Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн

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"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 throatness, Ben with a quiet snicker. He had aqueous grey 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 Proserpine 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 million-footed 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 clangour of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seem closer, nearer, for he has heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.