It had been almost two years since Eugene had last seen Robert Weaver, but now, by one of those sudden hazards of blind chance that for a moment bring men’s lives together and in an instant show them more than years together could have done, he was to see the other youth again.
One night in his second year at Cambridge he was reading in his room at about two o’clock in the morning, at the heart and core of the brooding silence of night that had come to mean so much to him, and that had the power to stir him as no other time of day could do with a feeling of swelling and exultant joy. The house had gone to sleep long before and there was no sound anywhere: it was late in winter, along in March, and the ice and snow had been packed and frozen on the earth for months with a kind of weary permanence — with a tenacity that gave to winter a harsh and dreary reality, a protraction of grey days and grim grey light which made the memory of other seasons, and particularly the hope of spring, remote and almost unbelievable. The street outside was frozen in this living and animate silence of great cold: suddenly this still perfection of night and darkness was shattered by the engines of a powerful motor which turned into the end of the street from Massachusetts Avenue, and tore along before the house at drunken speed with a roaring explosion of sound. Then, without slackening its speed, the brakes were jammed on, the car skidded murderously to a halt on the slippery pavement, and immediately backed up at full speed until it came before the house again, skidded to a halt and was abruptly silent.
Someone got out with the same violent impatience, slammed the door, and then for a moment he could hear him hunting along the street, swearing and muttering to himself; at length he came back to the house started up the steps on which he slipped or stumbled and fell heavily, after which he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse and feverish discontent: “The God-damnedest place I ever saw. . . . Did they never hear of a light around here? . . . Who the hell would want to live in a place like this?”
He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene’s name at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist. Eugene went to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk; then he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out: “What time do you go to bed? . . . Do you stay up all night? . . . What do you do, sleep all morning?” . . . He looked around the room: the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered with pieces of paper on which he had been writing. Robert broke into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh: “The damnedest place I ever saw!” he said. “Do you sleep on that thing?” he said contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall in one corner of the room.
“No, Robert,” he said, “I sleep on the floor. I use that for an ice-box.”
“What’s that in the corner?” Robert asked, pointing to some dirty shirts he had thrown there. “Shirts? . . . How long has it been since you sent anything to the laundry? . . . What do you do when you want a shirt, go out and buy one? . . . Do you ever take a bath? . . . Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?” He laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary movement, and said, “Lord! Lord! Lord! . . . The things I’ve done!” he shook his head mournfully. “Why, it’s awful,” he said, and he started to shake his head again.
“Why don’t you try to talk a little louder?” Eugene suggested. “I think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven’t heard you yet.”
He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to time and saying, “Lord!”
It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years. Under the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked closely at him: he wore a Derby hat that became his small lean head well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops. For the rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction he had always seemed to get into his clothes — there was always, even in his boyhood, a kind of formal dignity in his dress: he always wore a stiff, starched collar.
Robert’s face had grown thinner, he looked haggard and a good deal older: the lines of his sharp, incisive features were more deeply cut and his eyes, now injected and bloodshot from heavy drinking, were more wild and feverish in their restless discontent than they had ever been — he seemed to be lashed and driven by a savage and desperate hunger which he could neither satisfy nor articulate: he was being consumed and torn to pieces by a torment of desire and longing, the cause of which he could not define, and which he had no means to assuage or quench.
He had a bottle half filled with whisky in the pocket of his fur coat: he took it out and offered Eugene a drink, and after he had drunk he put the bottle to his lips and gulped down all that remained in a single draught. Then he flung the empty bottle away impatiently on the table; it was obvious that the liquor, instead of giving him some peace or comfort, acted as savagely and immediately as oil poured on the tumult of a raging fire — it fed and spurred the madness in him and gave him no release until he had drunk himself into a state of paralysis and stupefaction. He was one of those men for whom alcohol was a fatal and uncontrollable stimulant: having once drawn the cork from a bottle and tasted his first drink he was then powerless to resist or stop: he drank until he could drink no more, and he would beg, fight, lie, cheat, crawl or walk or incur any desperate risk or danger to get more drink. Yet, he told Eugene that until his twenty-first year he had never tasted liquor: he began to drink during his last year in college, and during the two years that followed he had gone far on the road toward alcoholism.
Eugene asked him how he had found out where he lived and, still passing his hand across his forehead, he answered in an impatient and abstracted tone: “Oh . . . I don’t know. . . . Someone told me, I guess. . . . I think it was Arthur Kittrell,” and then he fell to shak............