LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Thomas Wolfe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ belly?” said Harry.

      Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed. They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden fleece.

      “Hair makes a man of you,” said Harry.

      More often, as Spring deepened, he went now to Gant’s shop on the Square. He loved the scene: the bright hill-cooled sun, the blown sheets of spray from the fountain, the garrulous firemen emerging from the winter, the lazy sprawling draymen on his father’s wooden steps, snaking their whips deftly across the pavement, wrestling in heavy horseplay, Jannadeau in his dirty fly-specked window prying with delicate monocled intentness into the entrails of a watch, the reeking mossiness of Gant’s fantastical brick shack, the great interior dustiness of the main room in front, sagging with gravestones — small polished slabs from Georgia, blunt ugly masses of Vermont granite, modest monuments with an urn, a cherub figure, or a couchant lamb, ponderous fly-specked angels from Carrara in Italy which he bought at great cost, and never sold — they were the joy of his heart.

      Behind a wooden partition was his ware-room, layered with stonedust — coarse wooden trestles on which he carved inscriptions, stacked tool-shelves filled with chisels, drills, mallets, a pedalled emery wheel which Eugene worked furiously for hours, exulting in its mounting roar, piled sandstone bases, a small heat-blasted cast-iron stove, loose piled coal and wood.

      Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left as one entered, was Gant’s office, a small room, deep in the dust of twenty years, with an old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty papers, a leather sofa, a smaller desk layered with round and square samples of marble and granite. The sloping market Square, pocketed obliquely off the public Square, and filled with the wagons of draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower side on a few Poor White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will Pentland.

      Eugene would find his father, leaning perilously on Jannadeau’s dirty glass showcase, or on the creaking little fence that marked him off, talking politics, war, death, and famine, denouncing the Democrats, with references to the bad weather, taxation, and soup-kitchens that attended their administration, and eulogizing all the acts, utterances, and policies of Theodore Roosevelt. Jannadeau, guttural, judiciously reasonable, statistically argumentative, would consult, in all disputed areas, his library — a greasy edition of the World Almanac, three years old, saying, triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing: “Ah — just as I thought: the muni-CIP-al taxation of Milwaukee under De-MO-cratic administration in 1905 was $2.25 the hundred, the lowest it had been in years. I cannot ima-GINE why the total revenue is not given.” And he would argue with animation, picking his nose with his blunt black fingers, his broad yellow face breaking into flaccid creases, as he laughed gutturally at Gant’s unreason.

      “And you may mark my words,” proceeded Gant, as if he had never been interrupted, and had heard no dissenting judgment, “if they get in again we’ll have soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts will grease your backbone before another winter’s over.”

      Or, he would find his father in the workroom, bending over a trestle, using the heavy wooden mallet with delicate care, as he guided the chisel through the mazes of an inscription. He never wore work-clothes; he worked dressed in well brushed garments of heavy black, his coat removed, and a long striped apron covering all his front. As Eugene saw him, he felt that this was no common craftsman, but a master, picking up his tools briefly for a chef-d’oeuvre.

      “He is better at this than any one in all the world,” Eugene thought, and his dark vision burned in him for a moment, as he thought that his father’s work would never, as men reckon years, be extinguished, but that when that great skeleton lay powdered in earth, in many a tangled undergrowth, in the rank wilderness of forgotten churchyards, these letters would endure.

      And he thought with pity of all the grocers and brewers and clothiers who had come and gone, with their perishable work a forgotten excrement, or a rotted fabric; or of plumbers, like Max’s father, whose work rusted under ground, or of painters, like Harry’s, whose work scaled with the seasons, or was obliterated with newer brighter paint; and the high horror of death and oblivion, the decomposition of life, memory, desire, in the huge burial-ground of the earth stormed through his heart. He mourned for all the men who had gone because they had not scored their name upon a rock, blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most imperishable objects of the world and graven there some token, some emblem that utterly they might not be forgotten.

      Again, Eugene would find Gant moving with bent strides across the depth of the building, tearing madly along between the sentinel marbles that aisled the ware-room, muttering, with hands gripped behind him, with ominous ebb and flow. Eugene waited. Presently, when he had shuttled thus across his shop some eighty times, he would leap, with a furious howl, to his front door, storming out upon the porch, and delivering his Jeremiad to the offending draymen:

      “You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. You lousy good-for-nothing bums: you have brought me to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door. By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off. You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, as you have from mine, fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!”

      He would tear back into the shop muttering, to return almost at once, with a strained pretense at calmness, which ended in a howl:

      “Now I want to tell you: I give you fair warning once and for all. If I find you on my steps again, I’ll put you all in jail.”

      They would disperse sheepishly to their wagons, flicking their whips aimlessly along the pavements.

      “By God, somethin’s sure upset the ole man.”

      An hour later, like heavy buzzing flies, they would drift back settling from nowhere on the broad steps.

      As he emerged from the shop into the Square, they would greet him cheerfully, with a certain affection.

      “‘Day, Mr. Gant.”

      “Good day, boys,” he would answer kindly, absently. And he would be away with his gaunt devouring strides.

      As Eugene entered, if Gant were busy on a stone, he would say gruffly, “Hello, son,” and continue with his work, until he had polished the surface of the marble with pumice and water. Then he would take off his apron, put on his coat, and say, to the dawdling, expectant boy: “Come on. I guess you’re thirsty.”

      And they would go across the Square to the cool depth of the drugstore, stand before the onyx splendor of the fountain, under the revolving wooden fans, and drink chill gaseous beverages, limeade so cold it made the head ache, or foaming ice-cream soda, which returned in sharp delicious belches down his tender nostrils.

      Eugene, richer by twenty-five cents, would leave Gant then, and spend the remainder of the day in the library on the Square. He read now rapidly and easily; he read romantic and adventurous novels, with a tearing hunger. At home he devoured Luke’s piled shelves of five-cent novels: he was deep in the weekly adventures of Young Wild West, fantasied in bed at night of virtuous and heroic relations with the beautiful Arietta, followed Nick Carter, through all the mazes of metropolitan crime, Frank Merriwell’s athletic triumphs, Fred Fearnot, and the interminable victories of The Liberty Boys of ‘76 over the hated Redcoats.

      He cared not so much for love at first as he did for material success: the straw figures of women in boys’ books, something with hair, dancing eyes, and virtuous opinions, impeccably good and vacant, satisfied him completely: they were the guerdon of heroism, something to be СКАЧАТЬ