It was in this temper, after two days of aimless and frenzied wandering about the streets of the town, and over the hills that surrounded it, during which time he was no more conscious of what he did, said, ate, thought or felt than a man in a trance, that Eugene started off suddenly to visit his other married sister, who lived in a little town in South Carolina. He had not seen her since his father’s death two years ago; she had written him a few days before asking him to come down, and now, driven more by a fury of flight and movement than by any other impulse, he wired her he was coming, and started out in one of the Public Service motor cars which at that time made the trip across the mountains. Luke had arranged to meet him sixty miles from home at the town of Blackstone, in South Carolina, and drive him the remainder of the distance to his sister’s house.
He set out on a day in late October, wild and windy, full of ragged torn clouds of light that came and went from grey to gold and back to grey again. And everything that happened on that savage day he was to remember later with a literal and blazing intensity.
Autumn had come sharp and quick that year. October had been full of frost and nipping days, the hills were glorious that year as Eugene had never seen them before. Now, only a day or two before, there had been, despite the early season, a sudden and heavy fall of snow. It still lay, light but fleecy, in the fields; and on the great bulk of the hills it lay in a pattern of shining white, stark greys and blacks, and the colours of the leaves, which now had fallen thickly and had lost their first sharp vividness, but were still burning with a dull massed molten glow.
An hour away, and twenty-five miles from home, the car had drawn up before the post office of a mountain village or resort which lay at the crest of the last barrier of the hills, before the road dropped sharply down the mountain-side to South Carolina.
While they were halted here, another car drove up — an open, glittering, and expensive-looking projectile of light grey — and in it were three young men from home, two of whom Eugene knew. This car drew up abreast, stopped, and he saw that its driver was Robert Weaver. And although he had not seen the other youth since a midnight visit Robert had made to his room in Cambridge, the latter peered over towards him owlishly and without a word of greeting and with that abrupt, feverish, and fragmentary speech that was characteristic of him and was constantly becoming more dissonant and broken, he barked out:
“Who’s in there? Who’s that sitting up there in the front seat? Is that you, Gene?” he called.
When Gene assured him that it was, Robert asked where he was going. When he told him “Blackstone,” he demanded at once that he leave the service car and come with him.
“We’re going there, too,” he said. Turning to his comrades, he added earnestly:
“Aren’t we? Isn’t that where we’re going, boys?”
The two young men to whom he spoke now laughed boisterously, crying: “Yeah! That’s right! That’s where we’re going, Robert,” and one of them added with a solemn gravity:
“We’re going to — Blackstone,” here a slight convulsion seemed to seize his throat, he swallowed hard, hiccoughed, and concluded, “to see a football game”— a statement which again set them off into roars of boisterous laughter. Then they all shouted at Eugene:
“Come on! Come on! Get in! We’ve lots of room.”
Eugene got out of the service car, paid the driver, took the small hand-case he had, and got into the other car with Robert and his two companions. They drove off fast, and almost immediately they were dropping down the mountain, along the sinuous curves and turns of the steep road.
Robert’s two companions on this journey were young men whom Eugene had not known in boyhood, with whom he had now only a speaking acquaintance, and both of whom were recent comers to the town. The older of these two was a man named Emmet Blake, and he now sat beside Robert on the front seat of the car.
Emmet Blake was a man of twenty-seven years, a frail and almost wasted-looking figure of medium height, straight black hair, black eyes, and a thin, febrile, and corrupted-looking face which, although almost dead-white in its colour, was given a kind of dark and feverish vitality by a faint thin smile that seemed always to hover about the edges of his mouth, and the dark unnatural glitter of his black eyes.
He lived a reckless and dissipated life and drank heavily: time after time, after a h?morrhage of the lungs, he had been taken to a sanatorium in an ambulance, and his death had seemed to be a matter of only a few hours. And time after time he had come out again, and immediately started on another wild spree of women and corn whisky with Robert and others of the same breed. He was well-off as to money, and lived expensively, because he was a nephew of George Blake, the great Middle–Western manufacturer of cheap motor cars, which in twenty years’ time had created twenty thousand jokes and glutted the highways of the earth in twenty million tinny and glittering repetitions.
The name of the other youth, who was Eugene’s own age and sat beside him on the back seat, was Kitchin. He was a tall, dark, handsome fellow, with agreeable manners and a pleasant voice, the nephew of a retired physician in the town but not native to the place. Eugene had seen him on the streets, but had never talked to him before. It was evident that both Robert and his two friends had been drinking, although not heavily: there was in their manner the subdued yet wild and mounting elation of young men when they begin to drink. They laughed a great deal, rather hilariously, and for no good reason: they insisted frequently that they were going to the town of Blackstone to see a football game, an announcement which would set them off again in roars of laughter.
Almost as soon as Eugene got into the car, and even as they started off again, Blake thrust his thin hand into the leather pocket of the door beside him, produced a bottle that was three-quarters full of Scotch whisky, and turning, gave it to Eugene, saying:
“Take a big one, Gant. We’re all ahead of you.”
He drank long and deep, gulping the fiery liquor down his throat recklessly, feeling suddenly an almost desperate sense of release from the grey misery of hopelessness which had crushed him down for days now, since the letter had come. When he had finished he handed the bottle back to Emmet Blake, who took it, looked at it with a thin, evil, speculative smile, and said:
“Well, that’s pretty good. What do you say, Robert? Shall we let him pass on that?”
“Hell, no!” cried Robert hoarsely, looking swiftly round at the bottle. “That’s no drink! Make him take a good one, Emmet. You’ve got to do better than that if you keep up with us,” he cried, and then he burst out suddenly in his staccato laugh, shaking his head to himself as he bent over the wheel, and crying out: “Lord! Lord!”
Blake handed Eugene the bottle again, and he drank some more. Then Kitchin took the bottle and drank; he handed it back to Emmet Blake, who drank, and Blake handed it to Robert, who took it with one hand, his face turned slightly from the wheel, his eyes still fastened on the road, and drank until the bottle was empty. Then he flung it away from him across his arm. The bottle went sailing out across the road and down the gulch or deep ravine that sloped away beside them far down: the bottle struck a rock, exploding brilliantly in a thousand glittering fragments, and they all roared happily, and cheered.
They had finished up that bottle in one round of gulps and swallows, passing it from hand to hand as they rushed down the mountain-side, and almost instantly they were at work on a beverage of a yet more instant and fiery power — raw, white corn-whisky, in a gallon jug, clear as water, rank and nauseous to an unaccustomed throat, strong and instant as the kick of a mule, fiery, choking, formidable, and savage. They hooked their thumbs into the handle of the jug and brought the stuff across their shoulders with a free-hand motion; they let the wide neck pour into their tilted throats with a fat thick gurgle, and they gulped that raw stuff down with greedy gulpings like water going down a gully drain.
It was a drink that would have felled an ox, a terrific lightning-blast of alcohol that would have thrown Polyphemus to the earth; and yet it was not drink alone that made them drunk that day. For they were all young men, and they had shouted, sung, and roared with laughter, and pounded one another with affectionate delight as they rushed on — and it was not drink alone that made them drunk.
For they felt that everything on earth was good and glorious, that everything on earth was made for their delight, that they could do no wrong and make no error, and that such invincible strength was in them that trees would fall beneath their stroke, the immortal hills bow down before their stride, and that nothing in the world could stop them.
And for Eugene it seemed that everything had come to life for him at once — that he had emerged instantly and victoriously from the horror of shame, the phantasmal and dreamlike unreality that had held him in its spell. It seemed to him that all the earth had come to life again in shapes of deathless and familiar brightness, that he had gloriously reentered a life he thought he had lost for ever, and that all the plain priceless joy and glory of the earth was his, as it had never been before.
And first of all, and with an almost intolerable relief and happiness, he was conscious of the pangs of hunger: his famished belly and his withered stomach, which had for days shrunk wearily and with disgust from food, now, under the stimulation of a ravenous hunger, fairly pleaded for nourishment. He thought of food — food in a hundred glorious shapes and varieties: the literal sensual images of food blazed in his mind like paintings from the brush of a Dutch master, and it seemed to him that no one had ever painted, spoken, or written about food before in a way that would do it justice.
Later, these were the things Eugene would remember from that day with a living joy, for it was as if he had been born again, or discovered the world anew in all its glory. And besides all this — a part, an element in all this whole harmonious design of triumphant joy and rediscovery — was the way the hills had looked that day as they came down the mountain, the smell of the air which was mellow and autumnal, and yet had in it the premonitory breath of frost and sharpness, and the wild joy, power, and ecstasy that had filled their hearts, their throats, their lives — the sense of victory, triumph, and invincible strength, and of some rare, glorious, and intolerable happiness that was pending for them, and which seemed to swell the tremendous and exulting music of that magic day.
Around them, above them, below them — for the living and shining air of autumn, from the embrowned autumnal earth, from the great shapes of the hills behind them with their molten mass of colour — dull browns, rich bitter reds, dark bronze, and mellow yellow — from the raw crude clay of the piedmont earth and the great brown stubble of the cotton-fields — from a thousand impalpable and unutterable things, there came this glorious breath of triumph and delight. It was late October, there was a smell of smoke upon the air, an odour of burning leaves, the barking of a dog, a misty red, a pollenated gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful, and exultant light of the day — and far off, a sound of great wheels pounding on a rail, the wailing whistle, and the tolling bell of a departing train.
And finally, the immortal visage of the earth itself, with the soaring and limitless undulations of its blue ranges, the great bulk of the autumn hills, immense and near, the rugged, homely, and familiar trees — the pines, oaks, chestnuts, maples, locusts — the homely look of the old red clay — the unforgettable and indescribable naturalness of that earth — with its rudeness, wildness, richness, rawness, ugliness, fathomless mystery and utter familiarity, and finally the lonely, haunting, and enchanted music that it made — the strange spirit of time and solitude that hovered above it eternally, and which can never be described, but which may be evoked by a cow-bell broken by the wind in distant valleys, the lonely whistle of a departing train, or simply a sinuous gust of wind that smokes its way across coarse mountain grasses when spring comes — all this, which Eugene had felt and known in his childhood, and yet had never had a tongue to utter, he seemed now to know and understand so well that he had himself become its tongue and utterance, the more its child because he had been so long away from it, the more its eye because he now saw it again as it must have seemed to the first men who ever saw it, with the eyes of discovery, love, and recognition.
And yet, for him all these things spoke instantly, intolerably, exultantly, not of home, return, and settlement, but of one image, which now burned for ever in his brain, rose like a triumphant music in his heart. And that image was the image of the enchanted city, in which, it now seemed, all the frenzy and unrest of his spirit would find a certain goal and triumph, and toward which everything on earth, and all the hope and joy now rising in his heart, was tending.
When they got down off the mountain into South Carolina they were very drunk. On a dusty sand-clay road between some cotton-fields they stopped the car, and walked out into the fields to make water. The cotton stood stiff and dry and fleecy in its pods, the coarse brown stalks rose up in limitless planted rows, and underneath, he could see the old and homely visage of the red-clay earth.
At one edge of the field, and seeming very far away and lonely-looking, there was a negro shanty, and behind this a desolate wooded stretch of pine. Over all the earth at once, now that the roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and exultant mystery of the earth.
Eugene pulled several of the big cotton-stalks out of the dry red earth, thrust one through the button-hole of his coat lapel, and tore it through exultantly, although the stalk was two feet long. Then he reeled back toward the car again, holding the other stalks of cotton in his hands, got into the car, and at once began to talk to his companions about the cotton — ending up in a passionate oration about the hills, the fields, the cotton and the earth — trying to tell them all about “the South” and making of the stalks of cotton and “the South” a kind of symbol, as young men will, although they all felt and acted just as young men anywhere would do.
But at that moment, all Eugene was trying to say about his years away from home, and his return, and how he had discovered his own land again and was, “by God!” one of them — waving the stalks of cotton as he talked, and finding the whole core and kernel of all he wished to say in these stalks of cotton — all of this, although incoherent, drunken, and confused, seemed so eloquent and beautiful to him, so truthful, passionate, and exact — that he began to weep for joy as he talked to them. And they — they were, of course, delighted: they howled with laughter, cheered enthusiastically, slapped him on the back, and shook hands all round, crying —“By God! Listen to him talk! . . . Give ’em hell, son! We’re with you! . . . Hot-damn! Thataway, boy! . . . Stay with ’em! . . . Whee!”
Meanwhile, Robert was driving at terrific speed. They had begun to rip and tear along between the cotton-fields and over the dusty sand-clay roads, mistaking the screams of women and the shouts of men, as they swerved by their cars and wagons in a cloud of yellow dust and at a murderous clip, for admiring applause and enthusiastic cheers, an illusion which only spurred them on to greater efforts.
The upshot of it was that they finally tore into town, careening hideously along a central street and with no slackening of their speed whatever. The excited people in that part of the State had been phoning in about them for the last fifteen miles of their mad journey, and now they were halted suddenly at sight of the police, who stood lined up across the street in a double row — big, red-faced, country cops — to stop them.
The first brilliant, sparkling and wildly soaring effects of their intoxication had now worn off and, although they still felt full of power and a savage rending strength, the corn whisky was now smouldering in their veins more dully and with a sombre and brutal drunkenness. Eugene seemed to see all shapes and figures clearly — the coarse red faces of the country cops and their clumsy lumbering bodies, and the street drowsy and dusty in the warmish autumn afternoon.
The grasses on the lawns of houses were faded, sere and withered-looking, the leaves upon the trees had thinned and hung yellowed, dry and dead, and in the gutters a few dead leaves stirred dryly, a few scampered dryly in the streets before a moment’s gust of wind, and then lay still again.
Robert slowed down and stopped before that solid wall of beefy country blue and red: the police surrounded them and clambered heavily over the sides of the car, two standing on the running-boards, two on either side of Eugene on the back seat, and one with Robert and Emmet Blake up front.
“All right, boys,” said one of them, good-naturedly and casually enough, in the full, sonorous and somewhat howling voice of the countryman, “drive on down thar to the station-house now.”
“Yes, SIR! Yes, SIR!” Robert replied at once in a meek and obedient tone, and with a comical drunken alacrity. “How do you get there, Captain?” he said with a cunning and flattering ingratiation.
“Right down this here street to your right,” said the policeman in his drawling and countrified tone, “until you come to that ‘air second turning where you see that ‘air f’ar hydrant. Turn in to the left thar,” he said.
“Yes, sir!” said Robert heartily, starting the car again. “We’re all strangers here,” he lied, as if he hoped this lie might make amends for them. “We don’t know our way about yet.”
“Well,” the policeman drawled with a kind of ugly heartiness, “maybe the next time you come back you’ll be better acquainted here,” he said, winking at his comrades, and they all guffawed. “We’re glad to see you, boys,” he continued, still with this ugly falseness of good nature in his tone. “We been hearin’ about you,” he said, winking at his fellows again, “an’ we wanted to git acquainted.”
Here the policemen laughed again with sonorous countrified appreciation of their spokesman’s wit.
The policemen were all big beefy men, with hearty drawling voices, red countrified faces. They had large square feet, wore dusty-looking black slouch hats with a wide brim, and were dressed in rather gaudy but slovenly-looking uniforms, with stripes of gold braid running up the sides of their baggy trousers, and with the lower brass buttons of their heavy blue coats unbuttoned, exposing areas of soiled shirts and paunchy bellies. Their faces had a look of a slow but powerful energy, a fathomless and mindless animal good nature, and at the same time a fathomless and mindless animal cruelty — instant, volcanic, and murderous — written terribly, somehow, into their wide, thin and horribly cruel mouths, in which there was legible a vitality that had all the wild and sensual force of nature packed into it, and was therefore beyond nature — almost supernatural — in its savage and mindless qualities.
He had seen them standing idly on the corners of the little towns, huge and slovenly, swinging their thonged clubs in the great muttons of their hands, surveying with their great red faces and their wide thin mouths of fathomless cruelty and good nature the crowds that swarmed around them. He had heard their drawling howling accents of the country, that had all of the moisture and distance of the earth in them, and seen their slow minds wake to a mindless and murderous fury. Once as a child he had seen one of them, a ponderous giant so huge he lurched from side to side when he walked, and seemed to fill up the street with his size, beat a drunken old man — a little howling integument of bone and gristle — to death with his club, smashing the little old man across the skull until the blood rushed out in torrents through his sparse silvery hair, lacing its way in channels of brilliant red across his face and through his beard until it seemed incredible so small and old a man could have such fountains of bright blood in him.
And these huge creatures evoked for Eugene a whole history of this earth and people, monstrous, savage, and unutterable — a congruent and unspeakable legend which he knew, and all of them knew, down to the roots, and which he could not speak about and had to speak about, somehow, or die. For in these men there was evident not only the savage and mindless energy of the earth itself, with all that was wild, sensual, fecund, cruel and good-natured — the whole weather of life — but there was also evident the fear, the shame, the horror that had crushed them beneath its ocean weight of nameless and cowering dread and broken or destroyed their souls.
The two policemen who had clambered into the back seat of the car and now sat on each side of Eugene had these mountainous and fleshy figures, heavy, yet with a kind of solid and ugly softness, meaty, and without the muscular and sinewy leanness of young men. The back seat of the car was a narrow one — the car was a new “sports model” designed only for four people — and now the huge fleshy figures of these two policemen, wedged against Eugene, gave him a feeling of disgust and revulsion.
Nevertheless, the feeling of exultant and jubilant power had not yet worn off, and although he had understood at once, when he saw the men lined up across the street, that they were under arrest and would be taken to the city jail, this sordid prospect caused him no uneasiness whatever. Rather, the feeling of drunken joy was still so powerful in him that everything on earth seemed good, and everything that happened wonderful. He hailed the experience of being arrested and taken to jail exultantly as if some fortunate and glorious experience was in store for him, and his exuberant affection for the world was so great that he even liked the policemen.
Eugene howled with laughter, smote them on their broad backs, flung his arms out and around their shoulders, saying, “By God, you’re fine fellows, both of you, and you’ve got to have a drink!”
At this Robert laughed uneasily, saying to the policemen:
“Don’t pay any attention to him! We haven’t got anything to drink — I swear we haven’t.”
One of them had been rummaging around, however, and now triumphantly produced the jug from its hiding place beneath Blake’s legs.
“Here it is, boys,” he cried, as he displayed it. “I’ve got it.”
The glass jug was almost empty, but there was still perhaps an inch of the whisky at the bottom. Robert’s face had a worried look, for the law was such that a capture of this sort might also mean the confiscation of the owner’s car.
Blake, meanwhile, had been talking in a low, craftily persuasive tone of drunken insinuation and bribery to the policeman up front, saying:
“Now I know you boys don’t want to get us into any trouble. We weren’t doing anything wrong — just having a drink or two together and if you fellows will just forget about this thing, we’ll fix it up right with you — anything you say,” he whispered cunningly, “and get on out of town right now without anyone knowing a thing about it. What do you say, now? Come on! You can do it,” he said, with a leer of ingratiation.
The policeman to whom he spoke smiled good-naturedly, but said nothing. At this moment they drove up before the station-house, a shabby-looking little building of brick, with bars over the window, and which was situated on a side-street.
The shabby street looked warm, faded, sleepy, touched with the ghosts of autumn, but in an instant, as the police got out, opened the doors, and the gay men clambered down drunkenly among them, a rabble-rout of ragged negro boys, grinning, gape-mouthed countrymen with red faces, slouchy-looking barbers in their shirt-sleeves, and wormy-looking loafers, had gathered magically from nowhere, stood in a ring about them and snickered and shuffled about, pressed up to the barred windows and peered in curiously with shaded eyes as the policemen took them into the station.
As they started, Robert held back a little, and said hoarsely, and in a plaintive, troubled voice to the policeman who had him by the arm:
“What are you taking us in here for? We weren’t doing anything. Honest we weren’t. What are you going to do to us?”
The policeman smiled good-humouredly, and then said in a hearty reassuring voice:
“Aw, we’re not goin’ to do anything to you. We were just afraid you boys might run into something and hurt yourself, that’s all. We’re just goin’ to take you in here, and let you stay here a little while until you feel better,” he said, at the same time winking at his fellows.
“Well,” said Robert sullenly, casting a troubled and unwilling glance back at his shining car, “— I want to find my car here when I come out. Now if anything happens to that car, there’s going to be trouble,” he said ominously.
“That car will be right here when you come out the way you left it,” the policeman said heartily. “No one is goin’ to touch it. No, sir! I’ll look after that car myself!” he said, winking again at the others.
“All right, then,” said Robert. “That’s all I want to know.”
Then they marched all of them into the station-house.
The room they entered was a large one, and at first, because they had come into it out of the brightness of the sun, and the swimming confusion of drunkenness and arrest, it was so dark Eugene could not distinguish clearly any of its features. Then he saw that it was a square, rather high room with worn wooden floors, wainscoting of a dark varnished brown, and above that rude calcimined walls of white. In the wall along the street there were, besides the door, two barred windows which were very dirty and not very large, and did not give much light.
At one end of the room, as they came in, there was a row of dull green lockers, probably for the use of the police, and at the other end a high, square, somewhat majestical-looking desk, which was also of a dark maply-brown and which seemed to be built on an elevated rostrum or platform a few inches high. Over this desk a light with a green glass shade was burning, and behind it another large red-faced policeman was sitting. By his look of authority, and the military opulence of his slovenly uniform — for he had epaulets of thick gold braid upon his shoulders that would have glorified the uniform of a general in the Marine Corps — he seemed to be the superior in command.
As for the rest of the room, there was little decoration save for a row of worn and rickety-looking wooden chairs with rounded backs along the wall, and a liberal distribution of large brass spittoons which, to judge from the bare wooden boards around them, were used less frequently as receptacles than as targets, and obviously with uncertain success.
Finally, the whole place had the unforgettable look and smell that police-stations everywhere — and particularly those in little towns — have always had. Its stale dark air was impregnated with the odour of cheap cigars and tobacco-juice, of old worn varnished wood, of human sweat and urine and heavy wool, and with the strong tarry odour of a sanitary disinfectant. And somehow, in this stale, dark and weary odour, there was also a quality of terror, menace, and foreboding — as if the huge and dingy chronicle of human tragedy and error which this grim room had witnessed — all the brutal, shabby sinfulness of a little town — that swarming, hideous and tawdry fraternity of poverty, vice and error — dredged from its rat-holes in the dark depths of old brick buildings, hunted out of cheap hotels, pool rooms, greasy little lunch rooms, nigger shacks, and the rickety wooden brothels near the railroad tracks, with its vast brotherhood of scarred and battered men and women — chain-gang niggers, drunken country youths and cheap bootleggers, grimy prostitutes and all their furtive bawds and pimps, cutters, sluggers, slabbers, slashers, and brawlers — both those who live by vice and those who are its victims — this whole huge earth of pain and crime and misery had left the terrible imprint of its history so indelibly there that the weary air was impregnated with sorrow and fear, and the wood, walls, floors and ceilings were seasoned and ingrained with the substance of human wretchedness.
When they had come in, the police had lined up Eugene’s three companions before the imposing rostrum where the desk officer was sitting, but they had placed him carefully to one side against the wall, like an object too rare and precious for ordinary usage. Now, as the great man behind the desk glowered down gloomily and mistrustfully at them, one of the police spoke to the desk sergeant and, turning toward Eugene with a nod of the head, declared in a full countrified tone:
“This big ’un here’s the drunkest of the lot.”
And the enthroned law bent his gloomy gaze upon him with a hostile and suspicious look which said as plain as words that it was no more than he had suspected.
Eugene had not realized, in fact, until he felt that wall against his shoulders, how very drunk he was; but he was drunker now than he had ever been in all his life before. He could feel his back slide down along the wall, and then his bending knees would straighten with a jerk, and he would solemnly begin to slide up the wall again. Meanwhile the room swam and rocked and then was still before his eyes: the shapes of things would melt into a smear, and then resolve into their proper selves once more.
And he was conscious that the police were searching him and his companions, patting their pockets to see if they carried weapons, examining wallets and letters for identifications, taking their watches from them, and arraigning them on a series of formal charges, some of which had no bearing on their case whatever. Drunk, assuredly, they were; disorderly they might have been — although it had not seemed so to them; of driving in a reckless manner they were guilty; but of resisting an officer in the performance of his duty they had been, up to that time, spotlessly innocent.
But such were the charges delivered against them in sonorous and countrified tones. And in the solemn voices of the policemen, the knowing and portentous way in which they searched the young men — as if they were a gang of armed desperadoes, and in a manner that smacked of correspondence-school detective methods — and finally in the solemn countrified tones of the one who had pointed to Eugene, saying: “This big ’un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” there was something comical and ludicrous.
But in their sense of banded authority, in the stubborn almost conspiratorial way in which they had now hardened in a group against the young men, forsaking the good-humoured and jovial manners which had heretofore distinguished them, there was something ugly and revolting — something stupid, provincial, mob-like, and unreasoning, which told the young men plainly that “they had them” now, that they were “foreigners,” therefore suspect, and must bow their heads in silence to the obdurate and capricious tyrannies of a local and, for them, impregnable authority.
At length, the sonorous formalities of their arraignment having been completed, the sergeant having scrawled and written in his ledger, the man looked up and ordered sternly:
“All right, boys! Take ’em back and lock ’em up!”
Then the young men were marched back along a corridor into a large two-storeyed room, which had brick walls and cement floors, two rows of dirty barred windows, a grey and gelid light, and a general feel of raw and clammy dankness. This room, which had a harsh angular steel-and-cement newness that the other did not have, seemed to be of more recent construction, and to have been added on to the front part of the jail. In this room, also, there were several rows of cells, ascending in tiers up to the ceiling. When they entered, the place was quiet, but immediately a drunken negress in one of the cells began to bawl and rave and sob, smashing, hammering, and rattling the bars of her cell like a demented ape. There was everywhere a foul rank odour of undrained faecal matter, tempered with the odour of the tarry disinfectant, and cut more sharply with the acrid smell of some ammoniacal fluid.
At the first row of cells they paused, and the police in charge of Robert and Emmet Blake (for Eugene now discovered with a sense of shock that Kitchin was not with them) unlocked the doors of cells two and three and thrust Blake and Robert into them. The last, or end, cell in the row, Eugene now saw was intended for his occupancy and he stood waiting obediently, in the relaxed grip of one of the policemen, until his comrade should unlock the door.
Suddenly, as the door swung open, and Eugene stepped forward into the cell, his vision cleared somewhat, and he saw a young negro standing in the cell, beside the iron bed that projected from the wall, looking toward him with a startled expression on his face that suggested he had been asleep upon the cot, and had been rudely wakened by their entrance. Instantly, one fixed and all-obsessing belief began to burn in Eugene’s inflamed and drunken brain. He thought that he was being put here with this negro because the jail was crowded and the cell-space scanty, and further — and this was the thing that maddened him and that he found intolerable — because, as the policeman had said when they arraigned the young men, “this big ’un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” and they thought he was too drunk to notice or to care about the advantage they were taking of him.
For this reason — and this reason only — he now acted as he did. As far as the negro himself was concerned, Eugene bore no grudge against him, and the feeling of shame and degradation which had swept over him in an overwhelming flood when he saw the cell and knew he was to be locked in it like an animal was so great that he would not have cared with whom he had to share that cell, if it had been the custom of the country so to share it. But the custom of the country was not so, he knew, and the belief that he was being put upon, his drunkenness taken advantage of, and that he was being dealt with less fairly than the others, now so stung his maddened pride that he turned and kicked the iron door back in the faces of the two policemen, just as they were closing it.
Then he started to come out of the cell. When he did, the two big red-faced policemen came running forward with a lumbering, panting, and somehow revolting clumsiness and tried to push him back into the cell. When this happened, something dark, grey, and terrible that he had never known before rose up in his soul — and this thing, which now came to him for the first time, was to return often in the savage years that followed.
As the police came rushing towards Eugene his fury and desperation were so great that he felt little or no fear, but the sensations of horror and disgust were so terrible that they drove him mad, and he seemed to be drowning in them. And the first visible and physical, although perhaps not the basic, causes of these sensations of horror and disgust came from the mountainous figures of the two policemen, and the feel of their huge soft-solid bodies as they jammed against him. For, if they had quelled his rebellion at the outset by smashing him over the head with their clubs, he might have felt a moment’s fear before the club crashed on his skull, but he would not have felt horror and disgust.
But the sight, the feel, the smell, the look of these huge soft-solid bodies of mountainous flesh, and the revolting clumsiness of their movements, made the thing horrible. As they rushed towards Eugene and tried to thrust him back into the cell, he grabbed hold of the bars on either side of the door, and began to howl at them and curse them foully, and to butt at them with his head. When this happened the policemen braced themselves together like turn-squat Buddhas, holding on to the bars with their huge muttony hands, that had no leanness in them, and butted back at Eugene with their huge soft-solid stomachs.
They stood, half-squatly, side by side, their muttony hands gripped around the bars, their great red faces moist and panting, their huge buttocks somehow obscenely womanish in their fat breadth, as they butted back clumsily at him with their soft ponderous bellies — all of this, and the revolting contact of their flesh against his own, filled him with such an infinite loathing of horror and disgust that he went mad.
He started to come out of the cell. When he did, the two big police men came running forward with a lumbering clumsiness and tried to push him back in. One of the men raised his ponderous fist and shouted: “Git back in thar now or I’ll hit ye.” A huge muttony fist smashed squarely on his nose and mouth: he butted, cursed, amid a pin-wheel aura of exploding rockets: the fist smashed hard again below one eye: the boy screamed like a wounded animal and cursing horribly all the time began to use his head as a battering ram, butting again and again at the fat red faces.
Meanwhile the other one, grunting and puffing, and with his tongue between his teeth, began to thump, tug and wrench at the fingers of one hand, trying to loosen them from the bar, and saying to his fellow:
“You git his other hand, Jim, an’ try to make him turn a-loose.”
During all this time that Eugene had been cursing and butting at these men, he had also been shouting: “You God-damned red-faced South Car’lina bastards, you’re not going to lock me up in here with a nigger — no, you ain’t!”— and now he felt something rough and woolly scraping underneath his arm. It was the frightened negro’s head. He went squirming out below Eugene’s arm until he was outside peering with white eyeballs over a policeman’s shoulder, and when Eugene saw they would not try to keep the negro there with him, he went back in the cell and was locked up. He felt very sick, and everything was swimming nauseously around him: for a while he leaned over the w.c. and vomited into it. Then he sat down on the edge of the cot and stared ahead, thinking about nothing, but with something hideous, like a great grey smear, inside him.