OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Oh, change of life be damned!" he said in a disgusted tone. "Here you are a young woman thirty-two years old and you talk to me about a change of life! That has about as much sense to it as a lot of other things you say! The only thing you change is your mind--and you do that every five minutes!" He was silent for a moment, breathing heavily and staring at her coarsely with his bloated and unshaven face, his veined and weary-looking eyes. When he spoke again his voice was gruff and quiet, touched with a burly, almost paternal tenderness:

  "Helen," he said, "I'm worried about you--and not about your father. Your father is an old man now with a malignant cancer and with no hope of ever getting well again. He is tired of life, he wants to die--for God's sake why do you want to prolong his suffering, to try to keep him here in a state of agony, when death would be a merciful release for him? . . . I know there is no hope left for your father: he has been doomed for years, the sooner the end comes the better--"

  She tried to speak but he interrupted her brusquely, saying:

  "Just a minute. There's something that I want to say to you--for God's sake try to use it, if you can. The death of this old man seems strange and horrible to you because he is your father. It is as hard for you to think about his death as it is to think about the death of God Almighty; you think that if your father dies there will be floods and earthquakes and convulsions throughout nature. I assure you that this is not true. Old men are dying every second of the day, and nothing happens except they die--"

  "Oh, but Papa was a wonderful man," she said. "I know! I know! Everybody who ever knew him said the same."

  "Yes," McGuire agreed, "he was--he was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. And that is what makes it all the harder now."

  She looked at him eagerly, and said:

  "You mean--his dying?"

  "No, Helen," McGuire spoke quietly and with a weary patience. "There's nothing very bad about his dying. Death seems so terrible to you because you know so little about it. But I have seen so much of death, I have seen so many people die--and I know there is really nothing very terrible about it, and about the death of an old man ravaged by disease there is nothing terrible at all. It seems terrible to those looking on--there are," he shrugged his fat shoulders, "there are sometimes--physical details that are unpleasant. But the old man knows little of all that: an old man dies as a clock runs down--he is worn out, has lost the will to live, he wants to die, and he just stops. That is all. And that will happen to your father."

  "Oh, but it will be so strange now--so hard to understand!" she muttered with a bewildered look in her eyes. "We have expected him to die so many times--we have been fooled so often--and now I can't believe that it will ever happen. I thought that he would die in 1916, I never expected him to live another year; in 1918, the year that Ben died, none of us could see how he'd get through the winter--and then Ben died! No one had even thought of Ben--" her voice grew cracked and hoarse and her eyes glistened with tears. "We had forgotten Ben--everyone was thinking about Papa--and then when Ben died I turned against Papa for a time. For a while I was bitter against him--it seemed that I had done everything for this old man, that I had given him everything I had--my life, my strength, my energy--all because I thought that he was going to die--and then Ben, who had never been given anything--who had had nothing out of life--who had been neglected and forgotten by us all and who was the best one--the most decent of the whole crowd--Ben was the one who had to go. For a time after his death I didn't care what happened--to Papa or to any one else. I was so bitter about Ben's death--it seemed so cruel, so rotten and unjust--that it had to be Ben of all the people in the world--only twenty-six years old and without a thing to show for his life--no love, no children, no happiness, cheated out of everything, when Papa had had so much--I couldn't stand the thought of it, even now I hate to go to Mama's house, it almost kills me to go near Ben's room, I've never been in it since the night he died--and somehow I was bitter against Papa! It seemed to me that he had cheated me, tricked me--at times I got so bitter that I thought that he was responsible in some way for Ben's death. I said I was through with him, that I would do nothing else for him, that I had done all that I intended to do, and that somebody else would have to take care of him. . . . But it all came back; he had another bad spell and I was afraid that he was going to die, and I couldn't stand the thought of it. . . . And it has gone on now so long, year after year, and year after year," she said in a frenzied tone, "always thinking that he couldn't last and seeing him come back again, that I couldn't believe that it would ever happen. I can't believe it now. . . . And what am I going to do?" she said hoarsely and desperately, clutching McGuire by the sleeve, "what am I going to do now if he really dies? What is there left for me in life with Papa gone?" Her voice was almost sobbing now with grief and desperation--"He's all I've got to live for, Doctor McGuire. I've got nothing out of life that I wanted or expected--it's all been so different from the way I thought it was--I've had nothing--no fame, no glory, no success, no children--everything has gone--Papa is all that I have left! If he dies what shall I do?" she cried frantically, shaking him by the sleeve. "That old man is all I've got--the only thing I've got left to live for; to keep him alive, to make him comfortable, to ease his pain, to see he gets good food and attention--somehow, somehow," she panted desperately, clasping her big bony hands in a gesture of unconscious but pitiable entreaty, and beginning to rock unsteadily on her feet as she spoke--"somehow, somehow, to keep life in him, to keep him here, not to let him go--that's all I've got to live for--what in the name of God am I going to do when that is taken from me?"

  And she paused, panting and exhausted by her tirade, her big face strained and quivering, glaring at him with an air of frantic entreaty as if it was in his power to give the answers to these frenzied questions. And for a moment he said nothing; he just stood there looking at her with the coarse and brutal stare of his blotched face, his venous yellowed eyes, the wet cigarette stuck comically at the corner of one fat lip.

  "What are you going to do?" he barked, presently. "You're going to get hold of yourself--pull yourself together--amount to something, be somebody!" He coughed chokingly to one side, for a moment there was just the sound of his thick short breathing, then he flung the cigarette away, and said quietly:

  "Helen, for God's sake, don't throw your life away! Don't destroy the great creature that lies buried in you somewhere--wake it up, make it come to life. Don't talk to me of this old man's life as if it were your own--"

  "It is, it is!" she said in a brooding tone of morbid fatality.

  "It is not!" he said curtly, "unless you make it so--unless you play the weakling and the fool and throw yourself away. For God's sake, don't let that happen to you. I have seen it happen to so many people--some of them fine people like yourself, full of energy, imagination, intelligence, ability--all thrown away, frittered away like that," he flung fat fingers in the air--"because they did not have the guts to use what God had given them--to make a new life for themselves--to stand on their own feet and not to lean upon another's shoulder! . . . Don't die the death!" he rasped coarsely, staring at her with his brutal face. "Don't die the rotten, lousy, dirty death-in-life--the only death that's really horrible! For God's sake, don't betray life and yourself and the people who love you by dying that kind of death! I've seen it happen to so many people--and it was always so damned useless, such a rotten waste! That's what I was trying to say to you a few minutes ago--it's not the death of the dying that is terrible, it is the death of the living. And we always die that death for the same reason:--because our father dies, and takes from us his own life, his world, his time--and we haven't courage enough to make a new life, a new world for ourselves. I wonder if you know how often that thing happens--how often I have seen it happen--the wreck, the ruin, and the tragedy it has caused in life! When the father goes, the whole structure of the family life goes with him--and unless his children have the will, the stuff, the courage to make something of thei
r own, they die too. . . . With you, it's going to be very hard when your father dies; he was a man of great vitality and a strong personality who has left a deep impression on everyone who knew him. And for seven years now, your father's death has been your life. . . . It has become a part of you, you have brooded over it, lived with it, soaked in it, been tainted by it--and now it is going to be hard for you to escape. But escape you must, and stand on your own feet--or you are lost. . . . Helen!" he barked sharply, and fixed her with his coarse and brutal stare--"listen to me:--your childhood, Woodson Street, getting your father over drunks, cooking for him, nursing him, feeding him, dressing and undressing him--I know about it all, I saw it all--and now!"--he paused, staring at her, then made a sudden gesture outward, palms downward, of his two thick hands--"over, done for, gone for ever! It's no good any more, it won't work any more, it can't be brought back any more--forget about it!"

  "Oh, I can't! I can't!" she said desperately. "I can't give him up--I can't let him go--he's all I've got. Doctor McGuire," she said earnestly, "ever since I was a kid of ten and you first came to get Papa over one of his sprees, I've fairly worshipped you! I've always felt down in my heart that you were one of the most wonderful people--the most wonderful doctor--in the world! I've always felt that at the end you could do anything--perform a miracle--bring him back. For God's sake, don't go back on me now! Do something--anything you can--but save him, save him."

  He was silent for a moment, and just stared at her with his yellow, venous eyes. And when he spoke his voice was filled with the most quiet and utter weariness of despair that she had ever heard:

  "Save him?" he said. "My poor child, I can save no one--nothing--least of all myself."

  And suddenly she saw that it was true; she saw that he was lost, that he was done for, gone, and that he knew it. His coarse and bloated face was mottled by great black purplish patches, his yellow weary eyes already had the look of death in them; the knowledge of death rested with an unutterable weariness in his burly form, was audible in the short thick labour of his breath. She saw instantly that he was going to die, and with that knowledge her heart was torn with a rending pity as if a knife had been driven through it and twisted there; all of the brightness dropped out of the day, and in that moment it seemed that the whole substance and structure of her life was gone.

  The day was a shining one, full of gold and sapphire and sparkle, and in the distance, toward the east, she could see the sweet familiar green of hills. She knew that nothing had been changed at all, and yet even the brightness of the day seemed dull and common to her. It served only to make more mean and shabby the rusty buildings and the street before her. And the bright light filled her with a nameless uneasiness and sense of shame: it seemed to expose her, to show her imperfections nakedly, and instinctively she turned away from it into the drug-store, where there were coolness, artificial lights and gaiety, the clamour of voices and people that she knew. And she knew that most of them had come here for the same reason--because the place gave them a sort of haven, however brief and shabby, from the naked brightness of the day and their sense of indefinable uncertitude and shame--because "it was the only place there was to go."

  Several young people, two girls and a boy were coming down among the crowded tables towards one of the mirrored booths against the wall, where another boy and girl were waiting for them. As they approached, she heard their drawling voices, talking "cute nigger-talk" as her mind contemptuously phrased it, the vapid patter phrased to a monotonous formula of "charm," inane, cheap, completely vulgar, and as if they had been ugly little monsters of some world of dwarfs she listened to them with a detached perspective of dislike and scorn.

  One of the girls--the one already in the booth--was calling to the others in tones of playful protest, in her "cute," mannered, empty little voice:

  "Hey! theah, you all! Wheah you been! Come on, heah, man!" she cried urgently and reproachfully toward the approaching youth--"We been lookin' up an' down faw you! What you been doin', anyhow?" she cried with reproachful curiosity. "We been waitin' heah an' waitin' heah until it seemed lak you nevah would come! We wuh about to give you up!"

  "Child!" another of the girls drawled back, and made a languid movement of the hand--a move indicative of resignation and defeat. "Don't tawk! I thought we nevah would get away. . . . That Jawdan woman came in to see Mothah just as me an' Jim was fixin' to go out, an' child!"--again the languid movement of exhaustion and defeat--"when that woman gits stahted tawkin' you might as well give up! No one else can git a wuhd in edgeways. I'll declayah!" the voice went up, and the hand again made its languid movement of surrender--"I nevah huhd the lak of it in all mah days! That's the tawkinest woman that evah lived. You'd a-died if you could a-seen the way Jim looked. I thought he was goin' to pass right out befoah we got away from theah!"

  "Lady," said Jim, who had as yet taken no part in the conversation, "you said it! It sho'ly is the truth! That sho is one tawkin' woman--an' I don't mean maybe, eithah!" He drawled these words out with an air of pert facetiousness, and then looked round him with a complacent smirk on his young, smooth, empty face to see if his display of wit had been noticed and properly appreciated.

  And Helen, passing by, kept smiling, plucking at her chin abstractedly, feeling toward these young people a weary disgust that was tinged with a bitter and almost personal animosity.

  "Awful little made-up girls . . . funny-looking little boys . . . nothing to do but hang out here and loaf . . . walk up and down the street . . . and drink coca-cola all day long . . . and to think it seemed so wonderful to me when I was a kid, to dress up and go up town and come in here where Papa was. . . . How dull and cheap and dreary it all is!"

  XXII

  A little after three o'clock one morning in June, Hugh McGuire was seated at his desk in the little office which stood just to the left of the entrance hall at the Altamont Hospital, of which institution he was chief of staff and principal owner. McGuire's burly bloated form was seated in a swivel chair and sprawled forward, his fat arms resting on the desk, which was an old-fashioned roll-top affair with a number of small cubby-holes above and with two parallel rows of drawers below. In the space below the desk and between the surgeon's fat legs there was a gallon jug of corn whisky.

  And on the desk there was a stack of letters which had also been delivered to him the day before. The letters had been written to one of McGuire's own colleagues by a certain very beautiful lady of the town, of whom it is only necessary to say that she was not McGuire's wife and that he had known her for a long time. The huge man--curiously enough, not only a devoted father and a loyal husband, but a creature whose devotion to his family had been desperately intensified by the bitter sense of his one unfaith--had been for many years obsessed by one of those single, fatal and irremediable passions which great creatures of this sort feel only once in life, and for just one woman. Now the obsession of that mad fidelity was gone--exploded in an instant by a spidery scheme of words upon a page, a packet of torn letters in a woman's hand. Hence, this sense now of a stolid, slow, and cureless anguish in the man, the brutal deliberation of his drunkenness. Since finding these letters upon his desk when he had returned at seven o'clock the night before from his visit to Gant, McGuire had not left his office or moved in his chair, except to bend with a painful grunt from time to time, feel between his legs with a fat hand until he found the jug, and then, holding it with a bear-like solemnity between his paws, drink long and deep of the raw, fiery, and colourless liquid in the jug. He had done this very often, and now the jug was two-thirds empty. As he read, his mouth was half open and a cigarette was stuck on the corner of one fat lip, a look that suggested a comical drunken stupefaction. The hospital had long since gone to sleep, and in the little office there was no sound save the ticking of a clock and McGuire's short, thick, and stertorous breathing. Then when he had finished a letter, he would fold it carefully, put it back in its envelope, rub his thick fingers across the stubble of brown-reddish bea
rd that covered his bloated and discoloured face, reach with a painful grunt for the glass jug, drink, and open up another letter.

  And from time to time he would put a letter down before he had finished reading it, take up a pen, and begin to write upon a sheet of broad hospital stationery, of which there was a pad upon his desk. And McGuire wrote as he read, slowly, painfully, carefully, with a fixed and drunken attentiveness, no sound except the minute and careful scratching of the pen in his fat hands, and the short, thick stertorous breathing as he bent over the tablet, his cigarette plastered comically at the edge of one fat lip.

  McGuire would read the letters over and over, slowly, carefully, and solemnly. Burly, motionless and with no sound save for the short and stertorous labour of his breath, he stared with drunken fixity at the pages which he held close before his yellowed eyes, his bloated face. He had read each letter at least a dozen times during the course of the long evening. And each time that he finished reading it, he would fold it carefully with his thick fingers, put it back into its envelope, bend and reach down between his fat legs with a painful grunt, fumble for the liquor jug, and then drink long and deep.

  It seemed that a red-hot iron had been driven through his heart and twisted there; the liquor burned in his blood and stomach like fire; and each time that he had finished reading that long letter, he would grunt, reach for the jug again, and then slowly and painfully begin to scrawl some words down on the pad before him.