drooling, mumbling, he went to sleep.
At once he began to fight himself out of sleep. It seemed to him that it was immediately, yet he was aware of time passing all the while, and that time was a factor in his needto wake; that otherwise he would be sorry. For a long while he knew that his eyes were open, waiting for vision to return. Then he was seeing again, without knowing at once that he was awake.
He lay quite still. It seemed to him that, by breaking out of sleep, he had accomplished the purpose that he had waked himself for. He was lying in a cramped position under a low canopy, looking at the front of an unfamiliar building above which small clouds rosy with sunlight drove, quite empty of any sense. Then his abdominal muscles completed the retch upon which he had lost consciousness and he heaved himself up and sprawled into the foot of the car, banging his head on the door. The blow fetched him completely to and he opened the door and half fell to the ground and dragged himself up and turned toward the station at a stumbling run. He fell. On hands and knees he looked at the empty siding and up at the sunfilled sky with unbelief and despair. He rose and ran on, in his stained dinner jacket, his burst collar and broken hair. I passed out, he thought in a kind of rage, I passed out.
I passed out
.
The platform was deserted save for a negro with a broom. “Gret Gawd, white folks,” he said.
“The train,” Gowan said, “the special. The one that was on that track.”
“Hit done lef. Bout five minutes ago.” With the broom still in the arrested gesture of sweeping he watched Gowan turn and run back to the car and tumble into it.
The jar lay on the floor. He kicked it aside and started the engine. He knew that he needed something on his stomach, but there wasn’t time. He looked down at the jar.His inside coiled coldly, but he raised the jar and drank, guzzling, choking the stuff down, clapping a cigarette into his mouth to restrain the paroxysm. Almost at once he felt better.
He crossed the square at forty miles an hour. It was six-fifteen. He took the Taylor road, increasing speed. He drank again from the jar without slowing down. When he reached Taylor the train was just pulling out of the station. He slammed in between two wagons as the last car passed. The vestibule opened; Temple sprang down and ran for a few steps beside the car while an official leaned down and shook his fist at her.
Gowan had got out. She turned and came toward him, walking swiftly. Then she paused, stopped, came on again, staring at his wild face and hair, at his ruined collar and shirt.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “You pig. You filthy pig.”
“Had a big night. You dont know the half of it.”
She looked about, at the bleak yellow station, the overalled men chewing slowly and watching her, down the track at the diminishing train, at the four puffs of vapor that had almost died away when the sound of the whistle came back. “You filthy pig,” she said. “You cant go anywhere like this. You haven’t even changed clothes.” At the car she stopped again. “What’s that behind you?”
“My canteen,” Gowan said. “Get in.”
She looked at him, her mouth boldly scarlet, her eyes watchful and cold beneath her brimless hat, a curled spill of red hair. She looked back at the station again, stark and ugly in the fresh morning. She sprang in, tucking her legs under her. “Let’s get away from here.” He started the car andturned it. “You’d better take me back to Oxford,” she said. She looked back at the station. It now lay in shadow, in the shadow of a high scudding cloud. “You’d better,” she said.
At two oclock that afternoon, running at good speed through a high murmurous desolation of pines, Gowan swung the car from the gravel into a narrow road between eroded banks, descending toward a bottom of cypress and gum. He wore a cheap blue workshirt beneath his dinner jacket. His eyes were bloodshot, puffed,