Of Time and the River (60 page)

“What would you like to eat?” she now said meditatively. “How about a nice thick steak?” she said juicily, as she winked at him. “I’ve got the whole half of a fried chicken left over from last night, that you can have if you come over!—Now it’s up to you!” she cried out again in that almost hard challenging tone, as if he had shown signs of unwillingness or refusal. “I’m not going to urge you, but you’re welcome to it if you want to come.—How about a big dish full of string beans—some mashed potatoes—some stewed corn, and asparagus? How’d you like some great big wonderful sliced tomatoes with mayonnaise?—I’ve got a big deep peach and apple pie in the oven—do you think that’d go good smoking hot with a piece of butter and a hunk of American cheese?” she said, winking at him and smacking her lips comically. “Would that hit the spot? Hey?” she said, prodding him in the ribs with her big stiff fingers and then saying in a hoarse, burlesque, and nasal tone, in extravagant imitation of a girl they knew who had gone to New York and had come back talking with the knowing, cock-sure nasal tone of the New Yorker.

“Ah, fine, boys!” Helen said, in this burlesque tone. “Fine! Just like they give you in New York!” she said. Then turning away indifferently, she went down the steps, and across the walk towards her husband’s car, calling back in an almost hard and aggressive tone:

“Well, you can do exactly as you like! No one is going to urge you to come if you don’t want to!”

Then she got into the car and they drove swiftly off down-hill, turned the corner and vanished.

The reason, in fact, which argued in Eugene’s family’s mind against his succeeding in the work he wished to do was the very thing that should have been all in his favour. But neither he nor his family thought so. It was this: a writer, they thought, should be a wonderful, mysterious, and remote sort of person—someone they had never known, like Irvin S. Cobb. “Now, this boy,” they argued in their minds, “our son and brother, is neither wonderful, mysterious, nor remote. We know all about him, we all grew up together here, and there’s no use talking—he’s the same kind of people that we are. His father was a stone-cutter—a man who was born on a farm and had to work all his life with his hands. And five of his father’s brothers were also stone-cutters, and had to earn their living in the same way—by the sweat of their brow. And his mother is a hard-working woman who brought up a big family, runs a boarding-house and has had to scrape and save and labour all her life. Everyone in this part of the country knows her family: her brothers are respected business men in town here, and there are hundreds of her kinsfolk—farmers, storekeepers, carpenters, lumber-dealers, and the like—all through this section. Now, they’re all good, honest, decent, self-respecting people—no one can say they’re not—but there’s never been a writer in the crowd. No—and no doctors or lawyers either. Now there may have been a preacher or two—his Uncle Bascom was a preacher and a highly educated man too, always poking his nose into a book and went to Harvard, and all—yes, and now that we remember, always had queer notions like this boy—had to leave the Church, you know, for being an agnostic, and was always writing poems, and all such as that. Well, this fellow is one of the same kind—a great book-reader but with no practical business sense—and it seems to us he ought to get a job somewhere teaching school, or maybe some newspaper work— which he could do—or, perhaps, he should have studied law.”

So did their minds work on this subject. Yet the very argument they made—that he was the same kind of person as the rest of them, and not remote, wonderful, or mysterious—should have been the chief thing in his favour. But none of them could see this. For where they thought there was nothing wonderful or mysterious about them, he thought that there was; and none of them could see that his greatest asset, his greatest advantage, if he had any, was that he was made out of the same earth—the same blood, bone, character, and fury—as the rest of them. For, could they only have known it, the reason he read all the books was not, as they all thought, because he was a bookish person, for he was not, but for the same reason that his mother was mad about property—talked, thought, felt, and dreamed about real estate all the time, and wanted to own the earth just as he wanted to devour it. Again, the fury that had made him read the books was the same thing that drove his brothers and his sisters around incessantly, feeding the huge fury of their own unrest, and making them talk constantly and to everyone, until they knew all about the lives of all the butchers, bakers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, Greek restaurant owners, and Italian fruit-dealers in the community.

If they had understood this—that he had the same thing in him that they all had in them—they would have understood about his wanting to be a writer, and even the trouble in which presently he would involve himself, and that seemed so catastrophic and disgraceful to him at that time, would not have seemed so bad to them, for his father, one of his brothers, and several of his kinsmen had been in this same trouble—and it had caused no astonishment at all. But now that he had done this thing—now that the one they looked on as the scholar, and the bookish person, had done it—it was as if the leading deacon of the Church had been caught in a raid on a bawdy- house.

Finally, there was to be some irony for Eugene later in the fact that, had he only known it and grasped it, there was ready to his use in that one conflict all of the substance and energy of the human drama, and that the only thing that was wonderful or important was that they were all full of the passion, stupidity, energy, hope, and folly of living men—fools, angels, guiltless and guilty all together, not to be praised or blamed, but just blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—the whole swarming web of life and error in full play and magnificently alive. As for the fancied woes and hardships of the young artist in conflict with the dull and brutal Philistines,—that, he saw later, had had nothing to do with it, and was not worth a damn, any more than the plays that had been written in Professor Hatcher’s class, and in which a theatrical formula for living was presented in place of life. No; the conflict, the comedy, the tragedy,—the pain, the pride, the folly and the error—might have been just the same had Eugene wanted to be an aviator, a deep-sea diver, a bridge-builder, a professional pall-bearer, or a locomotive engineer. And the study of life was there in all its overwhelming richness, was right there in his grasp, but he could not see it, and would not use it. Instead he went snooping and prowling around the sterile old brothels of the stage, mistaking the glib concoctions of a counterfeit emotion for the very flesh and figure of reality. And this also has been true of every youth that ever walked the earth.

The letter came at length one grey day in late October; and instantly, when he had opened it, and read the first words “We regret,” his life went grey as that grey day, and he thought that he would never have heart or hope nor know the living joy of work again. His flesh went dead and cold and sick, yet he read the smooth lying phrases in the letter with the stolid face with which people usually receive bad news, and even tried to insinuate a thread of hope, to suck a kind of meagre and hopeless comfort from the hard, yet oily, words, “We are looking forward with great interest to reading your next play, and we hope you will send it to us as soon as it is completed.” . . . “Our members were divided in their opinion, four voting to reconsider it and five for rejection . . . although all were agreed on the freshness and vitality of the writing . . . while the power of some of the scenes is undeniable . . . we must reluctantly. . . . You are one of the young men whose work we are watching with the greatest interest . . .” and so on.

Those on whom the naked weight of shame has rested, who have felt its grey and hideous substance in their entrails, will not smile calmly and with comfort if their memory serves them.

Now a huge, naked, and intolerable shame and horror pressed down on Eugene with a crushing and palpable weight out of the wet, grey skies of autumn. The hideous grey stuff filled him from brain to bowels, was everywhere and in everything about him so that he breathed it out of the air, felt it like a naked stare from walls and houses and the faces of the people, tasted it on his lips, and endured it in the screaming and sickened dissonance of ten thousand writhing nerves so that he could no longer sit, rest, or find oblivion, exhaustion, forgetfulness or repose anywhere he went, or release from the wild unrest that drove him constantly about. He went to bed only to get up and prowl again the wet and barren little streets of night; he ate, and instantly vomited up again all he had eaten, and then like a dull, distressed and nauseated brute, he would sullenly and wretchedly eat again.

He saw the whole earth with the sick eyes, the sick heart, the sick flesh, and writhing nerves of this grey accursed weight of shame and horror in which his life lay drowned, and from which it seemed he could never more emerge to know the music of health and joy and power again; and from which, likewise, he could not die, but must live hideously and miserably the rest of his days, like a man doomed to live for ever in a state of retching and abominable nausea of heart, brain, bowels, flesh and spirit.

It seemed to him that all was lost, that he had been living in a fool’s dream for years, and that now he had been brutally wakened and saw himself as he was—a naked fool—who had never had an ounce of talent, and who no longer had an ounce of hope—a madman who had wasted his money and lost precious years when he might have learned some work consonant with his ability and the lives of average men. And it now seemed to him that his family had been terribly and mercilessly right in everything they had said and felt, and that he had been too great a fool to understand it. His sense of ruin and failure was abysmal, crushing, and complete.

XLII

It was in this temper, after two days of aimless and frenzied wandering about the streets of the town, and over the hills that surrounded it, during which time he was no more conscious of what he did, said, ate, thought or felt than a man in a trance, that Eugene started off suddenly to visit his other married sister, who lived in a little town in South Carolina. He had not seen her since his father’s death two years ago; she had written him a few days before asking him to come down, and now, driven more by a fury of flight and movement than by any other impulse, he wired her he was coming, and started out in one of the Public Service motor cars which at that time made the trip across the mountains. Luke had arranged to meet him sixty miles from home at the town of Blackstone, in South Carolina, and drive him the remainder of the distance to his sister’s house.

He set out on a day in late October, wild and windy, full of ragged torn clouds of light that came and went from grey to gold and back to grey again. And everything that happened on that savage day he was to remember later with a literal and blazing intensity.

Autumn had come sharp and quick that year. October had been full of frost and nipping days, the hills were glorious that year as Eugene had never seen them before. Now, only a day or two before, there had been, despite the early season, a sudden and heavy fall of snow. It still lay, light but fleecy, in the fields; and on the great bulk of the hills it lay in a pattern of shining white, stark greys and blacks, and the colours of the leaves, which now had fallen thickly and had lost their first sharp vividness, but were still burning with a dull massed molten glow.

An hour away, and twenty-five miles from home, the car had drawn up before the post office of a mountain village or resort which lay at the crest of the last barrier of the hills, before the road dropped sharply down the mountain-side to South Carolina.

While they were halted here, another car drove up—an open, glittering, and expensive-looking projectile of light grey—and in it were three young men from home, two of whom Eugene knew. This car drew up abreast, stopped, and he saw that its driver was Robert Weaver. And although he had not seen the other youth since a midnight visit Robert had made to his room in Cambridge, the latter peered over towards him owlishly and without a word of greeting and with that abrupt, feverish, and fragmentary speech that was characteristic of him and was constantly becoming more dissonant and broken, he barked out:

“Who’s in there? Who’s that sitting up there in the front seat? Is that you, Gene?” he called.

When Gene assured him that it was, Robert asked where he was going. When he told him “Blackstone,” he demanded at once that he leave the service car and come with him.

“We’re going there, too,” he said. Turning to his comrades, he added earnestly:

“Aren’t we? Isn’t that where we’re going, boys?”

The two young men to whom he spoke now laughed boisterously, crying: “Yeah! That’s right! That’s where we’re going, Robert,” and one of them added with a solemn gravity:

“We’re going to—Blackstone,” here a slight convulsion seemed to seize his throat, he swallowed hard, hiccoughed, and concluded, “to see a football game”—a statement which again set them off into roars of boisterous laughter. Then they all shouted at Eugene:

“Come on! Come on! Get in! We’ve lots of room.”

Eugene got out of the service car, paid the driver, took the small hand-case he had, and got into the other car with Robert and his two companions. They drove off fast, and almost immediately they were dropping down the mountain, along the sinuous curves and turns of the steep road.

Robert’s two companions on this journey were young men whom Eugene had not known in boyhood, with whom he had now only a speaking acquaintance, and both of whom were recent comers to the town. The older of these two was a man named Emmet Blake, and he now sat beside Robert on the front seat of the car.

Emmet Blake was a man of twenty-seven years, a frail and almost wasted-looking figure of medium height, straight black hair, black eyes, and a thin, febrile, and corrupted-looking face which, although almost dead-white in its colour, was given a kind of dark and feverish vitality by a faint thin smile that seemed always to hover about the edges of his mouth, and the dark unnatural glitter of his black eyes.