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 shaking his head again, and saying, “Awful! awful! awful!… Do you know how much money I’ve spent so far this year?… Forty-eight hundred dollars…. So help me, God. I hope I may die if I’m not telling you the truth! Why, it’s awful!” he said, and burst into a laugh.
“Have you travelled around a lot?” Gene asked.
“Have I? My God! I’ve spent only one week-end in New Haven since the beginning of the year,” he said. “Why, it’s terrible!… Do you know whom I’m rooming with?” he demanded.
