OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Oh, my God!” the younger woman groaned, rolling her eyes around in a comical and imploring fashion. “Here it comes.”

      “You are too young to know about it yourself,” the other went on gravely —“you belong to another generation — you don’t know about it — but I DO.” She paused again, shook her pursed lips with a convulsive pucker of distaste, and then, looking at her daughter again in her straight and deadly fashion, said slowly, with a powerful movement of the hand:

      “There’s been insanity in that boy’s family for generations back!”

      “Oh, my God! I knew it!” the other groaned.

      “Yes, sir!” the mother said implacably —“and two of his aunts — Robert Weaver’s own sisters died raving maniacs — and Robert Weaver’s mother herself was insane for the last twenty years of her life up to the hour of her death — and I’ve heard tell that it went back —”

      “Well, deliver me,” the younger woman checked her, frowning, speaking almost sullenly. “I don’t want to hear any more about it. . . . It’s a mighty funny thing that they all seem to get along now — better than we do . . . so let’s let bygones be bygones . . . don’t dig up the past.”

      Turning to her brother with a little frowning smile, she said wearily: “Did you ever know it to fail? . . . They know it all, don’t they?” she said mysteriously. “The minute you meet any one you like, they spill the dirt. . . . Well, I don’t care,” she muttered. “You stick to people like that. . . . He looks like a nice boy and —” with an impressed look over towards Robert’s friends, she concluded, “he goes with a nice crowd. . . . You stick to that kind of people. I’m all for him.”

      Now the mother was talking again: the boy could see her powerful and delicate mouth convolving with astonishing rapidity in a series of pursed thoughtful lips, tremulous smiles, bantering and quizzical jocosities, old sorrow and memory, quiet gravity, the swift easy fluency of tears that the coming of a train always induced in her, thoughtful seriousness, and sudden hopeful speculation.

      “Well, boy,” she was now saying gravely, “you are going — as the sayin’ goes —” here she shook her head slightly, strongly, rapidly with powerful puckered lips, and instantly her weak worn eyes of brown were wet with tears —“as the sayin’ goes — to a strange land — a stranger among strange people. — It may be a long, long time,” she whispered in an old husky tone, her eyes tear-wet as she shook her head mysteriously with a brave pathetic smile that suddenly filled the boy with rending pity, anguish of the soul, and a choking sense of exasperation and of woman’s unfairness —“I hope we are all here when you come back again. . . . I hope you find us all alive . . . .” She smiled bravely, mysteriously, tearfully. “You never know,” she whispered, “you never know.”

      “Mama,” he could hear his voice sound hoarsely and remotely in his throat, choked with anguish and exasperation at her easy fluency of sorrow, “— Mama — in Christ’s name! Why do you have to act like this every time someone goes away! . . . I beg of you, for God’s sake, not to do it!”

      “Oh, stop it! Stop it!” his sister said in a rough, peremptory and yet kindly tone to the mother, her eyes grave and troubled, but with a faint rough smile about the edges of her generous mouth. “He’s not going away for ever! Why, good heavens, you act as if someone is dead! Boston’s not so far away you’ll never see him again! The trains are running every day, you know. . . . Besides,” she said abruptly and with an assurance that infuriated the boy, “he’s not going today, anyway. Why, you haven’t any intention of going today, you know you haven’t,” she said to him. “He’s been fooling you all along,” she now said, turning to the mother with an air of maddening assurance. “He has no idea of taking that train. He’s going to wait over until tomorrow. I’ve known it all along.”

      The boy went stamping away from them up the platform, and then came stamping back at them while the other people on the platform grinned and stared.

      “Helen, in God’s name!” he croaked frantically. “Why do you start that when I’m all packed up and waiting here at the God-damned station for the train? You KNOW I’m going away today!” he yelled, with a sudden sick desperate terror in his heart as he thought that something might now come in the way of going. “You KNOW I am! Why did we come here? What in Christ’s name are we waiting for if you don’t think I’m going?”

      The young woman laughed her high, husky laugh which was almost deliberately irritating and derisive —“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”— and plodded him in the ribs with her large stiff fingers. Then, almost wearily, she turned away, plucking at her large chin absently, and said: “Well, have it your own way! It’s your own funeral! If you’re determined to go today, no one can stop you. But I don’t see why you can’t just as well wait over till tomorrow.”

      “Why, yes!” the mother now said briskly and confidently. “That’s exactly what I’d do if I were you! . . . Now, it’s not going to do a bit of harm to anyone if you’re a day or so late in gettin’ there. . . . Now I’ve never been there myself,” she went on in her tone of tranquil sarcasm, “but I’ve always heard that Harvard University was a good big sort of place — and I’ll bet you’ll find,” the mother now said gravely, with a strong slow nod of conviction — “I’ll bet you’ll find that it’s right there where it always was when you get there. I’ll bet you find they haven’t moved a foot,” she said, “and let me tell you something, boy,” she now continued, looking at him almost sternly, but with a ghost of a smile about her powerful and delicate mouth —“now I haven’t had your education and I reckon I don’t know as much about universities as you do — but I’ve never heard of one yet that would run a feller away for bein’ a day late as long as he’s got money enough to pay his tuition. . . . Now you’ll find ’em waitin’ for you when you get there — and YOU’LL GET IN,” she said slowly and powerfully. “You don’t have to worry about that — they’ll be glad to see you, and they’ll take you in a hurry when they see you’ve got the price.”

      “Now, Mama,” he said in a quiet frenzied tone, “I beg of you, for God’s sake, please, not to —”

      “All right, all right,” the mother answered hastily in a placating tone, “I was only sayin’—”

      “If you will kindly, please, for God’s sake —”

      “K-k-k-k-k-k!” his sister snickered, poking him in the ribs.

      But now the train was coming. Down the powerful shining tracks a half-mile away, the huge black snout of the locomotive swung slowly round the magnificent bend and flare of the rails that went into the railway yards of Altamont two miles away, and with short explosive thunders of its squat funnel came barging slowly forward. Across the golden pollenated haze of the warm autumnal afternoon they watched it with numb lips and an empty hollowness of fear, delight, and sorrow in their hearts.

      And from the sensual terror, the ecstatic tension of that train’s approach, all things before, around, about the boy came to instant life, to such sensuous and intolerable poignancy of life as a doomed man might feel who looks upon the world for the last time from the platform of the scaffold where he is to die. He could feel, taste, smell, and see everything with an instant still intensity, the animate fixation of a vision seen instantly, fixed for ever in the mind of him who sees it, and sense the clumped dusty autumn masses of the trees that bordered the tracks upon the left, and smell the thick exciting hot tarred caulking of the tracks, the dry warmth and good worn wooden smell of the powerful railway ties, and see the dull rusty red, the gaping emptiness and joy of a freight car, its rough floor whitened with soft siltings СКАЧАТЬ