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

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СКАЧАТЬ took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which stretches still to land.

      With scarcely a word spoken, as if it had been known anciently and forever, Helen stayed with Gant.

      The time for Daisy’s marriage was growing near: she had been sought by a tall middle-aged shaven life-insurance agent, who wore spats, collars of immaculate starchiness five inches in height, who spoke with an unctuous and insane croon, chortling gently in his throat from time to time for no reason at all. His name was Mr. McKissem, and she had screwed up enough courage, after an arduous siege, to refuse him, upon the private grounds of insanity.

      She had promised herself to a young South Carolinian, who was connected rather vaguely with the grocery trade. His hair was parted in the middle of his low forehead, his voice was soft, drawling, amiable, his manner hearty and insistent, his habits large and generous. He brought Gant cigars on his visits, the boys large boxes of assorted candies. Every one felt that he had favorable prospects.

      As for the others — Ben and Luke only — they were left floating in limbo; for Steve, since his eighteenth year, had spent most of his life away from home, existing for months by semi-vagabondage, scrappy employment, and small forgeries upon his father, in New Orleans, Jacksonville, Memphis, and reappearing to his depressed family after long intervals by telegraphing that he was desperately sick or, through the intermediacy of a crony who borrowed the title of “doctor” for the occasion, that he was dying, and would come home in a box if he was not sent for in the emaciated flesh.

      Thus, before he was eight, Eugene gained another roof and lost forever the tumultuous, unhappy, warm centre of his home. He had from day to day no clear idea where the day’s food, shelter, lodging was to come from, although he was reasonably sure it would be given: he ate wherever he happened to hang his hat, either at Gant’s or at his mother’s; occasionally, although infrequently, he slept with Luke in the sloping, alcoved, gabled back room, rude with calcimine, with the high drafty steps that slanted to the kitchen porch, with the odor of old stacked books in packing-cases, with the sweet orchard scents. There were two beds; he exulted in his unaccustomed occupancy of an entire mattress, dreaming of the day of manlike privacy. But Eliza did not allow this often: he was riven into her flesh.

      Forgetful of him during the day’s press, she summoned him at night over the telephone, demanding his return, and upbraiding Helen for keeping him. There was a bitter submerged struggle over him between Eliza and her daughter: absorbed in the management of Dixieland for days, she would suddenly remember his absence from meals, and call for him angrily across the phone.

      “Good heavens, mama,” Helen would answer irritably. “He’s your child, not mine. I’m not going to see him starve.”

      “What do you mean? What do you mean? He ran off while dinner was on the table. I’ve got a good meal fixed for him here. H-m! A GOOD meal.”

      Helen put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a face at him as he stood catlike and sniggering by, burlesquing the Pentland manner, tone, mouthing.

      “H-m! Why, law me, child, yes — it’s GOOD soup.”

      He was convulsed silently.

      And then aloud: “Well, it’s your own lookout, not mine. If he doesn’t want to stay up there, I can’t help it.”

      When he returned to Dixieland, Eliza would question him with bitter working lips; she would prick at his hot pride in an effort to keep him by her.

      “What do you mean by running off to your papa’s like that? If I were you, I’d have too much pride for that. I’d be a-sha-a-med!” Her face worked with a bitter hurt smile. “Helen can’t be bothered with you. She doesn’t want you around.”

      But the powerful charm of Gant’s house, of its tacked and added whimsy, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot calfskin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland, particularly in winter, since Eliza was most sparing of coal.

      Gant had already named it “The Barn”; in the morning now, after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntly toward town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide chill hall of Dixieland, bursting in upon Eliza, and two or three negresses, busy preparing the morning meal for the hungry boarders who rocked energetically upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse that had not been uttered when she bought the place, were vented now.

      “Woman, you have deserted my bed and board, you have made a laughing stock of me before the world, and left your children to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn. There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even your own brothers will come near you. ‘Nor beast, nor man hath fallen so far.’”

      And in the pantries, above the stove, into the dining-room, the rich voices of the negresses chuckled with laughter.

      “Dat man sho’ can tawk!”

      Eliza got along badly with the negroes. She had all the dislike and distrust for them of the mountain people. Moreover, she had never been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or govern it graciously. She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her supplies and her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. And she paid them reluctantly, dribbling out their small wages a coin or two at a time, nagging them for their laziness and stupidity.

      “What have you been doing all this time? Did you get those back rooms done upstairs?”

      “No’m,” said the negress sullenly, slatting flatfootedly down the kitchen.

      “I’ll vow,” Eliza fretted. “I never saw such a good-for-nothing shiftless darkey in my life. You needn’t think I’m going to pay you for wasting your time.”

      This would go on throughout the day. As a result, Eliza would often begin the day without a servant: the girls departed at night muttering sullenly, and did not appear the next morning. Moreover, her reputation for bickering pettiness spread through the length and breadth of Niggertown. It became increasingly difficult for her to find any one at all who would work for her. Completely flustered when she awoke to find herself without help, she would immediately call Helen over the telephone, pouring her fretful story into the girl’s ear and entreating assistance:

      “I’ll declare, child, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I could wring that worthless nigger’s neck. Here I am left all alone with a house full of people.”

      “Mama, in heaven’s name, what’s the matter? Can’t you keep a nigger in the house? Other people do. What do you do to them, anyway?”

      But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant’s and go to her mother’s, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous and animated good-humor. All the boarders were very fond of her: they said she was a fine girl. Every one did. There was a spacious and unsparing generosity about her, a dominant consuming vitality, which ate at her poor СКАЧАТЬ