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Read Ebook: The Happy Castaway by McDowell Robert Emmett Anderson Murphy Illustrator
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Alexandre Herculano
MONTEIRO & C.?--editores
Agencia Universal de Publica??es
MDCCCXCIV
ALEXANDRE HERCULANO
Alexandre Herculano
MONTEIRO & C.?--editores
Agencia Universal de Publica??es
MDCCCXCIV
Escor?o Biographico
ID?AS GERAES
Pontifice das lettras, Alexandre Herculano n?o teve, como muitos, a benevolencia, a fraqueza, uma cynica bondade de confundir os mediocres e os de talento; e perseguiu com o seu rancor todos os que a inutilidade levantara, elevados pela politica, pela camaradice, pela intriga. Foi um amarguroso e um triste. Por despeito? por tedio da sua epoca? por can?a?o do seu espirito! Interroga??es irrespondiveis, antes de se analysarem as causas que levantaram este homem ? imminencia, d'onde nunca cahiu, e d'onde tanta vez lan?ou sobre o seu tempo os threnos e as maldi??es d'um propheta que n?o pede perd?o para a miseria humana, antes invoca a colera de Deus sobre as velhas cidades corrompidas. Ezequiel d'uma epoca indigna de historia, s? come?ou a rugir, n?o por mando de Jehovah, mas depois de conhecer os homens e de se ter entediado d'elles. O seu temperamento soturno, a sua mente convulsiva, o seu caracter d'uma rectid?o, t?o inabalavel, t?o egoista--que hoje nos chega a parecer estudada--eram o producto d'uma hereditariedade que nunca se desmentiu e lhe deu esse bello cunho de portuguez, inquebrantavel e forte.
Aos vinte annos, viu-se obrigado, por uma revolta militar do corpo a que pertencia, a refugiar-se no estrangeiro, por onde pairou algum tempo, visitando a Inglaterra e a Fran?a. N?o sei se foi decisiva para a sua voca??o essa viagem; o estado em que ent?o se encontrava a Europa pode fazel-o crer. Uma outra era abria-se aos espiritos inquietos e convulsionarios. As na??es, que durante quarenta annos se tinham agitado em guerras terriveis, nas epicas campanhas de Bonaparte, nas guerrilhas da Italia, na politica da Austria, sentiam a necessidade de pacificar-se. Come?ou pois a revolu??o na arte.
Byron, Vigny, Goethe, Musset, Shelley, Moore, Hugo, punham no que escreviam a nostalgia d'epocas remotas da historia, que elles lembravam com saudade. Outras indoles, partilhando o mesmo enthusiasmo, tentaram estudar esses seculos para reconstituil-os com os documentos e as memorias. D'aqui a historia e o romance historico.
Qualquer d'estas duas corpora??es eram gremios recreativos, onde o culto das musas era um passatempo e o escrever prosa um trabalho mechanico. Apenas o bilioso Jos? Agostinho, o obsceno Bocage e o assucarado Tolentino, lan?avam no concerto de numes uma nota alegre e discordante.
Bocage escrevia:
<
Respondia-lhe com uma tremenda descompostura o padre, que queria arranjar um Cam?es para uso da c?rte de Jo?o VI e dos frades gracianos. O Tolentino, que nunca entendeu nada de litteratura, rabiscava versos, pedindo jantares e dinheiro.
N?o se levantava uma voz dolorosa ou eloquente, um grito de convulsivo desespero, uma poesia d'arrebatadora inspira??o. Tudo era pautado, mesquinho, uniforme como uma ceremonia da c?rte. O povo apenas, heroico resignado, conservava o grande refugio no desdem e na indifferen?a. Nenhum vate da Arcadia o cantou; nenhum escriptor punha a penna ao servi?o da sua causa, para o despertar. Massa inconsciente, que formigava n'um zumbido, sempre insistente, sempre pavoroso, como onda de temporal quebrando-se em rochedo terrivel--que lhe importava a elle que D. Jo?o VI fugisse e os francezes invadissem o reino? Atrophiado durante dois seculos--o decimo septimo e o decimo oitavo da nossa era--que t?o inexoravelmente come?am a ser julgados por uma historia mais visualisadora--sem poder tirar d'entre os seus uma das altivas figuras que fazem revolu??es; enterrado at? ? crapula, ao asco, ? immundice, ? lama, mas n'uma immundice quasi aterradora, tanto era enorme, quasi epica, tanto era medonha, ninguem lhe poude infiltrar energia, ninguem lhe soube provocar coragem. Paulino Cabral, Thomaz Pinto Brand?o, Bocage poetisaram a vi?la, a boneja, a marafona, a meretriz, o frade vicioso e o fadista; Nicolau Tolentino, professor de grammatica e empregado publico, era o cantor dos papelinhos dos frizados das senhoras, das reuni?es burguezas, dos ch?s, dos namoros a altas horas com despejos de fezes em cima do peralvilho embasbacado. Curiosos de certo, caracteristicos, pittorescos mesmo, e muito mais interessantes do que os Arcades, bachareis e magistrados que se apellidavam <
Visitando a Inglaterra e a Fran?a, a saudade da patria amargurou-lhe o prazer da for?ada viagem. Nas horas vagas d'essa vida de tribula??es e cuidados, vida errante, refed into the mountain, skidded and rolled down its side until it lodged beside the stream. It reminded him of a wounded dinosaur. Three girls were bathing in the stream. He looked away hastily.
Someone hailed them from the space ship.
"We've caught a man," shrieked one of his captors.
A flock of girls streamed out of the wrecked space ship.
"A man!" screamed a husky blonde. She was wearing a grass skirt. She had green eyes. "We're rescued!"
"No. No," Ann Clotilde hastened to explain. "He was wrecked like us."
"Oh," came a disappointed chorus.
"He's a man," said the green-eyed blonde. "That's the next best thing."
"Oh, Olga," said a strapping brunette. "Who'd ever thought a man could look so good?"
"I did," said Olga. She chucked Jonathan under the chin. He shivered like an unbroken colt when the bit first goes in its mouth. He felt like a mouse hemmed in by a ring of cats.
A big rawboned brute of a girl strolled into the circle. She said, "Dinner's ready." Her voice was loud, strident. It reminded him of the voices of girls in the honky tonks on Venus. She looked at him appraisingly as if he were a horse she was about to bid on. "Bring him into the ship," she said. "The man must be starved."
He was propelled jubilantly into the palatial dining salon of the wrecked liner. A long polished meturilium table occupied the center of the floor. Automatic weight distributing chairs stood around it. His feet sank into a green fiberon carpet. He had stepped back into the Thirty-fourth Century from the fabulous barbarian past.
With a sigh of relief, he started to sit down. A lithe red-head sprang forward and held his chair. They all waited politely for him to be seated before they took their places. He felt silly. He felt like a captive princess. All the confidence engendered by the familiar settings of the space ship went out of him like wind. He, Jonathan Fawkes, was a castaway on an asteroid inhabited by twenty-seven wild women.
As the meal boisterously progressed, he regained sufficient courage to glance timidly around. Directly across the table sat a striking, grey-eyed girl whose brown hair was coiled severely about her head. She looked to him like a stenographer. He watched horrified as she seized a whole roast fowl, tore it apart with her fingers, gnawed a leg. She caught him staring at her and rolled her eyes at him. He returned his gaze to his plate.
Olga said: "Hey, Sultan."
He shuddered, but looked up questioningly.
She said, "How's the fish?"
"Good," he mumbled between a mouthful. "Where did you get it?"
"Caught it," said Olga. "The stream's full of 'em. I'll take you fishing tomorrow." She winked at him so brazenly that he choked on a bone.
"Heaven forbid," he said.
"How about coming with me to gather fruit?" cried the green-eyed blonde; "you great big handsome man."
"Or me?" cried another. And the table was in an uproar.
The rawboned woman who had summoned them to dinner, pounded the table until the cups and plates danced. Jonathan had gathered that she was called Billy.
"Quiet!" She shrieked in her loud strident voice. "Let him be. He can't go anywhere for a few days. He's just been through a wreck. He needs rest." She turned to Jonathan who had shrunk down in his chair. "How about some roast?" she said.
"No." He pushed back his plate with a sigh. "If I only had a smoke."
Olga gave her unruly black hair a flirt. "Isn't that just like a man?"
"I wouldn't know," said the green-eyed blonde. "I've forgotten what they're like."
Billy said, "How badly wrecked is your ship?"
"It's strewn all over the landscape," he replied sleepily.
"Is there any chance of patching it up?"
He considered the question. More than anything else, he decided, he wanted to sleep. "What?" he said.
"Is there any possibility of repairing your ship?" repeated Billy.
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