LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ was a boy named Otto Krause, a cheese-nosed, hair-faced, inch-browed German boy, lean and swift in the legs, hoarse-voiced and full of idiot laughter, who showed him the gardens of delight. There was a girl named Bessie Barnes, a black-haired, tall, bold-figured girl of thirteen years who acted as model. Otto Krause was fourteen, Eugene was eight: they were in the third grade. The German boy sat next to him, drew obscenities on his books, and passed his furtive scrawled indecencies across the aisle to Bessie.

      And the nymph would answer with a lewd face, and a contemptuous blow against her shapely lifted buttock, a gesture which Otto considered as good as a promise, and which tickled him into hoarse sniggers.

      Bessie walked in his brain.

      In their furtive moments at school, he and Otto amused each other by drawing obscenities in their geographies, bestowing on the representations of tropical natives sagging breasts and huge organs. And they composed on tiny scraps of paper dirty little rhymes about teachers and principal. Their teacher was a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce glaring eyes: Eugene thought always of the soldier and the tinder and the dogs he had to pass, with eyes like saucers, windmills, the moon. Her name was Miss Groody, and Otto, with the idiot vulgarity of little boys, wrote of her:

      “Old Miss Groody

       Has Good Toody.”

      And Eugene, directing his fire against the principal, a plump, soft, foppish young man whose name was Armstrong, and who wore always a carnation in his coat, which, after whipping an offending boy, he was accustomed to hold delicately between his fingers, sniffing it with sensitive nostrils and lidded eyes, produced in the first rich joy of creation scores of rhymes, all to the discredit of Armstrong, his parentage, and his relations with Miss Groody.

      He was obsessed; he spent the entire day now in the composition of poetry — all bawdy variations of a theme. And he could not bring himself to destroy them. His desk was stuffed with tiny crumpled balls of writing: one day, during the geography lesson, the woman caught him. His bones turned to rubber as she bore down on him glaring, and took from the concealing pages of his book the paper on which he had been writing. At recess she cleared his desk, read the sequence, and, with boding quietness, bade him to see the principal after school.

      “What does it mean? What do you reckon it means?” he whispered dryly to Otto Krause.

      “Oh, you’ll ketch it now!” said Otto Krause, laughing hoarsely.

      And the class tormented him slily, rubbing their bottoms when they caught his eye, and making grimaces of agony.

      He was sick through to his guts. He had a loathing of physical humiliation which was not based on fear, from which he never recovered. The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later. He did not think he could endure being whipped by the fat young man with the flower: at three o’clock, white-faced, he went to the man’s office.

      Armstrong, slit-eyed and thin lipped, began to swish the cane he held in his hand through the air as Eugene entered. Behind him, smoothed and flatted on his desk, was stacked the damning pile of rhymed insult.

      “Did you write these?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes to little points in order to frighten his victim.

      “Yes,” said Eugene.

      The principal cut the air again with his cane. He had visited Daisy several times, had eaten at Gant’s plenteous board. He remembered very well.

      “What have I ever done to you, son, that you should feel this way?” he said, with a sudden change of whining magnanimity.

      “N-n-nothing,” said Eugene.

      “Do you think you’ll ever do it again?” said he, becoming ominous again.

      “N-no, sir,” Eugene answered, in the ghost of a voice.

      “All right,” said God, grandly, throwing away his cane. “You can go.”

      His legs found themselves only when he had reached the playground.

      But oh, the brave autumn and the songs they sang; harvest, and the painting of a leaf; and “half-holiday today”; and “up in the air so high”; and the other one about the train —“the stations go whistling past”; the mellow days, the opening gates of desire, the smoky sun, the dropping patter of dead leaves.

      “Every little snowflake is different in shape from every other.”

      “Good grashus! ALL of them, Miss Pratt?”

      “All of the little snowflakes that ever were. Nature never repeats herself.”

      “Aw!”

      Ben’s beard was growing: he had shaved. He tumbled Eugene on the leather sofa, played with him for hours, scraped his stubble chin against the soft face of his brother. Eugene shrieked.

      “When you can do that you’ll be a man,” said Ben.

      And he sang softly, in his thin humming ghost’s voice:

      “The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse door,

       He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got sore.

       The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse bell,

       He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got well.”

      They laughed — Eugene with rocking throatiness, Ben with a quiet snicker. He had aqueous gray eyes, and a sallow bumpy skin. His head was shapely, the forehead high and bony. His hair was crisp, maple-brown. Below his perpetual scowl, his face was small, converging to a point: his extraordinarily sensitive mouth smiled briefly, flickeringly, inwardly — like a flash of light along a blade. And he always gave a cuff instead of a caress: he was full of pride and tenderness.

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      Yes, and in that month when Prosperpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

      And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man’s heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the earth.

      The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, СКАЧАТЬ