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

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СКАЧАТЬ Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist’s drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood’s pharmacy.

      To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.

      Goggling, his great idiot’s head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles. For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor. He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood’s where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain’s end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.

      “What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle.

      “Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.”

      Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously. “Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?” he said, and struck him heavily on the back. His thick stupid face composed itself.

      “Have a cigarette, Willie,” he said, offering the package to Willie Goff.

      “What’s yours?” said the jerker to Toby Pottle.

      “Give me a dope, too.”

      “I don’t want anything,” said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad.

      Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie’s cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously.

      They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.

      Brady Chalmers took Willie’s colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it carefully and put it back.

      “What are you all dressed up about, Willie?” he said. “You must be going to see your girl.”

      Willie Goff grinned cunningly.

      Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face.

      “Come on, Willie,” he said, blandly, quietly, “you’ve got a girl, haven’t you?”

      Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.

      “I’ve got several,” said Willie Goff. “A fellow’s got to have a little Poon–Tang, hasn’t he?”

      Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for stronger music, louder wine.

      “How do you do?”

      “Aha! Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. “Where were YOU that time?”

      “YOU’LL never know,” she called back. It was between them — their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.

      “Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort. “You too, Brady.” He followed the ladies back — tall, bold, swagger — a young alcoholic with one sound lung. He was a good golfer.

      Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.

      “All right, son. Two dopes and a mint Limeade. Make it snappy.”

      “Do you work around here, boy?”

      The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.

      Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low — an excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.

      But — at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both Baptists.

      Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We’ll be waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had seen.

      Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck’s serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky. Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide.

      Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.

      For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford’s Reo. They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie.

      “Do СКАЧАТЬ