OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Now, is that nice? Is that kind?" said Upshaw in a tone of grieved reproach.

  He turned toward Eugene and spoke to him for the first time. . . . "Now, I leave it to you, Mr.--" he hesitated, "I didn't catch your name, sir, but is it all right if I call you Mr. Whipple?"

  "Yes," Eugene said. "It's all right."

  "Good!" he cried. "I knew it would be. The reason I say that is I used to have a friend out in Cleveland named Charley Whipple, who was just the same type of fellow that you are--you know," he said quietly and sneeringly, "a fine clean-cut fellow, eyes glowing with health, beautiful complexion, broad-shouldered, both feet on the ground, good to his mother.--Oh! he was a prince!--Just the same sort of looking fellow you are--so you won't mind if I call you by his name, will you? You remind me so much of him. Well, now, Mr. Whipple, I ask you if you think it's nice for a man's wife to talk to him like this? Is it kind? Is it fair?"

  "She's not your wife," said Robert. "She's my wife."

  For the first time Upshaw turned and faced his enemy squarely: he surveyed him slowly, up and down, with eyes which burned and glittered with their hatred. "Did you say something?" he asked.

  "You heard me," said Robert.

  "Did anyone speak to you? Did anyone say anything to you?" Upshaw whispered. He was silent a moment; then he leaned forward slightly over the table. "Let me give you some advice," he said. "The only pity about this is that you're not going to be able to use it.--But I'm going to give it to you, anyway: here it is--Don't fool with a dying man, Robert. If you're going to play around with anyone, play around with the living, and not with the dead. Dead men are bad people to play around with."

  "All right! All right!" cried Robert in a hoarse, excited tone. "That constitutes a threat! . . . Martha, Eugene. . . . I call on you to bear witness that he threatened me! We'll just see how that sounds in a court of law."

  "Courts! Law!" said Upshaw; and even as he spoke they all felt instantly how preposterous was Robert's threat and how meaningless such terms had become for this wisp of a man.

  "Do you think I care one good God-damn now for all the courts and laws that ever were? . . . Do you think there has been a time for the last two years when I gave a damn whether I lived or died?"

  "Except to spite Martha and me," said Robert bitterly. "You cared about that, all right!"

  "Yes," said Upshaw quietly. "You're right. I would have hung on to life as long as I could gasp a breath of air into what was left of my lung, and I would have lived on without a lung to breathe with in order to spoil your filthy game--that was the way I hated the two of you. You don't understand that, do you, Robert? You don't understand a man being able to hate so hard he can keep alive on it, he can use it instead of a lung to breathe with, he can use it instead of air. You don't know anything about that, do you?"

  "Yes, I do," said Robert. "I knew you hated me all along!"

  "Hated you!" Upshaw snarled. "Why, damn you, I hated the earth you walked upon, the air you breathed, the house you lived in, the places you went to; I hated all the people who saw you or spoke to you or had ever spent an hour in your company--you polluted the atmosphere for me if I even heard the sound of your voice."

  "I know you did," said Robert, nodding. "What did I tell you?" he cried to Martha, with a note of triumphant conviction.

  "You know! You know!" cried Upshaw fiercely. "Why, damn you, you poor cheap imitation of a contriving rascal, you damned little drugstore Casanova, you dirty little swine of a country-club snob, you village fortune-teller, you know nothing! . . . For two years I stayed alive with not enough sound lung left in me to cover the size of a silver dollar--and do you think it was because I was afraid to die, or wanted to live? No! No!" he whispered, and his face, or rather that eloquence of eye and tooth, grew passionate with the bitterest disgust and loathing he had ever seen. "I've had more than thirty years of it, and Christ! it's been enough! I've had my bellyful of it. . . . I'm fed up all the way to here!" he whispered, and he struck himself fiercely at the base of the throat. He coughed, suddenly, briefly, terribly, and with a swift impatient movement of his hot corded fingers he snatched a towel from the rack beside the water-basin, pressed his lowered face into it and then stared for a moment with an expression of intent and fascinated disgust into its folds, then he flung the bloodied rag away impatiently.

  "You know," he said again more calmly, and for the first time now with a touch of weariness, as if the fierce flame of this incredible energy of passion which had thus far upheld him had now been spent. "Why, you know nothing. It took a man to hate like that," he said. . . . "--a better man than you could ever be--yes! . . . with no more lung than a rabbit, I'm still a better man than you could ever be, for you are nothing but a thing without the courage even of your own rotten convictions--

  "God!" he looked with weary disgust from one to the other as they sat sullen, dumbly sodden, saying nothing. "The two of you! What a pair! . . . And to think of the time I wasted hating you . . . to think of all the time when I might have been pushing daisies in some quiet spot . . . keeping myself alive by thinking of this moment." His body was shaken again by a horrible soundless laughter. "Christ! . . . To think that I should ever have wanted to kill either of you."

  "To kill us!" said Robert hoarsely, not with fear but accusingly, as if he were collecting damning evidence in a trial.

  "Yes," Upshaw answered with the same weary tranquillity, "to kill you! . . . I've breathed and drunk and thought it for two years. I've lived just for this moment. I came two thousand miles across the continent to blow your brains out. . . ."

  "Did you hear him?" cried Robert, jumping up from the table. "Did you hear what he said, Martha? Did you hear him threaten me?"

  "Sit down!" said Upshaw quietly. "I've seen you now and I'm satisfied. I wouldn't touch you. Why, God-damn you, you're not worth it, either of you." Again he surveyed them with slow loathing, and broke into his soundless laughter. "Kill you! Why, I wouldn't do either of you so big a favour. You don't deserve such luck! I'll let you live and rot together. . . . Take her! . . . Take her!" he cried, more strongly, his eyes burning into fury. "Take her! . . . But before you do"--with a swift movement he withdrew from his pocket a small and crumpled wad of dollar bills--"here! I want to give you something!" And he flung them straight at Robert's face, "Take that . . . and go and get yourself a good prostitute while you're at it!"

  Robert sat perfectly still for a moment; then he got up slowly, went over to the door, and flung it open and walked back to the table. . . . "Get out of here," he said. Upshaw did not move: he sat regarding him silently, with an intent, contemptuous, catlike stare.

  "Did you hear me?" said Robert. . . . "Get out of my room!"

  "Sit down," said Upshaw. "You're going to annoy me."

  "Annoy you! I'll annoy you, you damned rascal," Robert cried furiously, and suddenly he slapped Upshaw in the face, shouting, "You're going out of here this minute, do you hear? . . . I'll show you if you can insult me in my own place," and he lunged viciously towards him.

  What happened then was so sudden and swift that Eugene could never thereafter remember clearly the order in which all of the events occurred: as Robert plunged towards the little man, Martha spoke sharply to him, commanding him to be still, at the same moment the table and two chairs overturned with a crash of glassware . . . and Upshaw, somehow, with an incredible speed of movement, was on his feet and moving backward out of the way of Robert's lunging fist. Eugene had a brief and terribly clear sensation of a gesture of catlike speed as Upshaw thrust his hand into the pocket of his coat and then the bright wicked wink of steel. Then Martha was on top of him, clinging frantically to his arm, wrestling him into the wall, and in a moment wrenching the weapon from his grasp.

  For a moment there was no sound in the room whatever save the sound of three excited people breathing rapidly and heavily, and another sound, the terrible sound of Upshaw's breathing, hoarse, rattling, painful, breaking suddenly and sharply into a torn gasping c
ough that was thick with blood. The first words spoken came from Martha:

  "Close that door!" she commanded curtly.

  Robert, instead of obliging her, turned to Eugene with an awed and quieted light in his eye.

  "Did you see that?" he whispered to Eugene.--"Did you see him pull that gun on me? . . . Why!" he cried with a kind of sudden astonishment, "it was assault with a deadly weapon! That's what it was! He tried to murder me!" He was beside himself with astonishment and excitement. "I'm going to get the police," and he rushed out into the hall.

  "Go get that damned fool and bring him back here," she said to Eugene. "And close that door!"

  Eugene ran out into the corridor just in time to see Robert disappearing at his long stiff stride around the corner that led to the lifts in the main building. When Eugene got there Robert was pressing buttons feverishly, but unfortunately, because the hour was so late and the lift-man was asleep below, his call had not yet been answered. Eugene seized him by the arm and began to pull him along back towards his room.

  "Let go of me!" he said.

  "You damned fool! . . . Do you want to ruin us all?"

  He seemed to sober up and grew calmer after a moment or two of excited prayer and protest. They went back to the room quietly enough. When they got there Martha was supporting Upshaw's body against the basin of the washstand. The man, by this time, was either unconscious or semi-conscious: all the savage and unholy energy which had burned for a space so incredibly that it had the power to hurl this diseased and near-dead mite across a continent had now flared utterly out and the creature which the girl supported in her arms, with a kind of dark and sullen tenderness, seemed to have died and dwindled with it; the body was no longer discernible, it seemed to have faded, a fabric of rotten sticks, into a shapeless heap of clothing; it dangled shapelessly and grotesquely like some deflated figure, and yet from the head, from that death's-head of skull and tooth and blazing eyes, there were spurting unbelievable, incredible fountains of blood: it burst simultaneously from the mouth and nostrils in a steady torrent until his skin was laced with it; it filled the basin, it was incredible that such fountains of bright blood should pour out of this withered squirrel of a man.

  Robert sat down sullenly in a chair by the table after saying, "Now, this is your last chance. . . . I've had as much as I can stand. You've got to decide between us here and now!" She did not answer him, and he said no more, relapsing into a sullen and half-drunken stupor.

  The girl washed the blood away from Upshaw's face with a towel: in a moment more she asked Eugene if he would help her carry him to the bed. Eugene picked him up and put him on the bed; his body felt like a handful of light dry sticks, he weighed no more than a child of ten; already his figure seemed, under the strange and terrible chemistry of death, to shrink and wither visibly from one moment to another, but his head rested above that shapeless and grotesque bundle of clothing as if it had been severed from the body--with an immense austerity of line and light, a cold, stiffening, and upthrust calm.

  Eugene went down to the office and told them what had happened. The night clerk, a fat, shuffling old man with a mild, pasty face, and the black African negro who was at the telephone-board, received the news with astonishing calmness and matter of factness, and then acted with admirable coolness, speed and quiet precision, of which Eugene often thought in the months that followed, because it revealed to him a kind of secret knowledge, a hidden seriousness in the hotel's working, and it showed, moreover, how much knowledge, ability, and decision may be stored behind the faces of inept and foolish-looking men.

  Eugene looked at the clock above the office desk: it was now ten minutes after three o'clock in the morning. Within twenty minutes they had an ambulance, a doctor, and two stretcher-bearers at the hotel; the doctor, a young Jew with a little moustache, walked quietly and casually into the room, with the ends of a stethoscope fastened in his ears. Eugene thought that Upshaw was already dead! His face had the upthrust marble rigidity of death, but after a moment's examination the doctor spoke quietly to the two men with him, they put the stretcher on the floor and laid the withered little figure on it. As they started to move out of the room Upshaw's arms began to flop and jerk stiffly and grotesquely with every step they took: at another word from the doctor they put their burden on the floor again, the doctor knelt swiftly, unknotted the cravat in Upshaw's collar and loosely tied his wrists together. Then they all went out, and Martha followed, holding Upshaw's hat. She rode over in the ambulance to the hospital, which was only a few blocks away in Fifteenth Street. Robert and Eugene followed in a taxi; there was no one on the streets, the buildings and the pavements had the hard, bare angularity they have early in the morning: they waited downstairs in a little room until shortly after five o'clock in the morning, when Martha came down to see them and to tell them that Upshaw had just died.

  Then Eugene left Robert and Martha there together and walked back towards the hotel. The streets were still bare, but in the east there was the first width of morning light, cold steel-grey, harsh and sharply clean: day was beginning to break, and he could hear the rumbling jingle of a milk-wagon and the sound of hoof and wheel behind him in the lonely street.

  LV

  If the hard and rugged lineaments of Abe's character had not at this time emerged out of the glutinous paste of obscure yearnings, there was no such indecision and uncertainty in the character of his mother. It was as legible as gold, as solid as a rock.

  Abe's mother was an old woman, with the powerful and primitive features of the aged Jewess: she was almost toothless, a solitary blackened tooth stood mournfully in the centre of her strong ruined mouth; she had a craggy worn face, seamed and furrowed by a countless sorrow, a powerful beaked nose, and a strong convulsive mouth, a mask which was like a destiny, since it seemed to have been carved and fashioned for the dirge-like wailing of eternal grief. The face of the old woman might have served not only as the painting of the whole history of her race, but as the painting of the female everywhere--not the female with her ephemeral youth, her brief snares of hair and hide, her succulent burst of rose-lips and flowing curve--but the female timeless, ageless, fixed in sorrow and fertility, as savage, as enduring, and as fecund as the earth. The old woman's face was like a worn rock at which all the waves of life had smashed and beaten: it was unmistakably the face of an old Jewess and yet the powerful and craggy features bore an astonishing resemblance to the face of a pioneer woman or of an old Indian chief.

  Her life, moreover, had the agelessness of the earth, the timelessness of her race and destiny: she had not been touched at all by the furious and savage life of the city with its sensational brevities, its hard, special, temporal qualities of speech, fashion, and belief, its million ephemeral enthusiasms, briefly held and forgotten, the stunned oblivion of its memory, which, in the brutal stupefaction of a thousand days, can hold to nothing, so that even the memory of love and death cannot endure there and a man may forget his dead brother ere his flesh grow rotten in the grave.

  The old woman did not forget: for her, as for the God she worshipped, the passing of seven thousand years was like the passing of a single day; yesterday, tomorrow, and for ever, a moment at the heart of love and memory. Thus, once when Eugene had called Abe upon the telephone, a full year after the death of his oldest brother, Jacob, the old woman had answered: the old voice came feebly, brokenly, indecipherably, and was like a wail. He asked for Abe, she could not understand, she began to talk in an excited, toothless mumble--a torrent of Yiddish broken here and there by a few mangled words and scraps of English--all she knew. At length Eugene made her understand he wanted to speak to Abe: suddenly she recognized his voice and remembered him. Then, instantly, as if it had happened only the day before and as if he had been a friend of her dead son, although he had never known him, the old woman began to wail, faintly and rhythmically, across the wire: "Jakie! . . . My Jakie! . . . Mein Sohn Jakie! . . . He is dead."

  A few days later Eugene had
gone home with Abe for dinner: he lived with his mother, two brothers, and Jimmy, his sister's illegitimate child, in a flat which occupied the second floor of an old four-storey red-brick house in Twelfth Street, near Second Avenue, on the East Side. The old woman had prepared a good meal for them: a thick rich soup, chopped chicken livers, chicken, cake, and a strong sweet wine: she served them but would not sit and eat with them: she came in briefly and shook hands shyly and awkwardly, mumbling incoherently a mangled jargon of Yiddish and English. Suddenly, however, as if she had briefly mastered herself by a strong effort, her old and sorrowful face was twisted by a convulsion of powerful and incurable grief, and a long, terrible, savagely wailing cry was torn from her throat: she turned blindly, and with a movement of natural and primitive sorrow, she suddenly seized the edges of her apron in her gnarled and worn hands and flung it up over her head and rushed toward the door at a blind, lunging, reeling step. She was like one demented by sorrow: the old woman began to beat her withered breasts and pull at her wispy grey hair, meanwhile running and stumbling blindly round her kitchen in a horrible and savage dementia and drunkenness of grief. Abe followed her out, and Eugene could hear his voice, low, urgent, and tender, as he spoke to her persuasively in Yiddish, and her long wailing cries subsided and he returned. His face was sad and weary-looking and in a moment he said: "Mama's breaking up fast. She's never been able to get over my brother's death. She thinks about it all the time: she can't get it off her mind."

  "How long has he been dead, Abe?"

  "He died over a year ago," Abe said. "But that doesn't matter: I know her--she'll never forget it now as long as she lives. She'll always feel the same about it."

  This terrible and savage picture of grief was carved upon Eugene's memory unforgettably: it became a tremendous and formidable fact, a fact as ancient, timeless, and savage as the earth, a fact which neither the stupefying oblivion of the city's life, the furious chaos of the streets, nor the savage glare of ten thousand blind and dusty days could touch. The old woman's grief was taller than their tallest towers, and more enduring than all their steel and stone: it would last for ever when all the city's bones were dust, and it was like the grief of all the women who had ever beat their breasts and flung their aprons across their heads and run, wailing, with a demented and drunken step: it filled him with horror, anger, a sense of cruelty, disgust, and pity.