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

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СКАЧАТЬ water abounds within a Washingtonian stone’s throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here’s your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources — gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees.”

      “What about the bushes, Luke?” yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.

      “Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,” Luke answered amid general tumult. “All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?”

      When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.

      “I’ll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up,” said Eliza.

      “O that’s all right.” O modestly. Generously.

      “He’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Gant.

      A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.

      He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled “God Loves Them Both.”

      They sold like hot cakes.

      Otherwise, he drove Gant’s car — a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant’s conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping.

      “I’ve never had a moment’s peace since I bought it,” he howled. “Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it has sucked out my life-blood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper’s grave to perish. Merciful God,” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age.” Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: “How much is the bill? Hey?” His eyes roved wildly in his head.

      “D-d-d-don’t get excited, papa,” Luke answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, “it’s only $8.92.”

      “Jesus God!” Gant screamed. “I’m ruined.” Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing.

      But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly — his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed “tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh,” when the car stalled.

      As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot “whah-whahs” filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.

      “You Goddamned scoundrel!” Gant yelled. “Stop, you mountain grill, or I’ll put you in jail.”

      “Whah-whah.”— His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.

      Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:

      “I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes —”

      “Whah-whah-whah!”

      “He’s a fiend out of hell,” cried Gant, beginning to weep. “Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he’s done.” They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.

      “You damned thug!” Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke’s throat. “Will you stop?”

      Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a howl of terror.

      On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands.

      Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches.

      Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair. He was sentimentally tender to children — girls of fourteen years. He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns. Once, at Gant’s, on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen sang in the parlor. He caressed her gently, leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison round his heart. He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother. He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia. As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them. They disliked him.

      Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke’s ministrations to Mrs. Selborne. His service was so devout, so extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous. And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant’s or Eliza’s, or from a parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery. Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza’s, at one or two o’clock in the morning, he felt her pass him. As she touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and burning face.

      Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you — you’re just a sucker! You show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing СКАЧАТЬ