OF TIME AND THE RIVER by Thomas Wolfe

Author:Thomas Wolfe [Wolfe, Thomas]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-04-07T16:27:52.496189+00:00

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.

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