Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

Чтение книги онлайн.

      30

       Table of Contents

      There was at Dixieland a girl named Laura James. She was twenty-one years old. She looked younger. She was there when he came back.

      Laura was a slender girl, of medium height, but looking taller than she was. She was very firmly moulded: she seemed fresh and washed and clean. She had thick hair, very straight and blonde, combed in a flat bracelet around her small head. Her face was white, with small freckles. Her eyes were soft, candid, cat-green. He nose was a little too large for her face: it was tilted. She was not pretty. She dressed very simply and elegantly in short plaid skirts and waists of knitted silk.

      She was the only young person at Dixieland. Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur. He thought her plain and dull. But he began to sit with her on the porch at night. Somehow, he began to love her.

      He did not know that he loved her. He talked to her arrogantly and boastfully as they sat in the wooden porch-swing. But he breathed the clean perfume of her marvellous young body. He was trapped in the tender cruelty of her clear green eyes, caught in the subtle net of her smile.

      Laura James lived in the eastern part of the State, far east even of Pulpit Hill, in a little town built on a salt river of the great coastal plain. Her father was a wealthy merchant — a wholesale provisioner. The girl was an only child: she spent extravagantly.

      Eugene sat on the porch rail one evening and talked to her. Before, he had only nodded, or spoken stiffly a word or two. They began haltingly, aware painfully of gaps in their conversation.

      “You’re from Little Richmond, aren’t you?” he said.

      “Yes,” said Laura James, “do you know any one from there?”

      “Yes,” said he, “I know John Bynum and a boy named Ficklen. They’re from Little Richmond, aren’t they?”

      “Oh, Dave Ficklen! Do you know him? Yes. They both go to Pulpit Hill. Do you go there?”

      “Yes,” he said, “that’s where I knew them.”

      “Do you know the two Barlow boys? They’re Sigma Nus,” said Laura James.

      He had seen them. They were great swells, football men.

      “Yes, I know them,” he said, “Roy Barlow and Jack Barlow.”

      “Do you know ‘Snooks’ Warren? He’s a Kappa Sig.”

      “Yes. They call them Keg Squeezers,” said Eugene.

      “What fraternity are you?” said Laura James.

      “I’m not any,” he said painfully. “I was just a Freshman this year.”

      “Some of the best friends I have never joined fraternities,” said Laura James.

      They met more and more frequently, without arrangement, until by silent consent they met every night upon the porch. Sometimes they walked along the cool dark streets. Sometimes he squired her clumsily through the town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of youth, past the loafing cluster at Wood’s. Often he took her to Woodson Street, where Helen secured for him the cool privacy of the veranda. She was very fond of Laura James.

      “She’s a nice girl. A lovely girl. I like her. She’s not going to take any beauty prizes, is she?” She laughed with a trace of good-natured ridicule.

      He was displeased.

      “She looks all right,” he said. “She’s not as ugly as you make out.”

      But she WAS ugly — with a clean lovely ugliness. Her face was freckled lightly, over her nose and mouth: her features were eager, unconscious, turned upward in irregular pertness. But she was exquisitely made and exquisitely kept: she had the firm young line of Spring, budding, slender, virginal. She was like something swift, with wings, which hovers in a wood — among the feathery trees suspected, but uncaught, unseen.

      He tried to live before her in armor. He showed off before her. Perhaps, he thought, if he were splendid enough, she would not see the ugly disorder and meanness of the world he dwelt in.

      Across the street, on the wide lawn of the Brunswick — the big brick gabled house that Eliza once had coveted — Mr. Pratt, who crawled in that mean world in which only a boarding-house husband can exist, was watering wide green spaces of lawn with a hose. The flashing water motes gleamed in the red glare of sunset. The red light fell across the shaven pinched face. It glittered on the buckles of his arm-bands. Across the walk, on the other lobe of grass, several men and women were playing croquet. There was laughter on the vine-hid porch. Next door, at the Belton, the boarders were assembled on the long porch in bright hashhouse chatter. The comedian of the Dixie Ramblers arrived with two chorus girls. He was a little man, with the face of a weasel and no upper teeth. He wore a straw hat with a striped band, and a blue shirt and collar. The boarders gathered in around him. In a moment there was shrill laughter.

      Julius Arthur sped swiftly down the hill, driving his father home. He grinned squintily and flung his arm up in careless greeting. The prosperous lawyer twisted a plump Van Dyked face on a wry neck curiously. Unsmiling, he passed.

      A negress in the Brunswick struck on the several bells of a Japanese gong. There was a scramble of feet on the porch; the croquet players dropped their mallets and walked rapidly toward the house. Pratt wound his hose over a wooden reel.

      A slow bell-clapper in the Belton sent the guests in a scrambling drive for the doors. In a moment there was a clatter of heavy plates and a loud foody noise. The guests on the porch at Dixieland rocked more rapidly, with low mutters of discontent.