Green shadows, white whale v5 Read Online Free PDF

mean? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.
    "Wait!" whispered Heeber. "This is it!"
    What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down their cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to crack Paris. So here, I thought, will these stones spill away, that house open wide, rosy lights flash on, so that from a monstrous cannon ten dozen pink women, not dwarf Irish but willowy French, will be shot out and down into the waving arms of this grateful multitude?
    The lights came on.
    I blinked.
    For there was the entire unholy thing, laid out for me in the drizzle.
    The lights flickered. The men quickened.
    A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end )f the stony yard and ran.
    Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great ircle. There was not one yell or a murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching. The rain rained down on the half-lit scene. The rain fell on tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and sharp noses. The rain hammered hunched shoulders. The rabbit ran. The dogs loped. The rabbit popped into its electric kennel. The dogs collided, yip-ing. The lights went out.
    In the dark I turned to stare at Heeber Finn, stunned.
    "Now!" he shouted. "Place your bets!"
    We were back in Kilcock, speeding, at ten o'clock.
    The rain was still raining, like an ocean smashing the road with titanic fists, as we drew up in a great tidal spray before the pub.
    "Well, now!" said Heeber Finn, looking not at us but at the windshield wiper palpitating before us. "Well!"
    Mike and I had bet on five races and had lost, between us, two or three pounds.
    "I won," Finn said, "and some of it I put down in your names, both of you. That last race, I swear to God, won for all of us. Let me pay!"
    "It's all right, Heeber," I said, my numb lips moving.
    Finn pressed two shillings into my hand. I didn't fight him. "That's better!" he said. "Now, one last drink on me!"
    Mike drove me back to Dublin.
    Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby he looked at me and said, "It was a wild Irish night for sure!"
    "A wild night," I said.
    I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler's privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter. I sat alone listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab's coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather. I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter with its sun of the South Pacific, its hot winds blowing the Pequod toward its doom, but along the way fiery sands and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.
    And I thought of the darkness beyond the city, the lights flashing, the electric rabbit running, the dogs yiping, the rabbit gone, the lights out, and the rain flailing the dank shoulders and soaked caps and ice-watering the noses and seeping through the sheep-smelling tweeds.
    Going upstairs, I glanced out a streaming window. There, on the street, riding by under a lamp, was a man on a bike. He was terribly drunk. The bike weaved back and forth across the bricks, as the man vomited. He did not stop the bike to do this. He kept pumping unsteadily, blearily, as he threw up. I watched him go off in the dark rain.
    Then I groped up to find and die in my room.

7
    On Grafton Street just halfway between The Four Provinces pub and the cinema stood the best, or so John said, Gentleman Riders to Hound emporium in all Dublin, if not Ireland, and perhaps one half of Bond Street in London.
    It was Tyson's, and to speak the name was to see the front windows with their hacking coats and foulards and pale yellow silk shirts and velvet hunting caps and twill pants and