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

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СКАЧАТЬ young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience. The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.

      “Madam, your daughter looks very fine,

      Slapoon!

      Madam, your daughter looks very fine,

      Slapoon!”

      Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop. He went to the Grocer.

      “Well,” said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, “you ought to put up a no-trespassin’ sign.”

      The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew. The boy’s name was Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of manner and complexion. He had white delicate fingers. His counters were filled with old brooches, gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches. The boy had two sisters — large handsome women. His mother was dead. None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance.

      At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber features, and the mincing effeminacy of an old maid. He was terrified in the company of other boys, all that was sharp, spinsterly, and venomous, would come protectively to the surface when he was ridiculed or threatened, and he would burst into shrill unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears. His mincing walk, with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the fringe of his coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a voluptuous and feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at once the terrible battery of their dislike.

      They called him “Miss” Michalove; they badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of him.

      Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school hours, he leaped up and rushed suddenly for the doors. Leonard, breathing stertorously, pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in a moment dragging the screaming boy along by the collar.

      “Sit down!” yelled John Dorsey, hurling him into a desk. Then, his boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by fear of inflicting some crippling punishment on the boy, he added illogically: “Stand up!” and jerked him to his feet again.

      “You young upstart!” he panted. “You little two-by-two whippersnapper! We’ll just see, my sonny, if I’m to be dictated to by the like of you.”

      “Take your hands off me!” Edward screamed, in an agony of physical loathing. “I’ll tell my father on you, old man Leonard, and he’ll come down here and kick your big fat behind all over the lot. See if he don’t.”

      Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the snuffing out of a young life. He was cold and sick about his heart. But when he opened his eyes again Edward, flushed and sobbing, was standing where he stood. Nothing had happened.

      Eugene waited for God’s visitation upon the unhappy blasphemer. He gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that had frozen John Dorsey’s and Sister Amy’s face, that they were waiting too.

      Edward lived. There was nothing beyond this — nothing.

      Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act. For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy — he was also glad at heart because of the existence of some one weaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his.

      Mr. Leonard’s “men of tomorrow” were doing nicely. The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter. Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion — the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys — big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart — the “He-men” were on the rails.

      And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was “a boy with a fine spirit.” She said it very often.

      He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

      He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne — it must go to Parnassus.

      18

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      In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen’s earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

      The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically — he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.

      And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to СКАЧАТЬ