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

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СКАЧАТЬ a mul-tye-millionaire,” Mr. Flannagan explained proudly. “We give him four or five dollars in small change every morning just to throw away.”

      Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.

      “Look out for the Stingaree,” he cried. “Remember the Maine.”

      “I tell you what,” said Eliza laughing. “He’s not so crazy as you think.”

      ‘That’s right,” said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant’s grin. “The Stingaree’s a fish. They have them in Florida.”

      “Don’t forget the birds, my friends,” said Simon, going out with his companions. “Be good to the birds.”

      They became very fond of him. Somehow he fitted into the pattern of their life. None of them was uncomfortable in the presence of madness. In the flowering darkness of Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic laughter burst suddenly out: Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept, unable to forget the smile of dark flowering evil, the loose pocket chinking heavily with coins.

      Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings. Heard lapping water of the inland seas.

      — And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes. He was almost twelve. He was done with childhood. As that Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full delight of loneliness. Sheeted in his thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the orchard window of the back room at Gant’s, drinking the sweet air down, exulting in his isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the whistle going west.

      The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination — he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion. He no longer went through the torment of the recess flight and pursuit. He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls. But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.

      Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big wide-browed head covered thickly by curling hair which had changed, since his infancy, from a light maple to dark brown-black, was a face so small, and so delicately sculptured, that it seemed not to belong to its body. The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled, oftener than he laughed, inwardly, at some extravagant invention, or some recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first time. He did not open his lips to smile — there was a swift twisted flicker across his mouth. His thick heavily arched eyebrows grew straight across the base of his nose.

      That Spring he was more alone than ever. Eliza’s departure for Dixieland three or four years before, and the disruption of established life at Gant’s, had begun the loosening of his first friendships with the neighborhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max Isaacs, and the others, and had now almost completely severed them. Occasionally he saw these boys again, occasionally he resumed again, at sporadic intervals, his association with them, but he now had no steady companionship, he had only a series of associations with children whose parents stayed for a time at Dixieland, with Tim O’Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick, with children here and there who briefly held his interest.

      But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others — his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery. He was filled with terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him.

      Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical background of his life, was now dappled by powerful prejudices of liking and distaste formed, God knows how, or by what intangible affinities of thought, feeling and connotation. Thus, one street would seem to him to be a “good street”— to exist in the rich light of cheerful, abundant, and high-hearted living; another, inexplicably, a “bad street,” touching him somehow with fear, hopelessness, depression.

      Perhaps the cold red light of some remembered winter’s afternoon, waning pallidly over a playing-field, with all its mockery of Spring, while lights flared up smokily in houses, the rabble-rout of children dirtily went in to supper, and men came back to the dull but warm imprisonment of home, oil lamps (which he hated), and bedtime, clotted in him a hatred of the place which remained even when the sensations that caused it were forgotten.

      Or, returning from some country walk in late autumn, he would come back from Cove or Valley with dewy nose, clotted boots, the smell of a mashed persimmon on his knee, and the odor of wet earth and grass on the palms of his hands, and with a stubborn dislike and suspicion of the scene he had visited, and fear of the people who lived there.

      He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence. He hated dull lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights. At night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights. After that, the dark.

      He played games badly, although he took a violent interest in sports. Max Isaacs continued to interest him as an athlete long after he had ceased to interest him as a person. The game Max Isaacs excelled in was baseball. Usually he played one of the outfield positions, ranging easily about in his field, when a ball was hit to him, with the speed of a panther, making impossible catches with effortless grace. He was a terrific hitter, standing at the plate casually but alertly, and meeting the ball squarely with a level swinging smack of his heavy shoulders. Eugene tried vainly to imitate the precision and power of this movement, which drove the ball in a smoking arc out of the lot, but he was never able: he chopped down clumsily and blindly, knocking a futile bounder to some nimble baseman. In the field he was equally useless: he never learned to play in a team, to become a limb of that single animal which united telepathically in a concerted movement. He became nervous, highly excited, and erratic in team-play, but he spent hours alone with another boy, or, after the mid-day meal, with Ben, passing a ball back and forth.

      He developed blinding speed, bending all the young suppleness of his long thin body behind the ball, exulting as it smoked into the pocket of the mitt with a loud smack, or streaked up with a sharp dropping curve. Ben, taken by surprise by a fast drop, would curse him savagely, and in a rage hurl the ball back into his thin gloved hand. In the Spring and Summer he went as often as he could afford it, or was invited, to the baseball games in the district league, a fanatic partisan of the town club and its best players, making a fantasy constantly of himself in a heroic game-saving rôle.

      But he was in no way able to submit himself to the discipline, the hard labor, the acceptance of defeat and failure that make a good athlete; he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be the general, the heroic spear-head of victory. And after that he wanted to be loved. Victory and love. In all of his swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like this — unbeaten and beloved. But moments of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and misery of his life СКАЧАТЬ