes, very much.”

      “And —” he giggled a little and made a shaking movement with his СКАЧАТЬ