OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ from every pore. “Yes, sir!” the swarthy little man continued, pompously, “I should doubt very much if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000 today!”

      “Well,” said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air. “That’s what I thought! I knew it would be way up there somewheres. But I could have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars. I’ve kicked myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance! I’d be a rich man today if I had! It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he concluded indefinitely.

      “Yes, sir,” the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry, briskly assured tones, “it goes to show that our hindsight is usually a great deal better than our foresight!” And he glanced about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and original.

      “It was about that time when I first met your father,” said Mr. Candler, turning to the boy again. “Along there in the fall of ‘82 — that’s when it was all right — and I don’t think he’d been in town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I’d have known if he’d been there longer. And yes, of course!” he cried sharply, struck by sudden recollection, “that very first day I saw him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men, unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I reckon, and moving them back into his shop. I guess he was just moving in at the time. He’d rented an old shack over there at the north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now. That’s where it was, all right. I was working for old man Weaver at the time — he had a grocery and general-goods store there opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice Company is now. I was going back to work after dinner and had just turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I saw your father. I remember stopping to watch him for a moment because there was something about his appearance — I don’t know what it was, but if you saw him once you’d never forget him — there was something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was different from any one I’d ever seen. Of course, he was an awful tall, big-boned, powerful-looking sort of man — how tall is your father, son?”

      “He was about six feet five,” the boy answered, “but I guess he’s not that much now — he’s stooped over some since he got old.”

      “Well, he didn’t stoop in those days,” said Mr. Candler. “He always carried himself as straight as an arrow. I noticed that. He was an awful big man — not that he had much weight on him — he was always lean and SKINNY like — but he LOOKED big — he had big bones — his FRAME was big!” cried Mr. Candler. “You’ll make a big man too when you fill out,” he continued, giving the boy an appraising look. “Of course, you look like your mother’s people, you’re a Pentland and they’re fleshy people, but you’ve got the old man’s frame. You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight and widen out — but it wasn’t that your father was so big — I think he looked bigger than he really was — it was something else about him — about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his work,” said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone. “I don’t know what it was, but I’d never seen any one like him before. For one thing he was dressed so good!” he said suddenly. “He always wore his good clothes when he worked — I’d never seen a man who did hard labour with his hands who dressed that way. Here he was, you know, sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in. Of course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up across the shoulders — but you could see his clothes were GOOD,” said Mr. Candler. “Looked like black broadcloth that had been made by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those wing collars with a black silk neck-tie — and not afraid to work, either! Why, the first thing I saw him do,” said Mr. Candler, laughing, “he let out a string of words at those niggers you could have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they hadn’t been able to budge an inch. ‘Merciful God,’ he says, that’s just the way he talked, you know —‘Merciful God! Has it come to this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there gloating at my agony? I could as soon look for help from a couple of God-damned wooden Indians! In the name of God, stand back. I’ll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!’ Well,” said Mr. Candler, chuckling with the recollection, “with that he reaches down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as anything you ever saw. Well, sir, you should have seen the look upon those niggers’ faces — I thought their eyes were going to pop out of their heads. And that’s the first time I ever spoke to him, you know. I can remember the very words I said. I said to him, ‘Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.’”

      The man’s story had stirred in the boy’s mind a thousand living memories of his father. For a moment it seems to him that the lost world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud, dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy. Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him. There are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory. They are the lives of the lost wilderness, his mother’s people; they are the tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart’s desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.

      He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg. He smells the sweet fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes, secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises. He feels the brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace and silence of the dusk.

      And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room upstairs. He is there beside his father and his father’s brothers in the darkness — waiting, silent, waiting — with an unspoken single question in their hearts. They are thinking of an older brother who that night is lying twelve miles away, shot through the lungs. He sees his father’s gaunt, long form in darkness, the big-boned hands, the gaunt, long face, the cold, green-grey, restless and weary eyes, so deep and untelling, so strangely lonely, and the slanting, almost reptilian large formation of the skull that has, somehow, its own strange dignity — as of some one lost. And the great stars of America blaze over them, the vast and lonely earth broods round them, then as now, with its secret and mysterious presences, and then as now the million-noted ululation of the night throngs up from silence the song of all its savage, dark and measureless fecundity. And he lies there in the darkness with his father and the brothers — silent, waiting — their cold, grey eyes turned upward to the loneliness of night, the blazing stars, having no words to say the thing they feel, the dream of time and the dark wonder of man’s destiny which has drenched with blood the old earth, the familiar wheat, and fused that day the image of immortal history in a sleepy country town twelve miles away.

      He sees the gaunt figure of the stone-cutter coming across the square at his earth-devouring stride. He hears him muttering underneath his breath the mounting preludes of his huge invective. He sees him striding on for ever, bent forward in his haste, wetting his thumb and clearing his throat with an infuriated and anticipatory relish as he comes. He sees him striding round the corner, racing up-hill towards the house, bearing huge packages of meat beneath his arm. He sees him take the high front steps four at a time, hasten like a hurricane into the house, lay down the meat upon the kitchen table, and then without a pause or introduction, comes the storm — fire, frenzy, curses, woes and lamentations, and then news out of the streets, the morning’s joy, the smoking and abundant dinner.

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