OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  Someone got out with the same violent impatience, slammed the door, and then for a moment he could hear him hunting along the street, swearing and muttering to himself; at length he came back to the house started up the steps on which he slipped or stumbled and fell heavily, after which he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse and feverish discontent: "The God-damnedest place I ever saw. . . . Did they never hear of a light around here? . . . Who the hell would want to live in a place like this?"

  He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene's name at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist. Eugene went to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk; then he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out: "What time do you go to bed? . . . Do you stay up all night? . . . What do you do, sleep all morning?" . . . He looked around the room: the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered with pieces of paper on which he had been writing. Robert broke into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh: "The damnedest place I ever saw!" he said. "Do you sleep on that thing?" he said contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall in one corner of the room.

  "No, Robert," he said, "I sleep on the floor. I use that for an ice-box."

  "What's that in the corner?" Robert asked, pointing to some dirty shirts he had thrown there. "Shirts? . . . How long has it been since you sent anything to the laundry? . . . What do you do when you want a shirt, go out and buy one? . . . Do you ever take a bath? . . . Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?" He laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary movement, and said, "Lord! Lord! Lord! . . . The things I've done!" he shook his head mournfully. "Why, it's awful," he said, and he started to shake his head again.

  "Why don't you try to talk a little louder?" Eugene suggested. "I think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven't heard you yet."

  He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to time and saying, "Lord!"

  It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years. Under the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked closely at him: he wore a Derby hat that became his small lean head well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops. For the rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction he had always seemed to get into his clothes--there was always, even in his boyhood, a kind of formal dignity in his dress: he always wore a stiff, starched collar.

  Robert's face had grown thinner, he looked haggard and a good deal older: the lines of his sharp, incisive features were more deeply cut and his eyes, now injected and bloodshot from heavy drinking, were more wild and feverish in their restless discontent than they had ever been--he seemed to be lashed and driven by a savage and desperate hunger which he could neither satisfy nor articulate: he was being consumed and torn to pieces by a torment of desire and longing, the cause of which he could not define, and which he had no means to assuage or quench.

  He had a bottle half filled with whisky in the pocket of his fur coat: he took it out and offered Eugene a drink, and after he had drunk he put the bottle to his lips and gulped down all that remained in a single draught. Then he flung the empty bottle away impatiently on the table; it was obvious that the liquor, instead of giving him some peace or comfort, acted as savagely and immediately as oil poured on the tumult of a raging fire--it fed and spurred the madness in him and gave him no release until he had drunk himself into a state of paralysis and stupefaction. He was one of those men for whom alcohol was a fatal and uncontrollable stimulant: having once drawn the cork from a bottle and tasted his first drink he was then powerless to resist or stop: he drank until he could drink no more, and he would beg, fight, lie, cheat, crawl or walk or incur any desperate risk or danger to get more drink. Yet, he told Eugene that until his twenty-first year he had never tasted liquor: he began to drink during his last year in college, and during the two years that followed he had gone far on the road toward alcoholism.

  Eugene asked him how he had found out where he lived and, still passing his hand across his forehead, he answered in an impatient and abstracted tone: "Oh . . . I don't know. . . . Someone told me, I guess. . . . I think it was Arthur Kittrell," and then he fell to shaking his head again, and saying, "Awful! awful! awful! . . . Do you know how much money I've spent so far this year? . . . Forty-eight hundred dollars. . . . So help me, God. I hope I may die if I'm not telling you the truth! Why, it's awful!" he said, and burst into a laugh.

  "Have you travelled around a lot?" Gene asked.

  "Have I? My God! I've spent only one week-end in New Haven since the beginning of the year," he said. "Why, it's terrible! . . . Do you know whom I'm rooming with?" he demanded.

  "No."

  "Andy Westerman," he said impressively and then, as the name communicated none of its significance to Gene, he added impatiently: "Why, you've heard of the Westermans, haven't you? . . . My God! what have you been doing all your life? . . . You've heard of the Westerman vacuum cleaners and electric refrigerators, haven't you? . . . Why, he's worth $20,000,000 if he's worth a cent! . . . The craziest man that ever lived!" he said, breaking suddenly into a sharp recollective laugh.

  "Who? Westerman?"

  "No. . . . My room-mate . . . that damned Andy Westerman. . . . Do you want to meet him?"

  "Is he up here with you?"

  "Why, that's what I'm telling you," he said impatiently.

  "Where is he?"

  "I don't know," said Robert with a laugh. "In jail by now, I reckon. . . . I left him down at the Copley Plaza an hour ago stopping everyone who came in and asking him if he'd ever been to Harvard. . . . If the man said yes, Andy would haul off and hit him as hard as he could. . . . God! the craziest man!" he said. Then, in a feverish staccato monologue, he continued: "The damnedest story you ever heard. . . . You never heard anything like the way I met him in your life. . . . Passed right out in the gutter on Park Avenue one night. . . . All alone. . . . They'd given me knock-out drops in some joint and robbed me. . . . Waked up in the most magnificent apartment you ever saw in your life. . . . Most beautiful woman you ever saw sitting right there on the bed holding my hand. . . . Andy Westerman's sister. . . . God! they've got stuff in that place that cost a fortune. . . . They've got one picture that the old man paid a hundred thousand dollars for. . . . Damned little thing that doesn't take up a foot of space. . . . Twenty million dollars! Yes, sir! . . . And those two get it all. . . . Why, it'll ruin me!" he burst out. "It takes every cent I can get to keep up with 'em. . . . My God! I never saw a place like this in my life! . . . These people up here think no more of spending a thousand dollars than we'd think of fifty cents down home. . . . God! I've got to do something. . . . I've got to get money somehow. . . . Yes, sir, Robert is going to be right up there among them. . . . Apartment on Park Avenue and everything. . . . God! that's the most beautiful woman in the world! All I want is to sleep with her just once. . . . Yes, sir, just once. . . .

  "And to think that she'd go and throw herself away on that damned consumptive little . . . !" he fairly ground his teeth together, turned away abruptly, and did not finish.

  "Throw herself away on whom? Who is this, Robert?"

  "Ah-h! that damned little fellow Upshaw that she's married to: been waiting--praying--hoping that he'd die for months--she'll marry me just as soon as he's out of the way--and he knows it! The damned little rat!" He gnashed his teeth savagely. "He's hanging on just as long as he can to spite us!" And he cursed bitterly, with a terrible unconscious humour, against a man who was too stubborn to oblige him by an early death.

  Then he jumped up and said abruptly: "Do you want to go
to New York with me?"

  "When?"

  "Right now!" said Robert. "I'm ready to go this very minute. Come on!"--and he started impatiently toward the door.

  When Eugene made no move to follow him, he turned and came back, saying in a resentful tone: "Well, are you coming, or are you just trying to bluff about it?"

  For a moment, the boy was infected by the other's madness, too near akin to his own ever to be wholly strange to him. The prospect of that reckless, drunken, purposeless flight through darkness towards the magic city held him with hypnotic power. Then, rudely, painfully, he broke the spell and answered curtly:

  "I wouldn't go as far as Harvard Square with you tonight, Robert. Not if you're going to drive that car. You're too drunk to know what you're doing and you'll have a smash-up as sure as you live if you try to drive."

  He was, in fact, wildly and dangerously drunk by now and Eugene began to think of some way of persuading him to go to sleep and of finding some place where he could spend the night: in his own room there was only a single cot, and it was too late to rouse the Murphys--they had been in bed for hours. Then he remembered that Mr. Wang had an extra couch in one of his rooms: it was a very comfortable one and he did not think that Wang would make any objection to Robert's sleeping there if he explained the situation to him. Therefore, he cautioned Robert to keep quiet, and went to Wang's door and knocked. Presently he appeared sleepily, thrusting out his fat, drowsy, and troubled face to see what the trouble was: when Eugene told him he agreed very generously and readily to let Robert sleep upon the couch and thus the young man got him settled at length, although not before the sudden apparition of a dragon with a scaly tail--one of the drawings that hung above the couch--had wrested from him a howl of terror: he had sprung out of bed and rushed out of Wang's apartment and into Eugene's, saying hoarsely, and in a tone of frightened indignation: "Do you expect me to spend the night alone in there with that damned Chinaman and his dragon? . . . How do I know what he'll do? . . . One of those people would cut your throat while you're asleep and think nothing of it. . . . I'm not going to stay in there." Gene finally persuaded him of Wang's innocence and kindness, and at length he went off to sleep after drinking the better part of a bottle of Wang's rice wine.

  XXXVIII

  One Sunday morning early in the month of May, Starwick and Eugene had crossed the bridge that led to the great stadium, and turned right along a path that followed the winding banks of the Charles River. Spring had come with the sudden, almost explosive loveliness that marks its coming in New England: along the banks of the river the birch trees leaned their slender, white and beautiful trunks, and their boughs were coming swiftly into the young and tender green of May.

  That spring--which, for Eugene, would be the third and last of his years in Cambridge--Starwick had become more mannered in his dress and style than ever before. During the winter, much to Professor Hatcher's concern--a concern which constantly became more troubled and which he was no longer able to conceal--the darling protégé on whom his bounty and his favour had been lavished, and to whom, he had fondly hoped, he would one day pass on the proud authorities of his own position when he himself should become too old to carry on "the work," had begun to wear spats and carry a cane and be followed by a dog.

  Now, with the coming of spring, Frank had discarded the spats, but as they walked along beside the Charles, he twirled his elegant light stick with an air of languid insouciance, interrupting his conversation with his friend now and then to speak sharply to the little dog that frisked and scampered along as if frantic with the joy of May, crying out to the little creature sharply, commandingly, and in a rather womanish tone from time to time:

  "Heel, Tang! Heel, I say!"

  And the dog, a shaggy little terrier--the gift of some wealthy and devoted friends of Frank's on Beacon Hill--would pause abruptly in its frisking, turn its head, and look towards its owner with the attentive, puzzled, and wistfully inquiring look that dogs and little children have, as if to say: "What is it, master? Are you pleased with me or have I done something that was wrong?"

  And in a moment, in response to Frank's sharper and more peremptory command, the little dog, with a crestfallen and somewhat apologetic look, would scamper back from its wild gaieties along the green banks of the Charles, to trot meekly along the path behind the two young men, until its exuberant springtime spirits got the best of it again.

  From time to time, they would pass other students, in pairs or groups, striding along the pleasant path; and when these young men saw Starwick twirling his stick and speaking to the little dog, they would grin broadly at each other and stare curiously at Starwick as they passed.

  Once Starwick paused to call "Heel!" sharply to the little dog at the very moment it had lifted its leg against a tree, and the dog, still holding its leg up, had looked inquiringly around at Starwick with such a wistful look that some students who were passing had burst out in hearty laughter. But Starwick, although the colour of his ruddy face deepened a shade, had paid no more attention to these ruffians than if they had been scum in the gutter. Rather, he snapped his fingers sharply, and cried "Heel!" again, at which the little dog left its tree and came trotting meekly back to its obedient position.

  Suddenly, while one of these episodes was being enacted, Eugene heard the bright wholesome tones of a familiar voice, and turning round with a startled movement, found himself looking straight into the broad and beaming countenance of Effie Horton and her husband Ed.

  "Well!" Effie was saying in her rich bright voice of Iowa. "Look who's here! I thought those long legs looked familiar," she went on in her tone of gay and lightsome, and yet wholesome, banter, "even from a distance! I told Pooly--" this, for an unknown reason, was the affectionate nickname by which Horton was known to his wife and all his friends from Iowa--"I told Pooly that there was only one pair of legs as long as that in Cambridge. 'It must be Eugene,' I said.--Yes sir!" she went on brightly, shaking her head with a little bantering movement, her broad and wholesome face shining with good nature all the time. "It is Eugene--and my! my! my!--I just wish you'd look at him," she went on gaily, in her tones of full rich fellowship and banter in which, however, a trace of something ugly, envious, and mocking was evident--"all dressed up in his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes out for a walk this fine morning just to give the pretty girls a treat! Yes, sir!" she cried again, shaking her head in wondering admiration, and with an air of beaming satisfaction, "I'll bet you that's just what he's going to do."

  He flushed, unable to think of an apt reply to this good-natured banter, beneath whose hearty good-fellowship he felt the presence of something that was false, ugly, jeering and curiously tormented, and while he was blundering out a clumsy greeting, Horton, laughing with lazy good-nature at his confusion, slapped him on the back and said:

  "How are yuh, kid? . . . Where the hell have you been keeping yourself, anyway?"

  The tone was almost deliberately coarse and robust in its hearty masculinity, but beneath it one felt the same false and spurious quality that had been evident in the woman's tone.

  --"And here is Mister Starwick!" Effie now cried brightly. "--And I wish you'd look!" she went on, as if enraptured by the spectacle--"all dressed up with a walking-stick and a dog--and yes, sir!" she exclaimed ecstatically, after an astonished examination of Frank's sartorial splendour--"wearing a bee-yew-teeful brown tweed suit that looks as if it just came out of the shop of a London tailor! . . . My! my! my! . . . I tell you!" she went on admiringly--"I just wish the folks back home could see us now, Pooly--"

  Horton laughed coarsely, with apparent good nature, but with an ugly jeering note in his voice.

  "--I just wish they could see us now!" she said. "It's not everyone can say they knew two London swells--and here they are--Mr. Starwick with his cane and his dog--and Eugene with his new suit--yes, sir!--and talking to us just as if we were their equals."

  Eugene flushed, and then with a stiff and inept sarcasm, said:

&n
bsp; "I'll try not to let it make any difference between us, Effie."

  Horton laughed coarsely and heartily again, with false good nature, and then smote the boy amiably on the back, saying:

  "Don't let her kid you, son! Tell her to go to hell if she gets fresh with you!"

  "--And how is Mr. Starwick these fine days!" cried Effie gaily, now directing the artillery of her banter at his unworthy person--"Where is that great play we've all been waiting for so eagerly for, lo! these many years! I tell you!" she exclaimed with rich conviction--"I'm going to be right there on the front row the night it opens up on Broadway!--I know that a play that has taken anyone so many years will be a masterpiece--every word pure gold--I don't want to miss a word of it."

  "Quite!" said Starwick coldly, in his mannered and affected tone. His ruddy face had flushed crimson with embarrassment; turning, he called sharply and coldly to the little dog, in a high and rather womanish voice: "Heel, Tang! Heel, I say!"

  He snapped his fingers and the little dog came trotting meekly toward him. Before Starwick's cold and scornful impassivity, Effie's broad and wholesome face did not alter a jot from its expression of radiant goodwill, but suddenly her eyes, which, set in her robust and friendly countenance, were the tortured mirror of her jealous, envious, possessive, and ravenously curious spirit, had grown hard and ugly, and the undernote of malice in her gay tones was more apparent than ever when she spoke again.

  "Pooly," she said, laughing, taking Horton affectionately by the arm and drawing close to him with the gesture of a bitterly jealous and possessive female, who, by the tortured necessity of her own spirit, must believe that "her man" is the paragon of the universe, and herself the envy of all other women, who lust to have him, but must gnash their teeth in vain--"Pooly," she said lightly, and drawing close to him, "maybe that's what's wrong with us! . . . Maybe that's what it takes to make you write a great play! . . . Yes, sir!" she said gaily, "I believe that's it! . . . I believe I'll save up all my spending money until I have enough to buy you a bee-yew-teeful tailored suit just like the one that Mr. Starwick has on. . . . Yes, sir!" She nodded her head emphatically in a convinced manner. "That's just exactly what I'm going to do! . . . I'm going to get Mr. Starwick to give me the address of his tailor--and have him make you a bee-yew-teeful new suit of English clothes--and then, maybe, you'll turn into a great genius like Mr. Starwick and Eugene!"