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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the morning, he breathed the seminal odor of her fresh bathed body as she passed him, gazed desperately into the tender sensuality of her face and, with a sense of unreality, wondered what change darkness wrought in this untelling face.

      Steve returned from New Orleans after a year of vagabondage. The old preposterous swagger, following the ancient whine, reappeared as soon as he felt himself safely established at home again.

      “Stevie doesn’t have to work,” said he. “He’s smart enough to make the others work for him.” This was his defiance to his record of petty forgeries against Gant: he saw himself as a clever swindler although he had never had courage to swindle any one except his father. People were reading the Get–Rich-Quick Wallingford stories: there was an immense admiration for this romantic criminal.

      Steve was now a young man in the first twenties. He was somewhat above the middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of skin, with a light pleasing tenor voice. Eugene had a feeling of disgust and horror whenever his oldest brother returned: he knew that those who were physically least able to defend themselves, which included Eliza and himself, would bear the brunt of his whining, petty bullying, and drunken obscenity. He did not mind the physical abuse so much as he did its cowardly stealth, weakness, and slobbering reconciliations.

      Once, Gant, making one of his sporadic efforts to get his son fixed in employment, had sent him out to a country graveyard to put up a small monument. Eugene was sent along. Steve worked steadily in the hot sun for an hour, growing more and more irritable because of the heat, the rank weedy stench of the graveyard, and his own deep antipathy to work. Eugene waited intensely for the attack he knew was coming.

      “What are you standing there for?” screamed Big Brother at length, looking up in an agony of petulance. He struck sharply at the boy’s shin with a heavy wrench he held in his hand, knocking him to the ground, and crippling him for the moment. Immediately, he was palsied, not with remorse, but with fear that he had injured him badly and would be discovered.

      “You’re not hurt, are you, buddy? You’re not hurt?” he began in a quivering voice, putting his unclean yellow hands upon Eugene. And he made the effort at reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering, blowing his foul breath upon his brother’s cringing flesh, and entreating him to say nothing of the occurrence when he went home. Eugene became violently nauseated: the stale odor of Steve’s body, the clammy and unhealthy sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch of his tainted flesh filled him with horror.

      There still remained, however, in the cast and carriage of his head, in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined boyishness: women were sometimes attracted to him. It was his fortune, therefore, to secure Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the first summer she came to Dixieland. At night her rich laughter welled up from the dark porch, they walked through the quiet leafy streets, they went to Riverside together, walking beyond the lights of the carnival into the dark sandy paths by the river.

      But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw the revulsion of the Gants against their brother, and as she began to see what damage she had already done to herself by her union with this braggart who had brandished her name through every poolroom in town as a tribute to his own power, she cast him off, quietly, implacably, tenderly. When she returned now, summer by summer, she met with her innocent and unwitting smile all of his obscene innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his bitter revelations behind her back. Her affection for Helen was genuine, but it was also, she felt, strategic and useful. The girl introduced her to handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant’s and Eliza’s for her, was really a partner in her intrigues, assuring her of privacy, silence, and darkness, and defending her angrily when the evil whispering began.

      “What do you know about her? You don’t know what she does. You’d better be careful how you talk about her. She’s got a husband to defend her, you know. You’ll get your head shot off some day.” Or, more doubtfully:

      “Well, I don’t care what they say, I like her. She’s mighty sweet. After all, what can we say about her for sure? No one can PROVE anything on her.”

      And in the winters now she made short visits to the South Carolina town where Mrs. Selborne lived, returning with an enthusiastic description of her reception, the parties “in her honor,” the food, the lavish entertainment. Mrs. Selborne lived in the same town as Joe Gambell, the young clerk to whom Daisy was engaged. He was full of sly hints about the woman, but before her his manner was obsequious, confused, reverential, and he accepted without complaint the presents of food and clothing which she sent him after their marriage.

      Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza’s purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale, and took place in the big dining-room of the house. Gant and his two older sons grinned sheepishly in unaccustomed evening dress, the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and funerals, sent gifts and came. Will and Pett gave a heavy set of carving steels.

      “I hope you always have something to use them on,” said Will, flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell.

      Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress fittings, rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails until they went blue, and the final splendor of the last two days — the arriving gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets and flowers, the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big packed dining-room, the droning interminable Scotch voice of the Presbyterian minister, the mounting triumph of the music when the grocery clerk got his bride. Later, the confusion, the greetings, the hysteria of the women. Daisy sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of a distant cousin, Beth Pentland, who had come up with her hearty red husband, the owner of a chain of small groceries in a South Carolina town, bringing gifts and a giant watermelon, and whose own grief was enhanced by the discovery, after the wedding, that the dress she had worked on weeks in advance she had put on, in her frenzy, wrong side out.

      Thus Daisy passed more or less definitely out of Eugene’s life, although he was to see her briefly on visits, but with decreasing frequency, in the years that followed. The grocery clerk was making the one daring gesture of his life: he was breaking away from the cotton town, in which all the years of his life had been passed, and from the long lazy hours of grocery clerks, the languorous gossip of lank cotton farmers and townsmen, to which he had been used. He had found employment as a commercial traveller for a food products company: his headquarters was to be in Augusta, Georgia, but he was to travel into the far South.

      This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift to his wife — a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear, and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures, of any life that differed from that of his village.

      “There’s no place like Henderson,” said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared.

      But he went to Augusta, and began his new life with Daisy in a lodging house. She was twenty-one, a slender, blushing girl who played the piano beautifully, accurately, academically, with a rippling touch, and no imagination. Eugene could never remember her very well.

      In the early autumn after her marriage, Gant made the journey to Augusta, taking Eugene with him. The inner excitement of both was intense; the hot wait at the sleepy junction of Spartanburg, the ride in the dilapidated day coaches of the branch line that ran to Augusta, the hot baked autumnal land, rolling piedmont and pine woods, every detail of the landscape they drank in with thirsty adventurous eyes. Gant’s roving spirit was parched for lack of travel: for Eugene, Saint Louis was a faint unreality, but there burned in him a vision of the opulent South, stranger even than his passionate winter nostalgia for the snow-bound North, which the drifted but short-lived snows in Altamont, the seizure СКАЧАТЬ