OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Hell, no!" cried Kitchin, fairly dancing about with gleeful satisfaction. "They never touched me! And I'd had as much to drink as any of you. I've been sittin' out front all afternoon reading the paper! I guess they thought I was the only sober one of the crowd," he said modestly. And this apparently was the reason for his astonishing freedom--this and another, more mercenary reason, which will presently be apparent.

  "Why, what do they mean by keeping us locked up back here while you're out front there reading the paper? Darnedest thing I ever heard of!" Robert barked. "Kitchin!" he now said angrily. "You go out there and tell them we want out of here!"

  "I told 'em! I told 'em!" Kitchin said virtuously. "That's what I've been telling them all afternoon."

  "Well, what do they say?" Robert demanded impatiently.

  "Boys," said Kitchin now, shaking his head regretfully, but unable to conceal his own elation and sense of triumph, "I've got news for you--and I'm afraid it's not going to be good news, either. How much money you got?"

  "Money!" Robert cried, in an astounded tone, as if the uses of this vile commodity had never occurred to him. "What's money got to do with it? We want out of here!"

  "I know you do," said Kitchin coolly, "but you're not going to get out unless you've got money enough to pay your fine."

  "Fine?" Robert repeated stupidly.

  "Well, that's what they call it, anyway. Fine or graft, or whatever the hell it is, you've got to pay it if you want to be let out."

  "How much is it?" said Robert. "How much do they want?"

  "Boys," said Kitchin, slowly and solemnly, "have you got seventy-three dollars?"

  "Seventy-three dollars!" Robert shouted. "Kitchin, what are you talking about?"

  "Well, don't shout at me," said Kitchin. "I can't help it! I didn't do it! But if you get out of here that's what you've got to pay."

  "Seventy-three dollars!" Robert cried. "Seventy-three dollars for what?"

  "Well, Robert," said Kitchin patiently, "you've got to pay fifty dollars fine and one dollar costs. That's because you were driving the car. That's fifty-one. And Emmet and Eugene here have to pay ten dollars apiece and one dollar costs--that's twenty-two dollars more. That figures up to seventy-three dollars. Have you got it?"

  "Why, the dirty grafting sons of bitches!" Blake now cried. "Telling us that everything would be all right and that they had put us in here so we wouldn't hurt ourselves! . . . All right, you cheap grafting bastards!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, rattling the barred door furiously as he spoke. "We'll give you your dirty graft--but wait till I get out of here!" he cried threateningly. "Just wait till I get out! George Blake will tend to you!" he shouted. "It'll be the worst day's work you've ever done!"

  But no one answered, although Blake and Robert cursed foully and shouted insults at the men. Meanwhile Kitchin waited patiently before their cells until the furious tumult should subside a little; when they were calmer he suggested that they pool their resources to see if they had enough to pay the total of the fines. But the sum of their combined funds was only a little more than forty dollars, of which Blake and Robert contributed the greater part and of which Eugene could contribute less than three dollars, which was all he had.

  When it was apparent that their total funds would not be adequate to secure their release Blake, still furiously angry, began to talk in a loud and drunken tone of bravado about his famous uncle, scrawling out a cheque and instructing Kitchin to go at once to the local agent for his uncle's motor cars and get the necessary money.

  "Any Blake dealer in the country will cash my personal cheque for fifty thousand dollars any time I need it!" he cried with extravagant boast, as if he thought this threat of opulence would strike terror to the hearts of the police. "Yes, sir!" he said. "All you got to do is to walk into any Blake agency in the country and tell them George Blake's nephew needs money--and they'll give you everything they've got!" he cried. "Tell 'em you need ten thousand dollars," he said, coming down in scale somewhat, "and they'll have it for you in five minutes."

  "Why, Emmet," said Kitchin quietly, and yet with a trace of mockery and ridicule on his dark, handsome, and rather sly face. "We don't need fifty thousand dollars. You know, we're not trying to buy the whole damned jail. Now, I thought," he went on quietly and ironically, "that all we needed was about thirty or forty--say fifty dollars--to make up the fine and get us out of town."

  "Yes," said Robert in a quick excited tone of vigorous agreement. "You're absolutely right! That's all we need, all right!"

  "All right! All right! Go to the Blake dealer! Go to the Blake dealer! That's what I'm telling you," cried Blake with an arrogant impatience. "He'll give you anything you want.--What are you waiting for?" he cried furiously. "Go on! Go on!"

  "But Emmet," said Kitchin quietly and reasonably, in his dark low voice, as he looked at the cheque which Blake had scrawled out for him. "This cheque you've given me is for five hundred dollars. Hadn't you better make out another one for fifty? You know, we don't need five hundred dollars, Emmet. And besides," he suggested tactfully, "the man might not have that much on hand. Hadn't you better give me one just made out for what we need?"

  "He'll have it! He's got it! He's got to have it!" said Blake with a dogmatic and unreasoning arrogance. "Tell him I sent you and you'll get the money right away!"

  Kitchin did not answer him: he thrust the cheque into his pocket and turned to Eugene, saying quietly:

  "Didn't you say your brother was waiting to meet you here at a hotel?"

  "Yes: he expected to meet me at four o'clock when that service car came in."

  "At what hotel?"

  "The Blackstone--listen, Kitchin," he reached through the bar and grabbed him by the arm, with a feeling of cold horror in his heart. "For Christ's sake, don't drag my brother into this," he whispered. "Kitchin--listen to me! If you can get this money from the Blake agent here, for God's sake, do it! What's the use of bringing my brother into it," he pleaded, "when it's all between the four of us, and can stay that way? I don't want my family to know I ever got into any trouble like this. Kitchin, look here--I can get the money for my fine: I've got a little money in the bank, and I'll pay Blake every cent I owe him if you get the money from the agent. Now, promise me you won't go and tell my brother!"

  He held him hard in the tension of desperation, and Kitchin promised. Then he went swiftly away, and they were left alone in their cells again. Robert, utterly cast down from his high exaltation, now cursed bitterly and morosely against the police and the injustice of his luck and destiny.

  Meanwhile, Blake, whose final and chief resource, it had now become pitifully evident, was nothing in himself but just the accident of birth that had made him nephew to a powerful and wealthy man, kept declaring in a loud voice of arrogant bravado that "any Blake agent in the United States will cash my personal cheque for fifty thousand dollars any time I ask for it! Yes, sir, any of them--I don't give a damn where it is! He's on his way here now! You'll see! We'll be out of here in five minutes now!"--a boastful assurance that was hardly out of his mouth before they heard steps approaching rapidly along the corridor and, even as Blake cried out triumphantly, "What did I tell you?" and as Eugene leaped up and ran to the door of his cell, clutching the bars with both hands, and peering out with bloodshot eyes like a caged gorilla, Kitchin entered the cell-room, followed by a policeman, and--Eugene's brother!

  Luke looked at him for a moment with a troubled expression and said: "Why, how did you get in here? What's happened to you?" he said, suddenly noticing his battered face. "Are you hurt, Eugene?"

  The boy made no reply but looked at him with sullen desperation and jerked his head towards the cells where his two companions were imprisoned--a gesture that pleaded savagely for silence. And Luke, instantly reading the meaning of that gesture, turned and called out cheerfully:

  "Now you boys just hold on a minute and I'll have you out of here."

  Then he came up close to the barred door of the cell wh
ere his younger brother stood and, his face stern with care, he said in a low voice: "What happened? Who hit you? Did any of these bastards hit you? I want to know."

  A policeman was standing behind him looking at them with narrowed eyes, and the boy said desperately:

  "Get us out of here. I'll tell you later."

  Then Luke went away with the policeman to pay their fines. When he had gone, Eugene turned bitterly on Kitchin, who had remained with the boys, accusing him of breaking his word by going to Luke. Kitchin's dark evasive eyes shifted nervously in his head as he answered:

  "Well, what else could I do? I went to the Blake agent here--"

  "Did you get the money?" Blake said. "Did he give it to you?"

  "Give!" Kitchin said curtly, with a sneer. "He gave me nothing--not a damned cent! He said he'd never heard of you!"

  There was silence for a moment.

  "Well, I can't understand that," Blake said at length, feebly, and in a tone of dazed surprise. "That's the first time anything like that has ever happened."

  At this moment Eugene's brother returned with two policemen, who unlocked the cell doors and let them out. The feeling of coming from the cell into free space again was terrific in its physical intensity: never before had Eugene known the physical sensations of release as he knew them at that moment. The very light and air in the space outside the cell had a soaring buoyancy and freshness which, by comparison, gave to that within the cell a material and oppressive heaviness, a sense of walled and mortared space that had pressed upon his heart and spirit with a crushing weight. Now, suddenly, as if a cord that bound him had been cut, or a brutal hand that held his life in its compelling grip had been removed, the sensations of release and escape filled his body with a sense of aerial buoyancy and the power of wing-like flight.

  With a desperate eagerness he had never felt before he wanted to feel the free light and air again: even the shocked solicitude of his companions when they saw his puffed lips and his blackened eye was drearily oppressive. He thrust past them, muttering, striding towards the door.

  It was the first time in his life that he had ever been arrested and locked up, and for the first time now, he felt and understood the meaning of an immense and brutal authority in life, which he had seen before, but to which he had always believed himself to be immune. Until that day he had had all the pride and arrogance a young man knows. Since childhood no one had ever compelled him to do anything by force, and although he had seen the million evidences of force, privilege, and compulsion applied to the lives of people around him, so that like every other native of the land in which he lived, he had in his heart no belief in law whatever, and knew that legal justice, where it was achieved, was achieved by fortuitous accident rather than by intent, he had believed, as every young man believes, that his own life and body were fiercely immune to every indignity of force and compulsion.

  Now this feeling was gone for ever. And having lost it irrecoverably, he had gained something of more value.

  For now, he was conscious, even at the moment he came out of the cell, of a more earthly, common, and familiar union with the lives of other men than he had ever known. And this experience was to have another extraordinary effect upon his spirit and its understanding and love of poetry, which may seem ludicrous, but which certainly dated from these few hours of his first imprisonment. Up to this time in his life, the poet who had stirred him by his power and genius more than any other was the poet Shelley.

  But in the years that followed, Shelley's poetry came to have so little meaning for him that all the magic substance which his lines once had was lost, and Eugene seemed to look indifferently at the hollow shells and ghosts of words, from which all enchantment and belief had vanished. And he felt this way not because the words of this great poet now seemed false to him, but because, more than any other poet he had known, Shelley was the poet of that time of life when men feel most strongly the sense of proud and lonely inviolability, which is legible in everything he wrote, and when their spirits, like his, are also "tameless and swift and proud." And this is a time of life and magic that, once gone, is gone for ever, and that may never be recaptured save by memory.

  But in the years that followed, just as Eugene's physical body grew coarser and more heavy, and his sensual appetites increased enormously, so also did the energy of his spirit, which in childhood had been wing-like, soaring, and direct in its aerial buoyancy, grow darker, slower, heavier, smouldering and slow in its beginning heat and densely woven and involved in all its web-like convolutions.

  And as all the strength and passion of his life turned more and more away from its childhood thoughts of aerial flight and escape into some magic and unvisited domain, it seemed to him that the magic and unvisited domain was the earth itself, and all the life around him--that he must escape not out of life but into it, looking through walls he never had seen before, exploring the palpable and golden substance of this earth as it had never been explored, finding, somehow, the word, the key, the door, to the glory of a life more fortunate and happy than any man has ever known, and which yet incredibly, palpably, is his, even as the earth beneath his feet is his, if he could only take it.

  And as he discovered this, Eugene turned more and more for food and comfort to those poets who have found it and who have left great pieces of that golden earth behind them in their verse, as deathless evidence that they were there:--those poets who wrote not of the air but of the earth, and in whose verse the gold and glory of the earth are treasured--their names are Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, Herrick, Donne, and Herbert.

  Their names are Milton (whom fools have called glacial and austere, and who wrote the most tremendous lines of earthly passion and sensuous magic that have ever yet been written), Wordsworth, Browning, Whitman, Keats, and Heine--their names are Job, Ecclesiastes, Homer, and The Song of Solomon.

  These are their names, and if any man should think the glory of the earth has never been, let him live alone with them, as Eugene did, a thousand nights of solitude and wonder, and they will reveal to him again the golden glory of the earth, which is the only earth that is, and is for ever, and is the only earth that lives, the only one that will never die.

  XLIV

  When they got out into the street again, night had almost come. It was about six o'clock, the lights in the streets had gone on, and in the figures of the people that went by, and the motor cars that flashed past sparsely, there was something hurried, mournful, and departing, like the breath of autumn and old leaves stirred by wind and driven on.

  Neither spoke for some time, nor dared look at the other: the boy walked with lowered head, his hat pulled down across his eyes. His lips were puffed and swollen, and his left eye was now entirely closed, a blind poached swelling of bruised blue. They passed below a street lamp, paused for a minute in the hard white glare, turned as if impelled by sombre instinct, and regarded each other with the stern defenceless eye of shame and sorrow. Luke looked earnestly at his brother for a second and then said gently:

  "How's your eye, Eugene?"

  The boy said nothing: sullenly, steadily, with his one good eye he returned his brother's look. Luke stared for a minute at the nauseous, fatted purple where the bad eye was, suddenly cursed bitterly, turned, and walked ahead.

  "The d-d-dirty bastards!" he said. "I've always fought they were a f-f-fairly decent lot till now, but the nice, damned, d-d-d-dirty South Car'lina--" he ground his teeth together, paused again, and turned towards his younger brother: "What d-d-did they do to you while you were in there? I w-w-w-want to know what happened."

  "I guess I got what was coming to me," the boy muttered. "We were all drunk, and we were driving pretty fast. So I want you to know that I'm not making any excuses for that."

  "Well," Luke said quietly, "that's all over now, and there's no use to w-w-worry about it. I guess you're not the f-f-f-first one that it's happened to. So let's f-f-forget about that." He was silent for a moment, and then he went on sternly: "But if t
hose b-b-bastards beat you up while you were in there I w-w-w-want to know about it."

  "I'm not kicking about it," the boy muttered again, because he was ashamed to tell him of the struggle he had had with the two policemen. "I guess I had it coming--but there was one thing!" he said with a surge of bitter feeling as he remembered it. "They did one thing I don't believe they had any right to do. If it had happened in the North it would have been all right, but, by God, I don't believe they have any right in this State to put a white man in the same cell with a nigger!"

  "Did they d-d-d-do that to you?" Luke cried in an excited voice, stopping short and half turning as he spoke.

  "Yes, they did, they tried to," and then he told him what had happened. Luke turned completely, and started back towards the station, cursing bitterly.

  "C-c-come on!" he said.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I'm g-g-g-going down there and tell those b-b-b-bastards what I fink of them!"

  "No, you're not! Listen!" Eugene seized his brother by the arm. "We'll only get locked up again! They've got us and we've got to take it! We're not going! Let's get out of this damned town quick as we can! I never want to see the place again!"

  Luke paused and stood, distractedly thrusting his fingers through his hair.

  "All right," he said at last. "We'll go. . . . But by G-g-god," his voice rose suddenly and he shook his fist in the direction of the station, "I'll be back. I've done business in this town for years, I've got f-f-f-friends here who are going goddam well to know the reason why a kid is beaten up and locked up with a n-n-nigger by the Blackstone cops. I'll see this f'ing through now if it t-t-t-takes a lifetime!" Then, turning to his brother, he said shortly: "All right, Gene. C-c-come on. We're g-g-getting out of town."

  Without further speech, they walked on down the street until they came to the place where Luke's car was parked.

  "W-w-w-what do you want to d-d-d-do, Gene?" he said quietly. "Do you want to go over to D-d-Daisy's tonight?"