OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ After the mayor had gone, he stamped around the house smashing everything he could get his hands on, cursing and blaspheming at the top of his voice. My mother stayed in the kitchen and paid no attention to him when he entered. This, of course, infuriated him. He made for her with the poker. She saw that at last she was up against it; but she had realized that such a moment was inevitable. She was not unprepared. So she reached in the flour bin and got her revolver —”

      “Did she have a revolver?”

      “Oh, yes,” he said nonchalantly, “my Uncle Will had given it to her as a Christmas present. Knowing my father as he did, he told her it might come in handy sometime. Mama was forced to shoot at him three times before he came to his senses.”

      There was a silence.

      “Gee!” said the boy, finally. “Did she hit him?”

      “Only once,” Eugene replied, tossing his cigarette into the fire. “A flesh wound in the leg. A trifle. He was up and about in less than a week. But, of course, Mama had left him by that time.”

      “Well!” said Mrs. Simpson, after a yet longer silence, “I’ve never had to put up with anything like THAT.”

      “No, thank heaven!” said Genevieve fervently. Then, curiously: “Is — is your mother Mr. Pentland’s sister?”

      “Yes.”

      “And the uncle who gave her the revolver — Mr. Pentland’s brother?”

      “Oh, yes,” Eugene answered readily. “It’s all the same family.” He grinned in his entrails, thinking of Uncle Bascom.

      “Mr. Pentland seems a very educated sort of man,” said Mrs. Simpson, having nothing else to say.

      “Yes. We went to see him when we were hunting for a house,” Genevieve added. “He was very nice to us. He told us he had once been in the ministry.”

      “Yes,” said Eugene. “He was a Man of God for more than twenty years — one of the most eloquent, passionate, and gifted soul-savers that ever struck fear into the hearts of the innumerable sinners of the American nation. In fact, I know of no one with whom to compare him, unless I turn back three centuries to Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine, who evoked, in a quiet voice like the monotonous dripping of water, a picture of hell-fire so near that the skins of the more imaginative fanatics on the front rows visibly blistered. However, Edwards spoke for two and a half hours: Uncle Bascom, with his mad and beautiful tongue, has been known to drive people insane with terror in twenty-seven minutes by the clock. There are still people in the asylums that he put there,” he said piously. “I hope,” he added quickly, “you didn’t ask him why he had left the Church.”

      “Oh, no!” said Genevieve. “We never did that.”

      “Why did he?” asked Mrs. Simpson bluntly, who felt that now she had only to ask and it would be given. She was not disappointed.

      “It was the centuries-old conflict between organized authority and the individual,” said Eugene. “No doubt you have felt it in your own lives. Uncle Bascom was a poet, a philosopher, a mystic — he had the soul of an artist which must express divine love and ideal beauty in corporeal form. Such a man as this is not going to be shackled by the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical convention. An artist must love and be loved. He must be swept by the Flow of Things, he must be a constantly expanding atom in the rhythmic surges of the Life Force. Who knew this better than Uncle Bascom when he first met the choir contralto?”

      “Contralto!” gasped Genevieve.

      “Perhaps she was a soprano,” said Eugene. “It skills not. Suffice it to say they lived, they loved, they had their little hour of happiness. Of course, when the child came —”

      “The child!” screamed Mrs. Simpson.

      “A bouncing boy. He weighed thirteen pounds at birth and is at the present a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy.”

      “What became of — her?” said Genevieve.

      “Of whom?”

      “The — the contralto.”

      “She died — she died in childbirth.”

      “But — but Mr. Pentland?” inquired Mrs. Simpson in an uncertain voice. “Didn’t he — marry her?”

      “How could he?” Eugene answered with calm logic. “He was married to someone else.”

      And casting his head back, suddenly he sang: “You know I’m in love with some-boddy else, so why can’t you leave me alone?”

      “Well, I NEVER!” Mrs. Simpson stared dumbly into the fire.

      “Well, HARDLY ever,” Eugene became allusively Gilbertian. “She hardly ever has a Big, Big B.” And he sang throatily: “Oh, yes! Oh, yes, indeed!” relapsing immediately into a profound and moody abstraction, but noting with delight that Genevieve and her mother were looking at him furtively, with frightened and bewildered glances.

      “Say!” The boy, whose ponderous jowl had been sunken on his fist for ten minutes, now at length distilled a question. “Whatever became of your father? Is he still living?”

      “No!” said Eugene, after a brief pause, returning suddenly to fact. “No! He’s still dying.”

      And he fixed upon them suddenly the battery of his fierce eyes, lit with horror:

      “He has a cancer.” After a moment, he concluded: “My father is a very great man.”

      They looked at him in stricken bewilderment.

      “Gee!” said the boy, after another silence. “That guy’s worse than our old man!”

      “Jimmy! Jimmy!” whispered Genevieve scathingly.

      There was a very long, for the Simpson family, a very painful, silence.

      “Aha! Aha!” Eugene’s head was full of ahas.

      “I suppose you have thought it strange,” Mrs. Simpson began with a cracked laugh, which she strove to make careless, “that you have never seen Mr. Simpson about when you called?”

      “Yes,” he answered with a ready dishonesty, for he had never thought of it at all. But he reflected at the same moment that this was precisely the sort of thing people were always thinking of: suddenly before the embattled front of that little family, its powers aligned for the defence of reputation, he felt lonely, shut out. He saw himself looking in at them through a window: all communication with life grouped and protected seemed for ever shut off.

      “Mother decided some months ago that she could no longer live with Father,” said Genevieve, with sad dignity.

      “Sure,” volunteered Jimmy, “he’s livin’ with another woman!”

      “Jimmy!” said Genevieve hoarsely.

      Eugene had a momentary flash of humorous sympathy with the departed Simpson; then he looked at her white bickering face and felt sorry for her. She carried her own punishment with her.

СКАЧАТЬ