Tornado Pratt Read Online Free Page B

found a nice, simple-minded volume that you could sit there and enjoy. Well, that book might have a hero and a heroine in it. You might fall in love with the heroine and that would mean you would naturally want to emulate the hero. So right away, you’re deflected from your own course, your own truth and energy. But that would only be the beginning. Thatbook would make you want to read another book. And that would immediately give you a new set of models and ideas. And so it would go on. Twenty years later, you’d find yourself like me—without spirit or energy, battered by other men’s thoughts. And to crown it all, what you’d be then, Tornado, would be an arbitrary wreck! It might have happened that you’d read completely different books from the ones you actually encountered and they’d have done quite different things to you.”
    Well, as you might guess, Horace, I was more than a little amazed by Harvey’s fervour. I knew he meant it kindly but I was kind of stubborn and sure of myself in those far-gone morning days. So I made him teach me, Horace, and, sadly, he consented. After a while, he got into it and became enthusiastic about my huge power to learn. Naturally, I began slowly—a modern novel or two, a kid’s history book, a few little tinkling poems and maybe a visit to the theatre. But from the start I bombarded Harvey with questions, making him explain and then explain his explanations and leaving no corner in which ignorance could lurk. And we made mighty strides, Horace.
P RATT P ERFECTS P RATT
    There came a time when Harvey would come at me with:
    “Would you say that poem was a typical product of the romantic movement, Tornado?”
    or
    “Do you really give a fart for art, Tornado?”
    And I’d come twisting back at him, full of book knowledge, leaping like a mountain goat from reference to reference, spinning out a shining web of ideas and, often as not, tangling up Harvey in the bright coils of my thought. Anything I could understand I could dominate and, if I set my mind to it, I could understand anything. Those were the tornado years, Horace, and I sucked in everything.
    They’re coming whirling out now, Horace, out of my vivid flux of days, some images of pain. Like the time I slugged Harvey Maldoon.
    We’d been to a speakeasy that night. Must have been a big occasion because I don’t recollect more than half a dozen times that Harvey came out on the town with me. After we got the mansion out beyond Taplow Park, he fitted it out with a billiard-room and most evenings he’d play billiards with one of the house-boys and then hit the sack early and read. But on this occasion—maybe it was my birthday?—I’d persuaded him to come down and see this new spot. We took the Cadillac and I remember telling the driver to go down by way of the lake because I wanted to show Harvey the latest in our fleet of cargo ships. We had a drink with the Captain and I recollect as we were leaving the ship I saw a rat creeping up a hawser and I distracted Harvey’s attention with a wise crack because I knew he had a mortal fear of rats.
    Then the night opened like a flower as it always did in those days for Tornado Pratt and out of the silver alleys of the town danced the children of sin. We caroused at Emmets which was a tinsel palace lit by emerald spotlights. The lights turned us all into fish nosing through turbulent pools of champagne. Little rainbow fish and thick grinning fish with pistols in their armpits clustered round as I swept up through the champagne. As I broke surface, the band struck up the “Tornado Song” which half a dozen Chicago clubs played whenever I walked in.
    All the big shots called at my table. Not only businessmen and politicians came to pay their respects but actors and singers and artists. In those days, there was a girl called Lotte who wore green and scarlet face paint so that across the room she looked like a parrot but close up she was ravishing. Lotte was a poet and a