OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel and stone and brick had entered their souls. Even their speech had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially — Murphy, his two sons, Feeney, and O’Doul — made constant use of a few arid words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they could say or wished to say. Chief among these words or phrases was “YOU know?” . . . or “YOU know what I mean?”— words which were uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on “You,” a slight and painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply. For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to offer than “Chee!” or “Jeez!” or “Ho-ly Jeez!” or “Christ!” or “HO-ly Christ!” or occasionally “HO-ly Mary!” Finally, they made a constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a word “guy”: it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats — the word fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.

      At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant spirits, as waiters in European café‘s, restaurants, and dining-cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs of British and American tourists — he thought this because he saw something sly, closed, conspiratorial, mocking and full of hatred and mistrust, in their relations with people who were not members of their race and their religion; he thought they had a warm, secret and passionate life of their own which never could be known by a stranger. But he soon found that this belief was untrue: even in their conversations with one another, they were almost inarticulate — a race which thought, felt, and spoke with the wooden insensitivity of automatons or dummies on whose waxen souls a few banal formulas for speech and feeling had been recorded. He heard some amazing performances: every evening toward six o’clock the family would gather in their dingy living-room at the end of the hall, Mr. Feeney and Mr. O’Doul would join them, and then he could hear the voices of the men raised in argument, protest, agreement, denial, affirmation and belief, or scepticism, evoking a ghastly travesty of all of man’s living moments of faith, doubt, and passion, and yet speaking for hours at a time, with the idiotic repetitions of a gramophone held by its needle to a single groove, a blunted jargon of fifty meaningless words:

      “What guy?”

      “DAT guy!”

      “Nah, nah, nah, not him — duh otheh guy!”

      “Wich guy do yuh mean — duh big guy?”

      “Nah, nah, nah — yuh got it all wrong! — Not HIM— duh little guy!”

      “Guh-WAN!”— a derisive laugh —“Guh-wan!”

      “Watcha tryin’ t’ do — KID me? Dat guy neveh saw de day he could take Grogan. Grogan ‘ud bat his brains out.”

      “Guh-WAN! Yer full of prunes! . . . Watcha tryin’ t’ give me? Dat guy ‘ud neveh take Tommy Grogan in a million yeahs! He couldn’t take Tommy duh best day he eveh saw! Grogan ‘ud have him on de floeh in thirty seconds!”

      “HO-ly Ghee!”

      “Sure he would!”

      “Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN! Yer CRAZY! GROGAN! HO-ly Ghee!”

      And this, with laughter, denial, agreement — all the appurtenances of conversation among living men — could go on unweariedly for hours at a time.

      Sometimes he would interrupt these conversations for a moment: he would go back to leave a message, to pay the rent, to ask if anyone had called.

      As soon as he knocked, the voices would stop abruptly, the room would grow suddenly hushed, there would be whispers and a dry snickering laughter: in a moment someone would say “Come in,” and he would enter a room full of hushed and suddenly straightened faces. The men would sit quietly or say a word or two of greeting, friendly enough in appearance, but swift sly looks would pass between them, and around the corners of their thin, hard mouths there would be something loose, corrupt and mocking. Mrs. Murphy would rise and come to greet him, her voice filled with a false heartiness, an unclean courtesy, a horrible and insolent travesty of friendliness, and her face would also have the look of having been suddenly straightened out and solemnly compressed; she would listen with a kind of evil attention, but she would have the same loose, mocking look, and the quiet sly look would pass between her and the others. Then, when he had left them and the door had closed behind him, there would be the same sly silence for a moment, then a low muttering of words, a sudden violence of hard derisive laughter, and someone saying, “HO-ly Jeez!”

      He despised them: he loathed them because they were dull, dirty, and dishonest, because their lives were stupid, barren, and ugly, for their deliberate and insolent unfriendliness and for the conspiratorial secrecy and closure of their petty and vicious lives, entrenched solidly behind a wall of violent and corrupt politics and religious fanaticism, and regarding the alien, the stranger, with the hostile and ignorant eyes of the peasant.

      All of the men had a dry, meagre, and brutal quality: Mr. Murphy was a little man with a dry, corky figure; he had a grey face, a thin sunken mouth, around which the line of loose mockery was always playing, and a closely cropped grey moustache. The boy always found him in his shirt-sleeves, with his shoes off and his stockinged feet thrust out upon a chair. Feeney, O’Doul, Jimmy and Eddy Murphy, although of various sizes, shapes, and ages, all had thick tallowy-looking skins, hard dull eyes and a way of speaking meagrely out of the corners of their loose thin mouths. Mrs. Murphy was physically the biggest of the lot, with a certain quality of ripeness and fertility, however blighted, that none of the others had: she was a large slatternly woman, with silvery white hair which gave her somehow a look of sly and sinister haggishness; she had a high, flaming colour marked with patches of eczematous red, her voice was hearty and she had a big laugh, but her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of the others.

      Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd. All decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder, and more liberal kind of life. As time went on, he made a few awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he began to come into the young man’s room from time to time, and presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes for the future. He was a little fellow, with the same dry, febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of having broken it in a high-school football game. The first time he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and stricken stupefaction.

      “Watcha do wit all dese books? Huh?”

      “I read them.”

      “Guh-WAN! Watcha tryin’ t’ hand me? Y’ ain’t read all dem books! СКАЧАТЬ