OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ Haw! Haw!” Again the great laugh of empty animal good nature burst out across the station platform, and this time George Pentland turned from the group of which he was a member and looked vacantly around him, his teeth bared with savage joy, as, with two brown fingers of his strong left hand, he dug vigorously into the muscular surface of his hard thigh. It was an animal reflex, instinctive and unconscious, habitual to him in moments of strong mirth.

      He was a powerful and handsome young man in his early thirties, with coal-black hair, a strong thick neck, powerful shoulders, and the bull vitality of the athlete. He had a red, sensual, curiously animal and passionate face, and when he laughed his great guffaw, his red lips were bared over two rows of teeth that were white and regular and solid as ivory.

      — But now, the paroxysm of that savage and mindless laughter having left him, George Pentland had suddenly espied the mother and her children, waved to them in genial greeting, and excusing himself from his companions — a group of young men and women who wore the sporting look and costume of “the country club crowd”— he was walking towards his kinsmen at an indolent swinging stride, pausing to acknowledge heartily the greetings of people on every side, with whom he was obviously a great favourite.

      As he approached, he bared his strong white teeth again in greeting, and in a drawling, rich-fibred voice, which had unmistakably the Pentland quality of sensual fullness, humour, and assurance, and a subtle but gloating note of pleased self-satisfaction, he said:

      “Hello, Aunt Eliza, how are you? Hello, Helen — how are you, Hugh?” he said in his high, somewhat accusing, but very strong and masculine voice, putting his big hand in an easy affectionate way on Barton’s arm. “Where the hell you been keepin’ yourself, anyway?” he said accusingly. “Why don’t some of you folks come over to see us sometime? Elk was askin’ about you all the other day — wanted to know why Helen didn’t come round more often.”

      “Well, George, I tell you how it is,” the young woman said with an air of great sincerity and earnestness. “Hugh and I have intended to come over a hundred times, but life has been just one damned thing after another all summer long. If I could only have a moment’s peace — if I could only get away by myself for a moment — if THEY would only leave me ALONE for an hour at a time, I think I could get myself together again — do you know what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely and eagerly, trying to enlist him in her sympathetic confidence —“If they’d only do something for THEMSELVES once in a while — but they ALL come to me when anything goes wrong — they never let me have a moment’s peace — until at times I think I’m going crazy — I get QUEER— funny, you know,” she said vaguely and incoherently. “I don’t know whether something happened Tuesday or last week or if I just imagined it.” And for a moment her big gaunt face had the dull strained look of hysteria.

      “The strain on her has been very great this summer,” said Barton in a deep and grave tone. “It’s — it’s,” he paused carefully, deeply, searching for a word, and looked down as he flicked an ash from his long cigar, “it’s — been too much for her. Everything’s on her shoulders,” he concluded in his deep grave voice.

      “My God, George, what is it?” she said quietly and simply, in the tone of one begging for enlightenment. “Is it going to be this way all our lives? Is there never going to be any peace or happiness for us? Does it always have to be this way? Now I want to ask you — is there nothing in the world but trouble?”

      “Trouble!” he said derisively. “Why, I’ve had more trouble than any one of you ever heard of. . . . I’ve had enough to kill a dozen people . . . but when I saw it wasn’t goin’ to kill me, I quit worryin’. . . . So you do the same thing,” he advised heartily. “Hell, don’t WORRY, Helen! . . . It never got you anywhere. . . . You’ll be all right,” he said. “You got nothin’ to worry over. You don’t know what trouble is.”

      “Oh, I’d be all right, George — I think I could stand anything — all the rest of it — if it wasn’t for Papa. . . . I’m almost crazy from worrying about him this summer. There were three times there when I knew he was gone. . . . And I honestly believe I pulled him back each time by main strength and determination — do you know what I mean?” she said hoarsely and eagerly —“I was just determined not to let him go. If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could have done something to make it start again — I’d have stood over him and blown my breath into him — got my blood into him — shook him,” she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands — “anything just to keep him alive.”

      “She’s — she’s — saved his life — time after time,” said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.

      “He’d — he’d — have been a dead man long ago — if it hadn’t been for her.”

      “Yeah — I know she has,” George Pentland drawled agreeably. “I know you’ve sure stuck by Uncle Will — I guess he knows it, too.”

      “It’s not that I mind it, George — you know what I mean?” she said eagerly. “Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life! . . . But it’s the STRAIN of it. . . . Month after month . . . year after year . . . lying awake at night wondering if he’s all right over there in that back room in Mama’s house — wondering if he’s keeping warm in that old cold house —”

      “Why, no, child,” the older woman said hastily. “I kept a good fire burnin’ in that room all last winter — that was the warmest room in the whole place — there wasn’t a warmer —”

      But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other’s speech.

      “— Wondering if he’s sick or needs me — if he’s begun to bleed again — oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it — that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time — everything he wears gets simply STIFF with that rotten corrupt matter — Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he’s going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you’ve lived forever — that there’ll never be an end — that you’ll never have a chance to live your own life — to have a moment’s peace or rest or happiness yourself? My God, does it always have to be this way? . . . Can I never have a moment’s happiness? . . . Must they ALWAYS come to me? Does EVERYTHING have to be put on my shoulders? . . . Will you tell me that?” Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair. She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria.

      “That’s — that’s the trouble now,” said Barton, looking down and searching for the word. “She’s . . . She’s . . . made the goat for every one. . . . She . . . she has to do it all. . . . That’s . . . that’s the thing that’s got her down.”

      “Not that I mind — if it will do any good. . . . Good heaven’s, Papa’s life means more to me than anything on earth. . . . I’d keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in him. . . . But it’s the strain of it, the STRAIN of it — to wait, to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time, never to know when he will die — always the STRAIN, the strain — do you see what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely, eagerly, and pleadingly. “You see, don’t you?”

      “I sure do, Helen,” he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh, and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features. “I know it’s been mighty tough on you. . . . How is Uncle Will now?” he said. “Is he any better?”

      “Why, СКАЧАТЬ