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

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СКАЧАТЬ buzzed with a light gay swarm of idlers: the faces of the virgins bloomed in and out like petals on a bough. Advancing upon him, an inch to the second, Eugene saw, ten feet away, the heavy paralyzed body of old Mr. Avery. He was a very great scholar, stone-deaf, and seventy-eight years old. He lived alone in a room above the Public Library. He had neither friends nor connections. He was a myth.

      “Oh, my God!” said Eugene. “Here he comes!”

      It was too late for escape.

      Gasping a welcome, Mr. Avery bore down on him, with a violent shuffle of his feet and a palsied tattoo of his heavy stick which brought him over the intervening three yards in forty seconds.

      “Well, young fellow,” he panted, “how’s Latin?”

      “Fine,” Eugene screamed into his pink ear.

      “Poeta nascitur, non fit,” said Mr. Avery, and went off into a silent wheeze of laughter which brought on a fit of coughing strangulation. His eyes bulged, his tender pink skin grew crimson, he roared his terror out in a phlegmy rattle, while his goose-white hand trembled frantically for his handkerchief. A crowd gathered. Eugene quickly drew a dirty handkerchief from the old man’s pocket, and thrust it into his hands. He tore up from his convulsed organs a rotting mass, and panted rapidly for breath. The crowd dispersed somewhat dejectedly.

      George Graves grinned darkly. “That’s too bad,” he said. “You oughtn’t to laugh, ‘Gene.” He turned away, gurgling.

      “Can you conjugate?” gasped Mr. Avery. “Here’s the way I learned:

      “Amo, amas,

       I love a lass.

       Amat,

       He loves her, too.”

      Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched himself again. Because he could not leave them, save by the inch, they moved off several yards to the curb. Grow old along with me!

      “That’s a damn shame,” said George Graves, looking after him and shaking his head. “Where’s he going?”

      “To supper,” said Eugene.

      “To supper!” said George Graves. “It’s only four o’clock. Where does he eat?”

      Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.

      “At the Uneeda,” said Eugene, beginning to choke, “It takes him two hours to get there.”

      “Does he go every day?” said George Graves, beginning to laugh.

      “Three times a day,” Eugene screamed. “He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper.”

      A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like sedge.

      At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd, with a loud and cheerful word for every one, Mr. Joseph Bailey, secretary of the Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and ruddy, came up by them with a hearty gesture of the hand:

      “Hello, boys!” he cried. “How’re they going?” But before either of them could answer, he had passed on, with an encouraging shake of his head, and a deep applauding “THAT’S right.”

      “WHAT’S right?” said Eugene.

      But before George Graves could answer, the great lung specialist, Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men’s furnishings (“Just a Whisper Off The Square”).

      Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled himself with a wild scream headlong at the curb. He arrived on hands and knees, but under his own power.

      “K-hurses!” said Eugene. “Foiled again.”

      ’Twas true! Dr. Fairfax Grinder’s lean bristled upper lip drew back over his strong yellow teeth. He jammed on his brakes, and lifted his car round with a complete revolution of his long arms. Then he roared away through scattering traffic, in a greasy blue cloud of gasoline and burnt rubber.

      Joe Zamschnick frantically wiped his gleaming bald head with a silk handkerchief and called loudly on the public to bear witness.

      “What’s the matter with him?” said George Graves, disappointed. “He usually goes up on the sidewalk after them if he can’t get them on the street.”

      On the other side of the street, attracting no more than a languid stare from the loafing natives, the Honorable William Jennings Bryan paused benevolently before the windows of the H. Martin Grimes Bookstore, allowing the frisking breeze to toy pleasantly with his famous locks. The tangles of Neaera’s hair.

      The Commoner stared carefully at the window display which included several copies of Before Adam, by Jack London. Then he entered, and selected a dozen views of Altamont and the surrounding hills.

      “He may come here to live,” said George Graves. “Dr. Doak’s offered to give him a house and lot in Doak Park.”

      “Why?” said Eugene.

      “Because the advertising will be worth a lot to the town,” said George Graves.

      A little before them, that undaunted daughter of desires, Miss Elizabeth Scragg, emerged from Woolworth’s Five and Ten Cent Store, and turned up toward the Square. Smiling, she acknowledged the ponderous salute of Big Jeff White, the giant half-owner of the Whitstone hotel, whose fortunes had begun when he had refused to return to his old comrade, Dickson Reese, the embezzling cashier, ninety thousand dollars of entrusted loot. Dog eat dog. Thief catch thief. It is not growing like a tree, in bulk doth make man better be.

      His six-and-a-half-foot shadow flitted slowly before them. He passed, in creaking number twelves, a massive smooth-jowled man with a great paunch girdled in a wide belt.

      Across the street again, before the windows of the Van W. Yeats Shoe Company, the Reverend J. Brooks Gall, Amherst (‘61), and as loyal a Deke as ever breathed, but looking only sixty of his seventy-three years, paused in his brisk walk, and engaged in sprightly monologue, three of his fellow Boy Scouts — the Messrs. Lewis Monk, seventeen, Bruce Rogers, thirteen, and Malcolm Hodges, fourteen. None knew as well as he the heart of a boy. He, too, it seems, had once been one himself. Thus, as one bright anecdote succeeded, or suggested, a half-dozen others, they smiled dutifully, with attentive respect, below the lifted barrier of his bristly white mustache, into the gleaming rhyme of his false teeth. And, with rough but affectionate camaraderie, he would pause from time to time to say: “Old Male!” or “Old Bruce!” gripping firmly his listener’s arm, shaking him gently. Pallidly, on restless feet, they smiled, plotting escape with slant-eyed stealth.

      Mr. Buse, the Oriental rug merchant, came around the corner below them from Liberty Street. His broad dark face was wreathed in Persian smiles. I met a traveller from an antique land.

      In the Bijou Cafe for Ladies and Gents, Mike, the counter man, leaned his hairy arms upon the marble slab, and bent his wrinkled inch of brow upon a week-old СКАЧАТЬ