Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

Чтение книги онлайн.

      8

       Table of Contents

      Eugene was loose now in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself, so that later, the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of great apples; or, as with Gulliver’s Travels, a bright windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of the earth-thaw, the feel of the fire.

      He had won his first release from the fences of home — he was not quite six, when, of his own insistence, he went to school. Eliza did not want him to go, but his only close companion, Max Isaacs, a year his senior, was going, and there was in his heart a constricting terror that he would be left alone again. She told him he could not go: she felt, somehow, that school began the slow, the final loosening of the cords that held them together, but as she saw him slide craftily out the gate one morning in September and run at top speed to the corner where the other little boy was waiting, she did nothing to bring him back. Something taut snapped in her; she remembered his furtive backward glance, and she wept. And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.

      Busy with the ache of their own growing pains, his brothers and sisters had little time for him: he was almost six years younger than Luke, the youngest of them, but they exerted over him the occasional small cruelties, petty tormentings by elder children of a younger, interested and excited by the brief screaming insanity of his temper when, goaded and taunted from some deep dream, he would seize a carving knife and pursue them, or batter his head against the walls.

      They felt that he was “queer”— the other boys preached the smug cowardice of the child-herd, defending themselves, when their persecutions were discovered, by saying they would make a “real boy” of him. But there grew up in him a deep affection for Ben who stalked occasionally and softly through the house, guarding even then with scowling eyes, and surly speech, the secret life. Ben was a stranger: some deep instinct drew him to his child-brother, a portion of his small earnings as a paper-carrier he spent in gifts and amusement for Eugene, admonishing him sullenly, cuffing him occasionally, but defending him before the others.

      Gant, as he watched his brooding face set for hours before a firelit book of pictures, concluded that the boy liked books, more vaguely, that he would make a lawyer of him, send him into politics, see him elected to the governorship, the Senate, the presidency. And he unfolded to him time after time all the rude American legendry of the country boys who became great men because they were country boys, poor boys, and hard-working farm boys. But Eliza thought of him as a scholar, a learned man, a professor, and with that convenient afterthought that annoyed Gant so deeply, but by which she firmly convinced herself, she saw in this book-brooder the fruit of her own deliberate design.

      “I read every moment I could get the chance the summer before he was born,” she said. And then, with a complacent and confidential smile which, Gant knew, always preceded some reference to her family, she said: “I tell you what: it may all come out in the Third Generation.”

      “The Third Generation be Goddamned!” answered Gant furiously.

      “Now, I want to tell you,” she went on thoughtfully, speaking with her forefinger, “folks have always said that his grandfather would have made a fine scholar if —”

      “Merciful God!” said Gant, getting up suddenly and striding about the room with an ironical laugh. “I might have known that it would come to this! You may be sure,” he exclaimed in high excitement, wetting his thumb briefly on his tongue, “that if there’s any credit to be given I won’t get it. Not from you! You’d rather die than admit it! No, but I’ll tell you what you will do! You’ll brag about that miserable old freak who never did a hard day’s work in his life.”

      “Now, I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” Eliza began, her lips working rapidly.

      “Jesus God!” he cried, flinging about the room with his customary indifference to reasoned debate. “Jesus God! What a travesty! A travesty on Nature! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” he exclaimed, indefinitely but violently, and then as he strode about, he gave way to loud, bitter, forced laughter.

      Thus, pent in his dark soul, Eugene sat brooding on a fire-lit book, a stranger in a noisy inn. The gates of his life were closing him in from their knowledge, a vast aerial world of fantasy was erecting its fuming and insubstantial fabric. He steeped his soul in streaming imagery, rifling the book-shelves for pictures and finding there such treasures as With Stanley in Africa, rich in the mystery of the jungle, alive with combat, black battle, the hurled spear, vast snake-rooted forests, thatched villages, gold and ivory; or Stoddard’s Lectures, on whose slick heavy pages were stamped the most-visited scenes of Europe and Asia; a Book of Wonder, with enchanting drawings of all the marvels of the age — Santos Dumont and his balloon, liquid air poured from a kettle, all the navies of the earth lifted two feet from the water by an ounce of radium (Sir William Crookes), the building of the Eiffel Tower, the Flatiron Building, the stick-steered automobile, the submarine. After the earthquake in San Francisco there was a book describing it, its cheap green cover lurid with crumbling towers, shaken spires, toppling many-storied СКАЧАТЬ