Of Time and the River (75 page)

“What is it, Mr. Gibbs? What’s the matter? What has he done?”

“Why,” he said, trembling with anger at the very thought of it, “he tried to burn us all up last night. He came in here at three o’clock in the morning, raving and carrying on like a crazy man. Then he went upstairs and set his room on fire.”

“On fire!”

“Why, yes!” said Gibbs. “We had to call the fire brigade to put it out. Why, it’s a wonder any of us are left alive—all of these people sleeping in the hotel and this crazy man yelling and screaming at five o’clock this morning that the place is on fire! Why, we can’t have anything like that in this hotel,” he said with the air of one who describes the desecration of a temple. “We can’t have a man like that here. Why, he’ll drive the other people out, we’ll lose all our guests: people aren’t going to stay in a place with a crazy man. There’s no telling what a man like that is liable to do. Now!” he said with an air of abrupt and pugnacious decision, “he’s got to get out: I won’t have him here! I’m not going to have a man like that in my hotel a moment longer”—his small jaw hardened meanly, his face shrank, and his eyes narrowed, as he turned away, “and someone’s got to pay for all the damage that was done! Now, I don’t care who pays it”—his face was averted—“but it’s not going to be us! Now you can tell him,” he snapped curtly, and he left.

Eugene went upstairs at once to Robert’s room in a state of choking anger and resentment: he felt that Robert had tricked him and taken advantage of him, that he was being held accountable for Robert’s misbehaviour, and that now his own standing in the hotel had been jeopardized and he would be forced to leave this delightful and charming establishment at which he had cursed and mocked so bitterly many times, but which now, in his resentful spirit, took on a peaceful and home-like glamour it had never had before. He walked into Robert’s room without knocking: the room was a wreck, a negro maid was mournfully and sullenly gathering up from the floor the charred and blackened remnants of a pile of bed-linen and blankets; the mirror had been smashed by a drinking-glass which Robert had hurled at it, he said, when he saw his image reflected in it, the remnants of a chair lay on the floor, the heavy glass plate upon a writing table had been broken, there was a large brownish stain upon one of the walls where he had hurled a whisky bottle, and one end of his bed lay tilted on the floor where he had stamped or kicked the slats and boards to splinters. Robert was standing in the midst of all the ruin he had made, with a nervous and rueful expression on his face: when his friend came in he looked at him uneasily and laughed in a feeble and foolish manner, without conviction.

“Now, damn it, don’t stand there laughing about it, Robert,” the other said. “You may think it’s funny as hell, but it’s no joke for me. Of course,” he went on bitterly, “I’m the goat. I’m the one who’s got to suffer for it. I’m the one they hold responsible. Now you’ve just fixed it so that I can’t stay here in the hotel any longer: they’re going to put me out!”

“You!” Robert said, in a protesting tone. “Why, it’s not your fault. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You’re damned well right, I didn’t,” he answered. “And you’re going to tell them so. Now, I was a fool once, but you won’t catch me that way again: I begged and pleaded to get you in here and you go and play a dirty trick like this. And you’re going to pay for it, too.”

“I’ll pay, I’ll pay,” Robert said hastily. “I know it was my fault. I’ll pay whatever they ask. Have they said anything to you about it?” he said nervously. “What do they say?”

“They say you’ve got to pay for all the damage that you’ve done and get out of the hotel at once.”

“Oh, I’ll pay!” he said earnestly, and with a pleading note in his voice. “I don’t want to leave the hotel. . . . I’ll never act like that again. . . . Does Gibbs want to see me?” he said nervously.

“You can just bet your bottom dollar he does! And right now!”

“Come on!” said Robert coaxingly. “You go with me. . . . He’ll listen to you. . . . Tell him how it was.”

“Tell him how it was! Why, he knows damn well how it was! And so do you! You were lousy and crazy-drunk, that’s how it was. . . . No, I won’t do it: I’ve been your goat long enough. You’ll have to fight it out with him for yourself. . . . And don’t you bring my name into it, either, Robert; this was a hell of a thing to do!” Eugene yelled furiously. “In God’s name, what’s got into you? Have you gone mad?”

“Ah,” he said in a brooding, sullen tone, “you know what it is. . . . It’s that woman. . . . It’s Martha! I can’t get her off my mind, I think about her all the time. . . . My God, Eugene, if something doesn’t happen soon, I will go crazy, sure enough.”

“Happen! What do you want to happen?”

He beat himself, suddenly and savagely, on his breast.

“Christ knows!” he said. “Something’s got to break loose . . . here . . . here . . . here!” His eyes were shot with tears and a madness of desperation: in this baffled and infuriated gesture there was something that was really painful, tortured, and deeply moving: all at once Eugene felt sorry for him; he did not know why Robert wanted to stay at the hotel any longer; he did not know what he found there in that shabby and sterile life to attract or interest him, and perhaps it was nothing except a sense in him that he was disgraced, an outcast from the ranks of orderly society: he wanted to stay in order to subdue the fear and shame he felt, and to soothe, in whatever way he could, his lacerated pride. Therefore Eugene resolved to help him.

“Robert,” he said, “if you really want to stay here, why don’t you go and see old Gibbs and talk to him. Tell him you’re sorry for all the trouble you made and the damage you did, and that you’re willing to pay whatever he says is fair. Then let him rave. He’s a sour old devil and he’ll bawl you out, but let him rave. He enjoys it. Then tell him if he’ll let you stay, you’ll never act like this again. And if I can help out any, I’ll do it.”

He agreed to this at once, and Eugene left him and went to his own room: when he went downstairs a few minutes later on his way to his first-class, Robert was standing at the desk, submissively attentive to the tongue-lashing Gibbs was giving him. The little man was in a state of trembling denunciation, he squinted and peered at Robert’s face, and wagged an indignant finger at him; his shrewd, sour, nasal voice carried to all parts of the room, and Robert listened apologetically and sorrowfully, putting in a word of penitent assent from time to time, in a deep, respectful voice:

“I quite agree with you. . . . You are absolutely right, sir. . . . It was a terrible thing to do. . . . I’ll never do it again as long as I live . . . I’ll pay you for every bit of damage that I did”—and he took out his cheque-book and opened it upon the counter. Eugene went over and joined them: the old man was beginning to simmer down somewhat into occasional howls and blasts of fury, like a hurricane which has spent its fiercest violence and is in process of abatement: Robert began to talk smoothly, entreatingly, and charmingly—he swore to a complete and abject repentance, spoke touchingly and mysteriously of great storms and tragedies in his recent life which had driven him to this mad and violent explosion, and gave his solemn oath never to repeat the experience again if he was only allowed to remain in the hotel: Eugene put in a word of agreement here and there when he thought it might help—the upshot of it was that Gibbs finally began to speak to Robert in a tone of almost paternal affection, a kind of radiance was given off from his meagre soul, he bent towards Robert intimately, he even laughed—and when they departed, to their astonishment, he even gave the repentant sinner a warm squeeze of the hand and a friendly pat upon the shoulder.

Within a period of three furious months Robert made trips to Colorado seven times: he got on trains and was hurled 2000 miles across the continent as casually as a man would make the subway trip from Times Square to Brooklyn Heights. Sometimes he would leave New York on Friday night and be back within four or five days, after spending ten hours with Martha Upshaw: sometimes he would be gone a week, and once he did not return for three. On this occasion Eugene received a telegram from him when he had been absent about five days: the message curtly bade Eugene to send all his mail to a hotel in Colorado Springs until further notice, and said he would explain on his return.

Eugene was sitting in the lobby one evening two weeks later when Robert came in. He walked with a limp and his face seemed to have undergone a curious angular distortion: he came toward Eugene with a kind of frozen grin and when he spoke to him he began to mutter something incoherent between set teeth and to point with his finger at his jaw. In a few moments, Eugene was able to decipher his jargon sufficiently to understand that his jaw and nose were broken, that most of the teeth had been extracted, in order that the jaw-bone might be wired together, and that he could not open his mouth now, either to speak or eat, because of wires that bound the fracture. In addition, his nose, which had been strong and straight, now curved sideways in a wide broken arc.

Robert was shockingly thin and wasted, he said he had bled a great deal, and had been unable to eat any solid food since his injury: it was obvious he had about reached the limit of his strength, the whole contour of his skull was visible, his eyes were sunken and burned with a more furious and fatal glow than ever before.

But he laughed at Eugene’s look of stupefaction when he saw him, and laughed again, morosely and indifferently, as he told him the cause of his injuries: he said he had been driving with Martha Upshaw the night he got to Colorado Springs, both had been to a roadhouse and were drunk and neither, to use his description of their feeling, “gave a damn.” The girl was driving, the hour was late, they had come round a curve in a mountain road at great speed, the car had left the road, plunged down a steep embankment, and turned over three times before it smashed up against a tree. The girl had been badly cut by broken glass and had several stitches taken in wounds on her face and head, but she broke no bones. Robert had been hurled twenty feet from the car, he was unconscious and bleeding horribly, and it had been thought at first his injuries were fatal.

But here he was, at least a vital piece of him, smashed and broken, but still fiercely living. It was obvious, however, that this final catastrophe had hardened his spirit in a resolute desperation: the suicidal fatalism—that hunger for death which all men have in them and which is perhaps as strong a driving-force in man as the hunger for life—and which had been strongly marked in Robert only when he was drunk—had now become the habit of his soul. He no longer cared whether he lived or died, in his inmost heart he had grown amorous of death, and it was evident that living flesh and bone could not much longer endure the cruel beating he had given it. And this fact—this shocking, visible, physical fact—as much as anything—sealed him in fatal desperation, confirmed him in his belief that everything was lost.

LI

Man’s youth is a wonderful thing: it is so full of anguish and of magic and he never comes to know it as it is, until it has gone from him for ever. It is the thing he cannot bear to lose, it is the thing whose passing he watches with infinite sorrow and regret, it is the thing whose loss he must lament for ever, and it is the thing whose loss he really welcomes with a sad and secret joy, the thing he would never willingly re-live again, could it be restored to him by any magic.

Why is this? The reason is that the strange and bitter miracle of life is nowhere else so evident as in our youth. And what is the essence of that strange and bitter miracle of life which we feel so poignantly, so unutterably, with such a bitter pain and joy, when we are young? It is this: that being rich, we are so poor; that being mighty, we can yet have nothing, that seeing, breathing, smelling, tasting all around us the impossible wealth and glory of this earth, feeling with an intolerable certitude that the whole structure of the enchanted life—the most fortunate, wealthy, good, and happy life that any man has ever known—is ours—is ours at once, immediately and for ever, the moment that we choose to take a step, or stretch a hand, or say a word—we yet know that we can really keep, hold, take, and possess for ever—nothing. All passes; nothing lasts: the moment that we put our hand upon it it melts away like smoke, is gone for ever, and the snake is eating at our heart again; we see then what we are and what our lives must come to.

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing. He hurls the great shoulder of his strength for ever against phantasmal barriers, he is a wave whose power explodes in lost mid-oceans under timeless skies, he reaches out to grip a fume of painted smoke; he wants all, feels the thirst and power for everything, and finally gets nothing. In the end, he is destroyed by his own strength, devoured by his own hunger, impoverished by his own wealth. Thoughtless of money or the accumulation of material possessions, he is none the less defeated in the end by his own greed—a greed that makes the avarice of King Midas seem paltry by comparison.

And that is the reason why, when youth is gone, every man will look back upon that period of his life with infinite sorrow and regret. It is the bitter sorrow and regret of a man who knows that once he had a great talent and wasted it, of a man who knows that once he had a great treasure and got nothing from it, of a man who knows that he had strength enough for everything and never used it.

All youth is bound to be “misspent”; there is something in its very nature that makes it so, and that is why all men regret it. And that regret becomes more poignant as the knowledge comes to us that this great waste of youth was utterly unnecessary, as we discover, with a bitter irony of mirth, that youth is something which only young men have, and which only old men know how to use. And for that reason, in later years, we all look back upon our youth with sorrow and regret—seeing what a wealth was ours if we had used it— remembering Weisberg, Snodgrass, and O’Hare—finally remembering with tenderness and joy the good bleak visage of the pavement cipher who was the first friend we ever knew in the great city—in whose grey face its million strange and secret mysteries were all compact—and who was our friend, our brother, and this earth’s nameless man. And so Eugene recalled Abraham Jones.