Web and the Rock Read Free Page B

stomping of great hoofs, and its circle of shirt-sleeved men--firemen, baseball players, and local idlers--sitting in split-bottom chairs of evenings; the look and feet of cellars everywhere--for this, curiously, was one of his strong obsessions--he always had a love of secret and enclosed places; the interiors of theatres, and the old Opera House on nights when a show was in town; McCormack's drug store, over at the southwest corner of the Square opposite his uncle's hardware store, with its onyx fountain, its slanting wooden fans, its cool and dark interior, and its clean and aromatic smells; Sawyer's grocery store, in one of the old brick buildings over on the north side of the Square, with its groaning plenty, its crowded shelves, its great pickle barrels, flour bins, coffee grinders, slabs of bacon, and its aproned clerks with straw cuffs on their sleeves; any kind of carnival or circus grounds; anything that had to do with railway stations, depots, trains, engines, freight cars, station yards. All of these things, and a thousand others, he had con nected in a curious but powerful identity with the figure of his father; and because his buried affections and desires drew him so strongly to these things, he felt somehow that they must be bad because he thought them "good," and that he liked them because he was wicked, and his father's son.
 His whole picture of his father's world--the world in which his father moved--as he built it in his brain with all the naïve but passionate intensity of childhood, was not unlike a Currier and Ives drawing, except that here the canvas was more crowded and the scale more large. It was a world that was drawn in very bright and very innocent and very thrilling colors--a world where the grass was very, very green, the trees sumptuous and full-bodied, the streams like sapphire, and the skies a crystal blue. It was a rich, compact, precisely executed world, in which there were no rough edges and no bleak vacancies, no desolate and empty gaps.
 In later years, George Webber actually discovered such a world as this in two places. One was the small countryside community in southern Pennsylvania from which his father had come, with its pattern of great red barns, prim brick houses, white fences, and swelling fields, some green with the perfection of young wheat, others rolling strips of bronze, with red earth, and with the dead-still bloom of apple orchards on the hills--all of it as exactly rich, precise, unwasteful, and exciting as any of his childhood dreams could have imagined it. The other was in certain sections of Germany and the Austrian Tyrol--places like the Black Forest and the Forest of Thuringia, and towns like Weimar, Eisenach, old Frankfort, Kufstein on the Austrian border, and Innsbruck.
 
 
 
 
    2
 
 
 
 
    Three O'Clock
    TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO OR THEREABOUTS, ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, George Webber was lying stretched out in the grass before his uncle's house in Old Catawba.
 Isn't Old Catawba a wonderful name? People up North or out West or in other parts of the world don't know much about it, and they don't speak about it often. But really when you know the place and think about it more and more its name is wonderful.
 Old Catawba is much better than South Carolina. It is more North, and "North" is a much more wonderful word than "South," as any one with any ear for words will know. The reason why "South" seems such a wonderful word is because we had the word "North" to begin with: if there had been no "North," then the word "South" and all its connotations would not seem so wonderful. Old Catawba is distinguished by its "Northness," and South Carolina by its "Southness." And the "Northness" of Old Catawba is better than the "Southness" of South Carolina. Old Catawba has the slants of evening and the mountain cool. You feel lonely in Old Catawba, but it is not the loneliness of South Carolina. In Old Catawba, the hill boy helps his father building fences and hears a soft