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

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СКАЧАТЬ he nodded, and turned his head away for a moment. Presently he lifted his gray face to her.

      “It is death, Veronica,” he said, “and now I may speak.”

      “Yes, Bruce,” she answered softly.

      It was the first time he had ever heard her use his name, and his heart thrilled to it.

      “I love you, Veronica,” he said. “I have loved you ever since I found your almost lifeless body on the beach, during all the nights I lay outside your tent, listening to your quiet breathing within, love you most of all now in this hour of death when the obligation to keep silence no longer rests upon me.”

      “Dearest, dearest,” she whispered, and he saw her face was wet with tears. “Why didn’t you speak? I have loved you from the first.”

      She leaned toward him, her lips half-parted and tremulous, her breathing short and uncertain, and as his bare arms circled her fiercely their lips met in one long moment of rapture, one final moment of life and ecstasy, in which all the pent longing of their lives found release and consummation now at this triumphant moment of their death.

      A distant reverberation shook the air. Glendenning looked up quickly, and rubbed his eyes with astonishment. There, in the island’s little harbor were turning slowly the lean sides of a destroyer, and even as he looked, there was another burst of flame and smoke, and a whistling five-inch shell burst forty yards from where the natives had stopped. With a yell of mingled fear and baffled rage, they turned and fled off toward their canoes. Already, a boat, manned by the lusty arms of a blue-jacketed crew, had put off from the destroyer’s side, and was coming in toward shore.

      “Saved! We are saved!” cried Glendenning, and leaping to his feet he signalled the approaching boat. Suddenly he paused.

      “Damn!” he muttered bitterly. “Oh, damn!”

      “What is it, Bruce?” she asked.

      He answered her in a cold harsh voice.

      “A destroyer has just entered the harbor. We are saved, Miss Mullins. Saved!” And he laughed bitterly.

      “Bruce! Dearest! What is it? Aren’t you glad? Why do you act so strangely? We shall have all our life together.”

      “Together?” he said, with a harsh laugh. “Oh no, Miss Mullins. I know my place. Do you think old J. T. Mullins would let his daughter marry Bruce Glendenning, international vagabond, jack of all trades, and good at none of them? Oh no. That’s over now, and it’s good-by. I suppose,” he said, with a wry smile, “I’ll hear of your marriage to some Duke or Lord, or some of those foreigners some day. Well, good-by, Miss Mullins. Good luck. We’ll both have to go our own way, I suppose.” He turned away.

      “You foolish boy! You dear bad silly boy!” She threw her arms around his neck, clasped him to her tightly, and scolded him tenderly. “Do you think I’ll ever let you leave me now?”

      “Veronica,” he gasped. “Do you MEAN it?”

      She tried to meet his adoring eyes, but couldn’t: a rich wave of rosy red mantled her cheek, he drew her rapturously to him and, for the second time, but this time with the prophecy of eternal and abundant life before them, their lips met in sweet oblivion . . . .

      Ah, me! Ah, me! Eugene’s heart was filled with joy and sadness — with sorrow because the book was done. He pulled his clotted handkerchief from his pocket and blew the contents of his loaded heart into it in one mighty, triumphant and ecstatic blast of glory and sentiment. Ah, me! Good old Bruce–Eugene.

      Lifted, by his fantasy, into a high interior world, he scored off briefly and entirely all the grimy smudges of life: he existed nobly in a heroic world with lovely and virtuous creatures. He saw himself in exalted circumstances with Bessie Barnes, her pure eyes dim with tears, her sweet lips tremulous with desire: he felt the strong handgrip of Honest Jack, her brother, his truehearted fidelity, the deep eternal locking of their brave souls, as they looked dumbly at each other with misty eyes, and thought of the pact of danger, the shoulder-to-shoulder drive through death and terror which had soldered them silently but implacably.

      Eugene wanted the two things all men want: he wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be famous. His fame was chameleon, but its fruit and triumph lay at home, among the people of Altamont. The mountain town had for him enormous authority: with a child’s egotism it was for him the centre of the earth, the small but dynamic core of all life. He saw himself winning Napoleonic triumphs in battle, falling, with his fierce picked men, like a thunderbolt upon an enemy’s flank, trapping, hemming, and annihilating. He saw himself as the young captain of industry, dominant, victorious, rich; as the great criminal-lawyer bending to his eloquence a charmed court — but always he saw his return from the voyage wearing the great coronal of the world upon his modest brows.

      The world was a phantasmal land of faery beyond the misted hem of the hills, a land of great reverberations, of genii-guarded orchards, wine-dark seas, chasmed and fantastical cities from which he would return into this substantial heart of life, his native town, with golden loot.

      He quivered deliciously to temptation — he kept his titillated honor secure after subjecting it to the most trying inducements: the groomed beauty of the rich man’s wife, publicly humiliated by her brutal husband, defended by Bruce–Eugene, and melting toward him with all the pure ardor of her lonely and womanly heart, pouring the sad measure of her life into his sympathetic ears over the wineglasses of her candled, rich, but intimate table. And as, in the shaded light, she moved yearningly toward him, sheathed plastically in her gown of rich velvet, he would detach gently the round arms that clung about his neck, the firm curved body that stuck gluily to his. Or the blonde princess in the fabulous Balkans, the empress of gabled Toyland, and the Doll Hussars — he would renounce, in a great scene upon the frontiers, her proffered renunciation, drinking eternal farewell on her red mouth, but wedding her to himself and to the citizenship of freedom when revolution had levelled her fortune to his own.

      But, steeping himself in ancient myths, where the will and the deed were not thought darkly on, he spent himself, quilted in golden meadows, or in the green light of woods, in pagan love. Oh to be king, and see a fruity wide-hipped Jewess bathing on her roof, and to possess her; or a cragged and castled baron, to execute le droit de seigneur upon the choicest of the enfeoffed wives and wenches, in a vast chamber loud with the howling winds and lighted by the mad dancing flames of great logs!

      But even more often, the shell of his morality broken to fragments by his desire, he would enact the bawdy fable of school-boys, and picture himself in hot romance with a handsome teacher. In the fourth grade his teacher was a young, inexperienced, but well-built woman, with carrot-colored hair, and full of reckless laughter.

      He saw himself, grown to the age of potency, a strong, heroic, brilliant boy, the one spot of incandescence in a backwoods school attended by snag-toothed children and hair-faced louts. And, as the mellow autumn ripened, her interest in him would intensify, she would “keep him in” for imaginary offenses, setting him, in a somewhat confused way, to do some task, and gazing at him with steady yearning eyes when she thought he was not looking.

      He would pretend to be stumped by the exercise: she would come eagerly and sit beside him, leaning over so that a few fine strands of carrot-colored hair brushed his nostrils, and so that he might feel the firm warmth of her white-waisted arms, and the swell of her tight-skirted thighs. She would explain things to him at great length, guiding his fingers with her own warm, slightly moist hand, when he pretended not to find the place; then she would chide him СКАЧАТЬ