Free Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe Page A

fixed on the orator in their customary expression of comic stupefaction. Now, breathing hoarsely and stertorously, he coughed chokingly and with an alarming rattling noise into his handkerchief, peered intently at his wadded handkerchief for a moment, and then said coarsely:
    “Hell! What all of you are saying is that you are goin’ to vote for Cox but that you hope that Harding wins.”
    “No, now, Jim—” the politician, Mr. Candler, said in a protesting tone—“I never said—”
    “Yes, you did!” Mr. Flood wheezed bluntly. “You meant it, anyhow, every one of you is sayin’ how he always was a Democrat and what a great man Wilson is, and how he’s goin’ to vote for Cox—and every God-damn one of you is praying that the other feller gets elected. . . . Why? I’ll tell you why,” he wheezed coarsely, “—it’s because we’re sick an’ tired of Woodrow, all of us—we want to put the rollers under him an’ see the last of him! Oh, yes, we are,” he went on brutally as some one started to protest—“we’re tired of Woodrow’s flowery speeches, an’ we’re tired of hearin’ about wars an’ ideals an’ democracy an’ how fine an’ noble we all are an’ ‘Mister won’t you please subscribe?’ We’re tired of hearin’ bunk that doesn’t pay an’ we want to hear some bunk that does—an’ we’re goin’ to vote for the crook that gives it to us. . . . Do you know what we all want—what we’re lookin’ for?” he demanded, glowering brutally around at them. “We want a piece of the breast with lots of gravy—an’ the boy that promises us the most is the one we’re for! . . . Cox! Hell! All of you know Cox has no more chance of getting in than a snowball has in hell. When they get through with him he won’t know whether he was run over by a five-ton truck or chewed up in a sausage mill. . . . Nothing has changed, the world’s no different, we’re just the same as we always were—and I’ve watched ‘em come an’ go for forty years—Blaine, Cleveland, Taft, McKinley, Roosevelt—the whole damned lot of ‘em—an’ what we want from them is just the same: all we can get for ourselves, a free grab with no holts barred, and to hell with the other fellow.”
    “So whom are you going to vote for, Jim?” said Mr. Candler smiling.
    “Who? Me?” said Mr. Flood with a coarse grin. “Why, hell, you ought to know that without asking. Me—I’m a Democrat, ain’t I?— don’t I publish a Democratic newspaper? I’m going to vote for Cox, of course.”
    And, in the burst of laughter that followed, some one could be heard saying jestingly:
    “And who’s going to win the Series, Jim? Some one told me you’re for Brooklyn!”
    “Brooklyn!” Mr. Flood jeered wheezingly. “Brooklyn has just the same kind of chance Cox has—the chance a snowball has in hell! Brooklyn! They’re in just the same fix the Democrats are in— they’ve got nothing on the ball. When Speaker and that Cleveland gang get through with them, Brooklyn is going to look just like Cox the day after the election. Brooklyn,” he concluded with brutal conviction, “hasn’t got a chance.”
    And again the debate between the men grew eager, animated and vociferous: they shouted, laughed, denied, debated, jeered good- naturedly, and the great train hurtled onward in the darkness, and the everlasting earth was still.
    And other men, and other voices, words, and moments such as these would come, would pass, would vanish and would be forgotten in the huge record and abyss of time. And the great trains of America would hurtle on through darkness over the lonely, everlasting earth—the earth which only was eternal—and on which our fathers and our brothers had wandered, their lives so brief, so lonely, and so strange—into whose substance at length they all would be compacted. And the great trains would hurtle on for ever over the silent and eternal earth—fixed in that design of everlasting stillness and