Cass Mastern's Wedding Ring*
ROBERT PENN WARREN
L ONG AGO
Jack Burden
was
a graduate student, working for
his
Ph.D. in American History, in the State University of his native State.
This
Jack Burden (of whom the present Jack Burden,
Me,
is a legal,
biological, and perhaps even metaphysical continuator) lived in a slat–
ternly apartment with two other graduate students, one industrious,
stupid, unlucky, and alcoholic, and the other idle, intelligent, lucky,
and alcoholic. At least they were alcoholic for a period after the first
of the month, when they received the miserable check paid them by
the University for their miserable work as assistant teachers. The in–
dustry and ill luck of one cancelled out against the idleness and luck
of the ·other and they both amounted to the same thing, and they
drank what they could get when they could get it. They drank be–
cause they didn't really have the slightest interest in what they were
doing now and didn't have the slightest hope for the future . They
could not even bear the thought of pushing on to finish their degrees,
for that would mean leaving the University (leaving the first-of-the–
month drunks, the yammer about "work" and "ideas" in smoke-blind
rooms, the girls who staggered slightly and giggled indiscreetly on the
dark stairs leading to the apartment) to go to some normal school on
a sun-baked cross-roads or a junior college long on Jesus and short on
funds, to go to face the stark reality of drudgery and dry-rot and pry–
iug eyes and the slow withering of the green wisp of dream which had,
like some window-plant in an invalid's room, grown out of a bottle.
Only the bottle hadn't had water in it. It had had something which
looked like water, smelled like kerosene, and tasted like carbolic acid:
one-run corn whisky.
Jack Burden lived with them, in the slatternly apartment among
the unwashed dishes in the sink and on the table, the odor of stale
tobacco smoke, the dirty shirts and underwear piled in corners. He
even took a relish in the squalor, in the privilege of letting a last crust
of buttered toast fall to the floor to lie undisturbed until the random
*
This is a self-contained chapter from a novel in progress.
