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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of hammer and saw, the gay festivity of crowds. He visited the Boyles, old guests at Dixieland, who lived in the old French quarter, sleeping at night with Frank Boyle in a vast dark room lighted dimly with tapers: they had as cook an ancient negress who spoke only French, and who returned from the Market early in the morning bearing a huge basket loaded with vegetables, tropical fruits, fowls, meats. She cooked strange delicious food that he had never tasted before — heavy gumbo, garnished steaks, sauced fowls.

      And he looked upon the huge yellow snake of the river, dreaming of its distant shores, the myriad estuaries lush with tropical growth that fed it, all the romantic life of plantation and canefields that fringed it, of moonlight, of dancing darkies on the levee, of slow lights on the gilded river boat, and the perfumed flesh of black-haired women, musical wraiths below the phantom drooping trees.

      They had but shortly returned from Mardi Gras when, one howling night in winter, as he lay asleep at Gant’s, the house was wakened by his father’s terrible cries. Gant had been drinking heavily, day after fearful day. Eugene had been sent in the afternoons to his shop to fetch him home, and at sundown, with Jannadeau’s aid, had brought him, behind the negro’s spavined horse, roaring drunk to his house. There followed the usual routine of soup-feeding, undressing, and holding him in check until Doctor McGuire arrived, thrust his needle deeply into Gant’s stringy arm, left sleeping-powders, and departed. The girl was exhausted: Gant himself had ravaged his strength, and had been brought down by two or three painful attacks of rheumatism.

      Now, he awoke in the dark, possessed by his terror and agony, for the whole right side of his body was paralyzed by such pain as he did not know existed. He cursed and supplicated God alternately in his pain and terror. For days doctor and nurse strove with him, hoping that the leaping inflammation would not strike at his heart. He was gnarled, twisted, and bent with a savage attack of inflammatory rheumatism. As soon as he had recovered sufficiently to travel, he departed, under Helen’s care, for Hot Springs. Almost savagely, she drove all other assistance from him, devoting every minute of the day to his care: they were gone six weeks — occasionally post-cards and letters describing a life of hotels, mineral baths, sickness and lameness, and the sport of the blooded rich, came to add new colors to Eugene’s horizon: when they returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been boiled from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was permanently crippled. He was never again able to close it, and there was something strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of awe and terror in his eyes.

      But the union between Gant and his daughter was finally consummated. Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain and terror which led on to death, but as his great strength dwindled, palsied, broke along that road, she went with him inch by inch, welding beyond life, beyond death, beyond memory, the bond that linked them.

      “I’d have died if it hadn’t been for that girl,” he said over and over. “She saved my life. I couldn’t get along without her.” And he boasted again and again of her devotion and loyalty, of the expenses of his journey, of the hotels, the wealth, the life they both had seen.

      And, as the legend of Helen’s goodness and devotion grew, and his dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the spitting grease of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile tremulous, bitter, terribly hurt.

      “I’ll show them,” she wept. “I’ll show them.” And she rubbed thoughtfully at a red itching patch that had appeared during the year upon the back of her left hand.

      She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed. They stopped at Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in a paint store; he slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took Eugene about the city, leaving the boy outside for a moment while he went “in here to see a fellow”— a “fellow” who always sent him forth, Eugene thought, with an added impetuosity to his swagger.

      Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the small bleared shacks of Arkansas set in malarial fields.

      Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot Springs: he plunged heavily into the bewildering new world — performed brilliantly, and won the affection of the young woman who taught him, but paid the penalty of the stranger to all the hostile and banded little creatures of the class. Before his first month was out, he had paid desperately for his ignorance of their customs.

      Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily; sometimes, he went along with her, leaving her with a sensation of drunken independence, while he went into the men’s quarters, stripping himself in a cool room, entering thence a hot one lined with couches, shutting himself in a steam-closet where he felt himself momentarily dwindling into the raining puddle of sweat at his feet, to emerge presently on trembling legs and to be rolled and kneaded about magnificently in a huge tub by a powerful grinning negro. Later, languorous, but with a feeling of deep purification, he lay out on one of the couches, victoriously his own man in a man’s world. They talked from couch to couch, or walked pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath towels — malarial Southerners with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed alcoholics, purple-skinned gamblers, and broken down prize-fighters. He liked the smell of steam and of the sweaty men.

      Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with The Saturday Evening Post.

      “It won’t hurt you to do a little light work after school,” said she. And as he trudged off with his sack slung from his neck, she would call after him:

      “Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Throw your shoulders back. Make folks think you’re somebody.” And she gave him a pocketful of printed cards, which bore this inscription:

      SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT

       DIXIELAND

       In Beautiful Altamont,

       America’s Switzerland.

       Rates Reasonable — Both Transient and Tourist.

       Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.

      “You’ve got to help me drum up some trade, if we’re to live, boy,” she said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous jocularity that was coming to wound him so deeply, because he felt it was only an obvious mask for a more obvious insincerity.

      He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened pachyderm in Eliza’s world — sprucing up confidently, throwing his shoulders back proudly, making people “think he was somebody” as he cordially acknowledged an introduction by producing a card setting forth the joys of life in Altamont and at Dixieland, and seized every opening in social relations for the purpose of “drumming up trade.” He hated the jargon of the profession, which she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she used constantly with such satisfaction — smacking her lips as she spoke of “transients,” or of “drumming up trade.” In him, as in Gant, there was a silent horror of selling for money the bread of one’s table, the shelter of one’s walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend from out the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave, the harlot, and the fool.

      Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up Central Avenue, fringed on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for him, by the borders of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land of timeless and never-ending faery. He drank endlessly the water that came smoking from the earth, hoping somehow to wash himself clean from all pollution, beginning his everlasting fantasy of the miraculous spring, or the bath, neck-high, of curative mud, which would draw out of a man’s veins each drop of corrupted blood, dry up in him a cancerous growth, dwindle and absorb a cyst, remove all scorbutic blemishes, scoop and suck and thread away the fibrous slime of all disease, leaving him again with the perfect flesh of an animal.

      And he gazed for hours into the entrances of СКАЧАТЬ