Of Time and the River (39 page)

And with that numb horror of disbelief and silence and the dark about her, in her, filling her, it seemed to her suddenly that there was some monstrous and malevolent force in life that held all mankind in its spell and that compelled men to destroy themselves against their will. It seemed to her that everything in life—the things men did and said, the way they acted—was grotesque, perverse, and accidental, that there was no reason for anything.

A thousand scenes from her whole life, seen now with the terrible detachment of a spectator, and dark and sombre with the light of time, swarmed through her mind: she saw herself as a child of ten, hanging on grimly to her father, a thin fury of a little girl, during his sprees of howling drunkenness—slapping him in the face to make him obey her, feeding him hot soup, undressing him, sending for McGuire, “sobering him up” and forcing him to obey her when no one else could come near him. And she saw herself later, a kind of slavey at her mother’s boarding-house in St. Louis during the World’s Fair, drudging from morn to night, a grain of human dust, an atom thrust by chance into the great roar of a distant city, or on an expedition as blind, capricious, and fatally mistaken as all life. Later, she saw herself as a girl in high school, she remembered her dreams and hopes, the pitiably mistaken innocence of her vision of the world; her grand ambitions to “study music,” to follow a “career in grand opera”; later still, a girl of eighteen or twenty, amorous of life, thirsting for the great cities and voyages of the world, playing popular songs of the period—“Love Me and the World Is Mine,” “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold,” and so on—for her father, as he sat, on summer evenings, on his porch; a little later, “touring” the little cities of the South, singing and playing the popular “rhythm” and sentimental ballads of the period in vaudeville and moving-picture houses. She remembered how she had once been invited to a week-end house party with a dozen other young men and women of her acquaintance, and of how she had been afraid to go, and how desperately ashamed she was when she had “to go in swimming” with the others, and to “show her figure,” her long skinny legs, even when they were concealed by the clumsy bathing dress and the black stockings of the period. She remembered her marriage then, the first years of her life with Barton, her tragic failure to have children, and the long horror of Gant’s last years of sickness—the years of sombre waiting, the ever-impending terror of his death.

A thousand scenes from this past life flashed through her mind now, as she lay there in the darkness, and all of them seemed grotesque, accidental and mistaken, as reasonless as everything in life.

And filled with a numb, speechless feeling of despair and nameless terror, she heard, somewhere across the night, the sound of a train again, and thought:

“My God! My God! What is life about? We are all lying here in darkness in ten thousand little towns—waiting, listening, hoping— for what?”

And suddenly, with a feeling of terrible revelation, she saw the strangeness and mystery of man’s life; she felt about her in the darkness the presence of ten thousand people, each lying in his bed, naked and alone, united at the heart of night and darkness, and listening, as she, to the sounds of silence and of sleep. And suddenly it seemed to her that she knew all these lonely, strange, and unknown watchers of the night, that she was speaking to them, and they to her, across the fields of sleep, as they had never spoken before, that she knew men now in all their dark and naked loneliness, without falseness and pretence as she had never known them. And it seemed to her that if men would only listen in the darkness, and send the language of their naked lonely spirits across the silence of the night, all of the error, falseness and confusion of their lives would vanish; they would no longer be strangers, and each would find the life he sought and never yet had found.

“If we only could!” she thought. “If we only could!”

Then, as she listened, there was nothing but the huge hush of night and silence, and far away the whistle of a train. Suddenly the phone rang.

XXVI

A few minutes after four o’clock that morning as McGuire lay there sprawled upon his desk, the phone rang again. And again he made no move to answer it: he just sat there, sprawled out on his fat elbows, staring stupidly ahead. Creasman came in presently, as the telephone continued to disturb the silence of the hospital with its electric menace, and this time, without a glance at him, answered.

It was Luke Gant. At four o’clock his father had had another hćmorrhage, he had lost consciousness, all efforts to awaken him had failed, they thought he was dying.

The nurse listened carefully for a moment to Luke’s stammering and excited voice, which was audible across the wire even to McGuire. Then, with a troubled and uncertain glance toward the doctor’s sprawled and drunken figure, she said quietly:

“Just a minute. I don’t know if the doctor is in the hospital. I’ll see if I can find him.”

Putting her hand over the mouth-piece, keeping her voice low, she spoke urgently to McGuire:

“It’s Luke Gant. He says his father has had another hćmorrhage and that they can’t rouse him. He wants you to come at once. What shall I tell him?”

He stared drunkenly at her for a moment, and then, waving his finger at her in a movement of fat impatience, he mumbled thickly:

“Nothing to do. . . . No use . . . . Can’t be stopped. . . . People expect miracles. . . . Over. . . . Done for. . . . Tell him I’m not here . . . gone home,” he muttered, and sprawled forward on the desk again.

Quietly, coolly, the nurse spoke into the phone again:

“The doctor doesn’t seem to be here at the hospital, Mr. Gant. Have you tried his house? I think you may find him at home.”

“No, G-g-g-god-damn it!” Luke fairly screamed across the wire. “He’s not at home. I’ve already t-t-tried to get him here. . . . N-n-n-now you look here, Miss Creasman!” Luke shouted angrily. “You c-c-can’t kid me: I know where he is—He’s d-d-down there at the hospital right now—wy-wy-wy—stinkin’ drunk! You t-t-tell him, G-g-g-god-damn his soul, that if he d-d-doesn’t come, wy-wy- wy—P-p-p-papa’s in a bad way and and and f-f-frankly, I fink it’s a rotten shame for McGuire to act this way, wy-wy-wy after he’s b- b-been Papa’s doctor all these years. F-f-frankly, I do!”

“Nothing to be done,” mumbled McGuire. “No use. . . . All over.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Gant,” said Creasman quietly. “I’ll let the doctor know as soon as he comes in!”

“C-c-c-comes in, hell!” Luke stammered bitterly. “I’m c-c-comin’ down there myself and g-g-get him if I have to wy-wy-wy d-d-drag him here by the s-s-scruff of his neck!” And he hung up the receiver with a bang.

The nurse put the phone down on the desk, and turning to McGuire, said:

“He’s raving. He says if you don’t go, he’ll come for you and get you himself. Can’t you pull yourself together enough to go? If you can’t drive the car, I’ll send Joe along to drive it for you.” (Joe was a negro orderly in the hospital.)

“What’s the use?” McGuire mumbled thickly, a little angrily. “What the hell do these people expect, anyway? . . . I’m a doctor, not a miracle man. . . . The man’s gone, I tell you . . . the whole gut and rectum is eaten away . . . he can’t live over a day or two longer at the most. . . . It’s cruelty to prolong it: why the hell should I try to?”

“All right,” she said resignedly. “Do as you please. Only, he’ll probably be here for you himself in a few minutes. And since they do feel that way about it, I think you might make the effort just to please them.”

“Ah-h,” he muttered wearily. “People are all alike. . . . They all want miracles.”

“Are you just going to sit here all night?” she said with a rough kindliness. “Aren’t you going to try to get a little sleep before you operate?”

He waved fat fingers at her, and did not look at her.

“Leave me alone,” he mumbled; and she left him.

When she had gone, he fumbled for the jug and drank again. And then, while time resumed its sanded drip, and he sat there in the silence, he thought again of the old dying man whom he had known first when he was a young doctor just beginning and with whom his own life had been united by so many strange and poignant memories. And thinking of Gant, the strangeness of the human destiny returned to haunt his mind; there was something that he could not speak, a wonder and a mystery he could not express.

He fumbled for the jug again, and holding it solemnly in his bearish paws, drained it. Then he sat for several minutes without moving. Finally, he got up out of his chair, grunting painfully, and fumbling for the walls, lurched out into the hall, and began to grope his way across the corridor toward the stairs. And the first step fooled him as it had done so many times before; he missed his step, even as a man stepping out in emptiness might miss, and came down heavily upon his knees. Then, pushing with his hands, he slid out peacefully on the oiled green linoleum, pillowed his big head on his arms with a comfortable grunt, and sprawled out flat, already half dead to the world. It was in this position—also a familiar one—that Creasman, who had heard his thump when falling, found him. And she spoke sharply and commandingly as one might speak to a little child.

“You get right up off that floor and march upstairs,” she said. “If you want to sleep you’re going to your room; you’ll not disgrace us sleeping on that floor.”

And like a child, as he had done so many times before, he obeyed her. In a moment, as her sharp command reached his drugged consciousness, he grunted, stirred, climbed painfully to his knees, and then, pawing carefully before him like a bear, unable or unwilling to stand up, he began to crawl slowly up the stairs.

And it was in this position, half-way up, pawing his burly and cumbersome way on hands and knees, that Luke Gant found him. Cursing bitterly, and stammering with wild excitement, the young man pulled him to his feet, Creasman sponged off the great bloated face with a cold towel and, assisted by Joe Corpering, the negro man, they got him down the stairs and out of the hospital into Luke’s car.

Dawn was just breaking, a faint glimmer of blue-silver light, with the still purity of the earth, the sweet fresh stillness of the trees, the bird-song waking. The fresh sweet air, Luke’s breakneck driving through the silent streets, the roaring motor—finally, the familiar and powerfully subdued emotion of a death chamber, the repressed hysteria, the pain and tension and the terror of shocked flesh, the aura of focal excitement around the dying man revived McGuire.

Gant lay still and almost lifeless on the bed, his face already tinged with the ghostly shade of death, his breath low, hoarse, faintly rattling, his eyes half-closed, comatose, already glazed with death.

McGuire sighted at his shining needle, and thrust a powerful injection of caffeine, sodium, and benzoate into the arm of the dying man. This served partially to revive him, got him through the low ebb of the dark, his eyes opened, cleared, he spoke again. Bright day and morning came, and Gant still lived. And with the light, their impossible and frenzied hopes came back again, as they have always been revived in desperate men. And Gant did not die that day. He lived on.

XXVII

By the middle of the month Gant had a desperate attack; for four days now he was confined to bed, he began to bleed out of the bowels, he spent four sleepless days and nights of agony, and with the old terror of death awake again and urgent, Helen telegraphed to Luke, who was in Atlanta, frantically imploring him to come home at once.

With the arrival of his son and under the stimulation of Luke’s vital and hopeful nature, the old man revived somewhat: they got him out of bed and into a new wheel-chair which they had bought for the purpose, and the day of his arrival Luke wheeled his father out into the bright June sunshine and through the streets of the town, where he again saw friends, and renewed acquaintances he had not known in years.

The next day Gant seemed better. He ate a good breakfast, by ten o’clock he was up and Luke had dressed him, got him into the new wheelchair and was wheeling him out on the streets again in the bright sunshine. All along the streets of the town people stopped and greeted the old man and his son, and in Gant’s weary old brain there may perhaps have been a flicker of an old hope, a feeling that he had come to life again.

“Wy-wy-wy-wy, he’s f-f-f-fine as silk!” Luke would sing out in answer to the question of some old friend or acquaintance, before his father had a chance to answer. “Aren’t you, C-C-C-Colonel? Wy-wy-wy-wy Lord God! Mr. P-p-p-p-parker, you couldn’t k-k-k-kill him with a wy-wy-wy-wy-wy with a b-b-butcher’s cleaver. He’ll be here when you and I bofe are p-p-p-pushing daisies.” And Gant, pleased, would smile feebly, puffing from time to time at a cigar in the unaccustomed, clumsy, and pitifully hopeful way sick men have.

Towards one o’clock Gant began to moan with pain again and to entreat his son to make haste and take him home. When they got back before the house, Luke brought the wheel chair to a stop and helped his father to get up. His stammering solicitude and over- extravagant offers of help served only to exasperate and annoy the old man who, still moaning feebly, and sniffling with trembling lip, said petulantly:

“No, no, no. Just leave me alone to try to get a moment’s peace, I beg of you, I ask you, for Jesus’ sake.”

“Wy-wy-wy-wy, all right, P-p-p-papa,” Luke stammered with earnest cheerfulness. “Wy-wy-wy, you’re the d-d-d-doctor. Wy-wy, I’ll just wheel the chair up on the porch and then I’ll c-c-come back to your room and f-f-f-fix you up in a j-j-j-j-jiffy.”

“Oh, Jesus, I don’t care what you do. . . . Do what you like,” Gant moaned. “I’m in agony. . . . O Jesus!” he wept. “It’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel—just leave me alone, I beg of you,” he sniffled.

“Wy-wy-wy, yes, sir, P-p-p-papa—wy, you’re the doctor,” Luke said. “Can you make it by yourself all right?” he said anxiously, as his father, leaning heavily upon his cane, started up the stone steps toward the walk that led up to the house.

“Why, yes, now, son,” Eliza, who had heard their voices and come out on the porch, now said diplomatically, seeing that Luke’s well- meant but stammering solicitude had begun to irritate his father. “Mr. Gant doesn’t want any help—you put the car up, son, and leave him alone, he’s able to manage all right by himself.”