Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 11

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Natalie was gone. Eric sat down and stared through the screen at the dying fire.

He was a fool, certainly, he told himself. The scruples of pride which he entertained did not belong in the realm of the liberated intelligence; in being governed by them, he remained hopelessly fixed upon those peasant lowlands which extended in a reversal of eternity back through the toilsome mists of his heritage. His commentaries in The Horizon paid him approximately a hundred dollars each, but at any moment that heroic little periodical might give up the ghost; the tenants on his farm might quite reasonably default this year; he was without a position and had no immediate prospect of finding one in which he could be even moderately happy. The position Natalie’s uncle had offered to make for him was a little too much for his sense of the ignominiously comic, even if he had wanted to go on teaching after his humiliating experience at Anders. And yet, he had rejected the advances of the only woman he knew who had ever stimulated him both mentally and physically, and who had with graceful carelessness offered him the freedom of the earth! Many a man would have jumped at the opportunity. Perhaps he would have done so himself if he had had any real sense of humor. But he was shackled still by those stubborn and irrational ideals that had drawn his ancestors into the harder way, that had made them fanatically reverence the plowshare and abominate the parlor.

His grandfather and his father had both been uncommon men, each uncommonly needed by his time, each great in the way of those countless and unrecorded souls whose names are too bright for history but are written dimly in the long, dark furrow, the ribboned steel of railways triumphantly overtaking the sun, the pluming smoke of city sky-lines where once the prairie dreamt its age-long, vacant dream. His grandfather, Doctor Edvard, and his father, Edward, had each been needed by his time. That was the difference—Eric was not needed by his time. Nothing was needed now but robots who would respond to the pull of a lever or the push of a button. Even in higher education, the robot inscribed the diplomas with an expert hand.

Eric turned out the lights, went up to his room, undressed, and lay sleepless on his bed listening to the slow rain that had just begun to fall. Barney Olson’s underfed, agonized face kept floating before him in the darkness—then, in its wake, the face of Sibert Mueller, ecstatic with a new idea—and Natalie Monroe’s, wasteful, burnt pure, ribald and shameless. He forced his thoughts into himself.

He was unencumbered by any personal possessions outside his books. It would be a simple matter to get into his car—tomorrow would be as good a time as any—and strike out at random in any direction that promised plenty of space ahead. He wanted to put behind him every reminder of his conscientious, devoted industry at Anders and the infuriated chagrin that had been virtually his only reward. Even good old Mueller was a link between him and that immediate, incredible past, but Mueller would understand. He would not charge him with an ungrateful breach of friendship if he awoke some morning to find that Eric Stene had gone.

His thoughts, out of their plunging chaos, settled again upon his grandfather as if there alone they could find any firm ground.