OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  This judgment was followed by a brief but heavy pause, which was broken in a moment by the voice of the pompous, swarthy little man who, in a tone of detached curiosity, said:

  "Whatever became of that other boy--the one who used to work there in The Courier office when you owned it? What was his name, anyway?"

  "Ben," said Mr. Flood heavily, but without hesitation. "That was Ben." Here he coughed in an alarming, phlegmy sort of way, cleared his throat and spat chokingly into the spittoon at his feet, wiped his mouth with his wadded handkerchief and in a moment, panting for breath, wheezed:

  "Ben was the one that worked for me."

  "Oh, yes, yes, yes!" the swarthy little man said rapidly, as if now it all came back to him. "Ben! That was the one! Whatever became of him? I haven't seen him recently."

  "He's dead," said Mr. Flood, still wheezing rapidly for breath and gazing at the spittoon. "That's the reason you haven't seen him," he said seriously. And suddenly, as if the long-awaited moment had come, he bent over, torn by a fit of choking and phlegmy sounds of really astounding proportions. When it was over, he raised himself, settled back slowly and painfully in his seat, and for a moment, with closed eyes, did nothing but wheeze rapidly. In a moment, still with closed eyes, he gasped almost inaudibly:

  "Ben was the one that died."

  "Oh, yes! I do remember now," the pompous little man declared, nodding his head sharply with an air of conviction. "That's been some time ago, hasn't it?" he said to the boy.

  "He died two years ago," the boy replied, "during the war."

  "Oh, that's so, he did! I remember now!" the man cried instantly, with an air of recollection that somehow said that he remembered nothing. "He was overseas at the time, wasn't he?" he asked smoothly.

  "No, sir," the boy answered. "He was at home. He died of pneumonia--during that big epidemic."

  "I know," the man said regretfully. "That got a lot of the boys. Ben was in service at the time, wasn't he?"

  "No," the boy answered. "He never got in. Luke was the one who was in service. Ben tried to get in twice but he couldn't pass the examinations."

  "Is that so?" the man said vaguely. "Well, I was mighty sorry to hear about his death. Old Ben was one fine boy!"

  Nothing was said for a moment.

  "I'll tell you how fine he was," Mr. Flood, who had been wheezing with closed eyes, now grunted suddenly, glaring solemnly about him with an air of brutal earnestness. "Now I think I knew that boy about as well as any man alive--he worked for me for almost fifteen years--started out when he was ten years old as a route-boy on The Courier and kept right on working for my paper until just a year or two before he died! And I'm here to tell you," he wheezed solemnly, "that they don't come any better than Ben!" Here he glowered around him pugnaciously as if the character of a dead saint had been called in question. "Now he wasn't one of your big talkers who'd promise everything and know nothing. Ben was a do-er, not a talker. You could depend on him," said Mr. Flood, hoarsely and impressively. "When he told you he'd do a thing, you'd know it was going to get done! As regular as a clock and as steady as the day is long! And as quiet a fellow as you ever saw," said Mr. Flood. "That was Ben for you! Am I right?" he demanded, suddenly turning to the boy. "Was that Ben?"

  "Yes, sir," the boy answered. "That was Ben."

  "And until you asked him something he'd go for days at a time without speaking to you, but I knew he didn't mean anything by it, it was just his way. He believed in tending to his own business and he expected every one else to do the same." And for a moment, exhausted by these eulogies, he wheezed rapidly.

  "Well, the world would be a lot better off if there were more like him," the pompous, swarthy little man now said virtuously, as if this sentiment expressed his own pious belief and practice. "There are too many people sticking their noses in other people's business, as it is."

  "Well, they didn't stick their noses in Ben's business," said Mr. Flood with grim emphasis, "not after the first time, anyway. But they didn't come any better than that boy. I couldn't have thought more of him if he'd been my own son," he concluded piously and then gasped stertorously, lifted his cigar slowly to his lips with the thick, gouty tenderness that characterized all his movements and for a moment puffed slowly, wheezing reflectively over it.

  "Not that he was ever much like a boy," he grunted suddenly, with a surprising flash of insight. "He was always more like an old man--didn't ever seem to be a kid like the others. Why," suddenly he chuckled with a phlegmy hoarseness, "I remember when he first began to come down there in the morning as a carrier, the other kids all called him 'Pop.' That was Ben for you. Always had that scowl on his face, even when he was laughing--as serious and earnest as an old man. But he was one of the best--as good as they come." Again he coughed chokingly, bent over with a painful grunt, and cleared his throat phlegmily into the polished brass spittoon beside him. Then, wheezing a little, he drew the wadded silk handkerchief from a side-pocket, wiped his mouth with it, raised himself up in his seat a little, and settled back slowly, tenderly, wheezing, with a sigh! Then for a moment he laboured painfully, eyes closed, with his rapid wheezing breath and finally, when it seemed he must be exhausted by his efforts and done with conversation for the evening, he wheezed faintly and unexpectedly.

  "That was Ben."

  "Oh, I remember that boy now," the swarthy pompous-looking man suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration--"Wasn't Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on the score-board as they phoned it in to him?"

  "Yes," wheezed Mr. Flood, nodding heavily. "You got him now, all right. That was Ben."

  "I remember now," the swarthy little man said thoughtfully, with a far-away look in his eye. "I was thinking about him the other day when I went by The Courier office. They were playing the Series then. They had another fellow in the window and I wondered what had become of him. So that was Ben?"

  "Yes," Mr. Flood wheezed hoarsely again. "That was Ben."

  For a moment as the gouty old rake had spoken of the boy's dead brother, the boy had felt within him a sense of warmth: a wakening of dead time, a stir of grateful affection for the gross old man as if there might have been in this bloated carcass some trace of understanding for the dead boy of whom he spoke--an understanding faint and groping as a dog who bays the moon might have of the sidereal universe, and yet genuine and recognizable.

  And for a moment present time fades out and the boy sits there staring blindly out at the dark earth that strokes for ever past the train, and now he has the watch out and feels it in his hands. . . . And suddenly Ben is standing there before his vision, smoking, and scowls down through the window of the office at the boy.

  He jerks his head in a peremptory gesture: the boy, obedient to his brother's command, enters the office and stands there waiting at the counter. Ben steps down from the platform in the window, puts the earphones on a table and walks over to the place where the boy is standing. For a moment, scowling fiercely, he stands there looking at the boy across the counter. The scowl deepens, he makes a sudden threatening gesture of his hard white hand as if to strike the boy, but instead he reaches across the counter quickly, seizes the boy by the shoulders, pulls him closer, and with rough but skilful fingers tugs, pulls and jerks the frayed string of neck-tie which the boy is wearing into a more orderly and presentable shape.

  The boy starts to go.

  "Wait!" says Ben, quietly, in a deliberately off-hand kind of tone. He opens a drawer below the counter, takes out a small square package, and scowling irritably, and without looking at the boy, he thrusts it at him. "Here's something for you," he says, and walks away.

  "What is it?" The boy takes the package and examines it with a queer numb sense of expectancy and growing joy.

  "Why don't you open it and see?" Ben says, his back still turned, and scowling down into a paper on the desk.

  "Open it?" the boy says, starin
g at him stupidly.

  "Yes, open it, fool!" Ben snarls. "It's not going to bite you!"

  While the boy fumbles with the cords that tie the package, Ben prowls over toward the counter with his curious, loping, pigeon-toed stride, leans on it with his elbows and, scowling, begins to look up and down the 'want-ad.' columns, while blue, pungent smoke coils slowly from his nostrils. By this time, the boy has taken off the outer wrapping of the package, and is holding a small case, beautifully heavy, of sumptuous blue velvet, in his hands.

  "Well, did you look at it?" Ben says, still scowling up and down the 'want-ads.' of the paper, without looking at the boy.

  The boy finds the spring and presses it, the top opens, inside upon its rich cushion of white satin is a gold watch, and a fine gold chain. It is a miracle of design, almost as thin and delicate as a wafer. The boy stares at it with bulging eyes and in a moment stammers:

  "It's--it's a watch!"

  "Does it look like an alarm clock?" Ben jeers quietly, as he turns a page and begins to scowl up and down the advertisements of another column.

  "It's--for me?" the boy says thickly, slowly, as he stares at it.

  "No," Ben says, "it's for Napoleon Bonaparte, of course! . . . You little idiot! Don't you know what day this is? Have I got to do all the thinking for you? Don't you ever use your head for anything except a hat-rack? . . . Well," he goes on quietly in a moment, still looking at his paper, "what do you think of it? . . . There's a spring in the back that opens up," he goes on casually, "Why don't you look at it?"

  The boy turns the watch over, feels the smooth golden surface of that shining wafer, finds the spring, and opens it. The back of the watch springs out, upon the inner surface is engraved, in delicate small words, this inscription:

  "To Eugene Gant

  Presented To Him On His Twelfth Birthday

  By His Brother

  B. H. Gant

  October 3, 1912"

  "Well," Ben says quietly in a moment. "Did you read what it says?"

  "I'd just like to say--" the boy begins in a thick, strange voice, staring blindly down at the still open watch.

  "Oh, for God's sake!" Ben says, lifting his scowling head in the direction of his unknown demon, and jerking his head derisively towards the boy. "Listen to this, won't you? . . . Now, for God's sake, try to take good care of it and don't abuse it!" he says quickly and irritably. "You've got to look after a watch the same as anything else. Old man Enderby"--this is the name of the jeweller from whom he has bought the watch--"told me that a watch like that was good for fifty years, if you take care of it. . . . You know," he goes on quietly, insultingly, "you're not supposed to drive nails with it or use it for a hammer. You know that, don't you?" he says, and for the first time turns and looks quietly at the boy. "Do you know what a watch is for?"

  "Yes."

  "What is it for?"

  "To keep time with," says the boy.

  Ben says nothing for a moment, but looks at him.

  "Yes," he says quietly at length, with all the bitter weariness of a fathomless resignation and despair, the infinite revulsion, scorn, disgust which life has caused in him. "That's it. That's what it's for. To keep time with." The weary irony in his voice had deepened to a note of passionate despair. "And I hope to God you keep it better than the rest of us! Better than Mama or the old man--better than me! God help you if you don't! . . . Now go on home," he says quietly in a moment, "before I kill you."

  "To keep time with!"

  What is this dream of time, this strange and bitter miracle of living? Is it the wind that drives the leaves down bare paths fleeing? Is it the storm-wild flight of furious days, the storm-swift passing of the million faces, all lost, forgotten, vanished as a dream? Is it the wind that howls above the earth, is it the wind that drives all things before its lash, is it the wind that drives all men like dead ghosts fleeing? Is it the one red leaf that strains there on the bough and that for ever will be fleeing? All things are lost and broken in the wind; the dry leaves scamper down the path before us, in their swift-winged dance of death the dead souls flee along before us driven with rusty scuffle before the fury of the demented wind. And October has come again, has come again.

  What is this strange and bitter miracle of life? Is it to feel, when furious day is done, the evening hush, the sorrow of lost, fading light, far sounds and broken cries, and footsteps, voices, music, and all lost--and something murmurous, immense and mighty in the air?

  And we have walked the pavements of a little town and known the passages of barren night, and heard the wheel, the whistle and the tolling bell, and lain in the darkness waiting, giving to silence the huge prayer of our intolerable desire. And we have heard the sorrowful silence of the river in October--and what is there to say? October has come again, has come again, and this world, this life, this time are stranger than a dream.

  May it not be that some day from this dream of time, this chronicle of smoke, this strange and bitter miracle of life in which we are the moving and phantasmal figures, we shall wake? Knowing our father's voice upon the porch again, the flowers, the grape-vines, the low rich moons of waning August, and the tolling bell--and instantly to know we live, that we have dreamed and have awakened, and find then in our hands some object, like this real and palpable, some gift out of the lost land and the unknown world as token that it was no dream--that we have really been there? And there is no more to say.

  For now October has come back again, the strange and lonely month comes back again, and you will not return.

  Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep, in the hill, Ben--cold, cold, cold.

  "To keep time with!"

  And suddenly the scene, the shapes, the voices of the men about him swam back into their focus, and he could hear the rhythmed pounding of the wheels below him, and in his palm the frail-numbered visage of the watch stared blank and plain at him its legend. It was one minute after twelve o'clock, Sunday morning, October the third, 1920, and he was hurtling across Virginia, and this world, this life, this time were stranger than a dream.

  The train had halted for a moment at one of the Virginia towns, and for a moment the people were conscious of the strange yet casual familiarity of all those sounds which suddenly will intercept the rhythmic spell of time and memory which a journey in a train can cast upon its passengers. Suddenly this spell was broken by the intrusion of peculiar things--of sounds and voices--the sense of instant recognition, union to a town, a life which they had never known, but with which they now felt immediately familiar. A railwayman was coming swiftly down the station platform beneath the windows of the train, pausing from time to time to hammer on the car-wheels of each truck. A negro toiled past below them with a heavy rattling truck in tow, piled high with baggage.

  And elsewhere there were the casual voices of the railwaymen--conductors, porters, baggage masters, station men--greeting each other with friendly words, without surprise, speaking of weather, work, plans for the future, saying farewell in the same way. Then the bell tolled, the whistle blew, the slow panting of the engine came back to them, the train was again in motion; the station, and the station lights, a glimpse of streets, the thrilling, haunting, white-glazed incandescence of a cotton mill at night, the hard last lights of town, slid past the windows of the train. The train was in full speed now, and they were rushing on across the dark and lonely earth again.

  Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:

  "Your father's in Baltimore now, isn't he, son?" he said.

  "Yes, sir. He's at Hopkins. Luke's up there with him."

  "Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back about his being there," said the man with the florid face.

  "What's wrong with him?" Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment, after he had absorbed this information. "Ain't he feeling good?"

  The b
oy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered. His father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem possible or proper for him to say this to these men. He said:

  "He's got some kind of kidney trouble, I think. He goes up there for radium treatments."

  "It's the same thing John Rankin had," the florid-faced man glibly interposed at this moment. "Some sort of prostate trouble, isn't it?" he said.

  "Yes, sir, that's it," the boy said. For some reason he felt a sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid face. The easy, glib and false assurance that his father's "trouble" was "the same thing John Rankin had" seemed to give the disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.

  "I know what it is," the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his head in a confident manner. "It's the same thing John Rankin had. A lot of men get it after they're fifty. John told me he went through agony with it for ten years. Said he used to be up with it a dozen times a night. It got so he couldn't sleep, he couldn't rest, he couldn't do anything but walk the floor with it. It got him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking around like a dead man. Then he went up there and had that operation and he's been a new man ever since. He looks better than he's looked in twenty years. I was talking to him the other day and he told me he didn't have an ache or a pain in the world. He said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it--the picture of health.

  "Well," he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy, "remember me to your father when you see him. Tell him Frank Candler asked to be remembered to him."

  "Are you and him good friends?" Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow formidable curiosity which belonged to him. "You know him well?"

  "Who? Mr. Gant?" Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well that the very question was amusing to him. "Why, I've known him all my life--I've known him ever since he first came to Altamont--let's see, that's all of forty years ago when he first came here?" Mr. Candler went on reflectively, "or no, maybe a little less than that. Wait a minute." He considered seriously for a moment. "The first time I ever saw your father," said Mr. Candler very slowly and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any one, but staring straight before him, "was in October, 1882--and I believe--I believe," he said strongly, "that was the very year he came to town--yes, sir! I'm positive of it!" he cried. "For Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days--I don't believe we had 2,000 people there--why, that's all in the world it was." Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily. "The courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it--when you got two blocks away you were right out in the country. Didn't Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars, and didn't I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a price as that and expect to get it! Why!" Mr. Candler declared, with a full countrified laugh, "it was nothing but a mud-hole down in the holler. I've seen old Captain Porter's hawgs wallerin' around in it many's the time. 'And you,' I said to him, 'you--do you think I'd pay you a price like that for a mud-hole? Why, you must think I'm crazy, sure enough.' 'All right,' he says, 'have it your own way, but you'll live to see the day you'll regret not buying it. You'll live to see the day when you can't buy one of those lots for a thousand dollars!' One of them!" Mr. Candler now cried in hearty self-derision. "Why, if I owned one of those lots to-day, I'd be a rich man! I don't believe you could buy a foot of that land to-day for less than a thousand dollars, could you, Bruce?" he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking man who sat beside the boy.