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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Well,” said Eliza hopefully, “maybe he’s going to brace up now and make a new start. He’s promised that he’d try.”

      “Well, I should hope so,” said Helen scathingly. “I should hope so. It’s about time.”

      Her dislike for him was innate. She had placed him among the tribe of the Pentlands. But he was really more like Gant than any one else. He was like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse. In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him. She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son. But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of friendliness, charity, tolerance.

      “What are you going to do, Steve?” she asked. “You’ve got a family now, you know.”

      “Little Stevie doesn’t have to worry any longer,” he said, smiling easily. “He lets the others do the worrying.” He lifted his yellow fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.

      “Good heavens, Steve,” she burst out angrily. “Pull yourself together and try to be a man for once. Margaret’s a woman. You surely don’t expect her to keep you up, do you?”

      “What business is that of yours, for Christ’s sake?” he said in a high ugly voice. “Nobody’s asked your advice, have they? All of you are against me. None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it gets your goat to see me make good.” He had believed for years that he was persecuted — his failure at home he attributed to the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called “the world.”

      “No,” he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, “don’t worry about Stevie. He doesn’t need anything from any of you, and you don’t hear him asking for anything. You see that, don’t you?” he said, pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties. “Well, there’s lots more where that came from. And I’ll tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big Boys soon. He’s got a couple of deals coming off that’ll show the pikers in this town where to get off. You get that, don’t you?” he said.

      Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways.

      “I hear Mr. Vanderbilt’s getting jealous,” he said.

      Helen laughed ironically, huskily.

      “You think you’re a pretty wise guy, don’t you?” said Steve heavily. “But I don’t notice it’s getting you anywhere.”

      Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply, unconsciously.

      “Now, I hope you’re not going to forget your old friends, Mr. Rockefeller,” he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. “I’d like to be vice-president if the job’s still open.” He turned back to the keyboard — and searched with a hooked finger.

      “All right, all right,” said Steve. “Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it’s funny. But you notice that Little Stevie isn’t a fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don’t you? And he doesn’t have to sing in moving-picture shows, either,” he added.

      Helen’s big-boned face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker’s daughter.

      “You’d better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around,” she said. “You’re a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife’s money. Why, it’s absurd!” she said furiously.

      “Oh for God’s sake!” Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. “What do you want to listen to him for? Can’t you see he’s crazy?”

      As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe — he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them. He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system.

      In the early hours of morning, at two or three o’clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene’s charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again.

      One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.

      Her white face worked silently above the heat.

      “Get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s that accursed licker that makes you so mean.” She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.

      “I never thought I’d live to hear such talk from a son of mine,” she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.

      “Now, I want to tell you,” she said, “I’m not going to put up with you any longer. If you don’t get out of here at once I’m going to call 38 and let them take you.” This was the police station. It awoke unpleasant memories. He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions. He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her. At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant’s.

      The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly. It had lasted for years. Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother’s defense.

      “You m-m-m-miserable d-d-degenerate,” he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric. “You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped.”

      He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him. Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands. He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen.

      Wrong forever on the throne.

      Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben’s voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.

      “Ben!” he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.

      Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.

      “Come on, come on, you big bastard,” said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. “I’ll take you on now. You haven’t got a chance, Ben,” he continued, with elaborate pity. “You haven’t got a chance, boy. I’ll tear your head off with what I know.”

      Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist. Steve’s head bounced upon СКАЧАТЬ