Taylor

Taylor is both a physical destination and a measure of failed responsibility. Gowan Stevens treats it as a deadline he must reach before a special train arrives, but the journey exposes his intoxication, disorientation, and inability to fulfill the role of dependable escort. At Taylor station, Temple Drake is leaving without him, and the place converts his intended rescue into a humiliating confrontation witnessed by railway workers and strangers.

Road and Destination

Taylor first appears as the endpoint of the road leading away from town. After Gowan asks where the men are taking him, they cross the square, drive roughly half a mile out of town, and identify the route as the road to Taylor. Gowan explains that he must drive there early in the morning and arrive before the special train. The destination therefore enters the scene as a practical obligation: he has a schedule, a route, and a specific train to catch, even though his conduct has already begun to undermine his ability to keep them.

The road also links Taylor to the social world beyond the immediate town. Gowan is not merely wandering; he is trying to reach a place associated with a train, a planned meeting, and Temple’s movement through the region. His insistence on the deadline gives Taylor a promise-like function in the narrative. Reaching it would mean recovering control of the night, while missing it would leave Temple to proceed without him.

Intoxication and Lost Time

Gowan’s approach to Taylor is interrupted by the drinking episode that destroys his sense of time. After filling a glass level full, he empties it steadily and then loses consciousness of the intervening sequence. He later becomes aware of cold open air, an engine panting beside a dark string of cars, and the need to explain that he has learned to drink like a gentleman. Even while vomiting in a cramped place smelling of ammonia and creosote, he continues trying to say that he must be at Taylor at six-thirty, when the special is due to arrive.

The remembered deadline survives while his practical capacity collapses. He is weak, drooling, swaying against a wall, and unable to read a name written there except by shutting one eye and steadying himself. He then speaks incoherently about a girl he knows and a proposed outing to Starkville, before falling asleep. Taylor is thus attached to a fractured chronology: Gowan’s mind continues to repeat the appointment, but his body has already surrendered the time needed to keep it.

The Missed Train

When Gowan reaches the platform, it is deserted except for a Black railway worker with a broom. Gowan asks about the special train, and the worker tells him that it left five minutes earlier. This confirmation turns Taylor from a destination into a site of irreversible loss. Gowan has not simply been delayed; the train, and with it the opportunity to meet Temple as planned, has already departed.

He runs back to the car, finds the jar on the floor, and drinks again despite knowing that he needs something on his stomach. The liquor makes him feel better almost immediately, but the apparent recovery is chemically temporary and narratively destructive. He crosses the square at forty miles an hour, takes the Taylor road, increases his speed, and drinks from the jar again without slowing. His movement toward Taylor becomes a reckless attempt to erase the consequences of the earlier lapse.

Taylor Station and Temple Drake

At six-fifteen, Gowan reaches Taylor and finds that the train is just pulling out of the station. He forces the car between two wagons as the last car passes. Its vestibule opens, Temple Drake springs down, and she runs briefly beside the train while an official leans down and shakes his fist at her. Taylor station is therefore a place of hurried transit rather than reunion: Temple is already in motion, and her arrival on the platform is inseparable from the danger and disorder of the departure.

Gowan gets out and Temple turns toward him, then pauses before continuing. Her response is shaped by what she sees: his wild face and hair, ruined collar, and ruined shirt. She identifies the visible fact directly, telling him, "You’re drunk," and condemns him as a filthy pig. The station makes his failure public. The man who had promised himself that he would reach Taylor in time arrives only after the train has gone, visibly incapacitated and unable to present himself as the gentleman he had been trying to claim as an identity.

Taylor in Temple’s Recollection

Taylor also remains important through Temple’s later explanation of the circumstances that led her to leave school at night. She says that Gowan Stevens is from Jefferson and attended the University of Virginia, and that he repeatedly insisted he had been taught to drink like a gentleman. Because she had only two dollars, she begged him to let her out anywhere and lend her enough money for a ticket. Her account places Taylor within a larger pattern of restricted mobility: Temple’s decisions are shaped by the university’s social rules, the unequal access to cars, the threat of punishment, and her dependence on men who control transportation and money.

The destination consequently exposes a contradiction in Gowan’s self-image. His claim to gentlemanly drinking does not produce protection or competence; it produces the missed train and leaves Temple to manage the consequences. Taylor is where the language of masculine assurance meets its practical result. It is also where Temple’s nominal privilege as the daughter of Judge Drake fails to provide immediate freedom, forcing her to improvise within a system that condemns her for slipping out while making her movement dependent on others.

Narrative Significance

Taylor concentrates the episode’s central reversal from planned arrival to failed pursuit. Gowan believes that speed, alcohol, and determination can restore the evening, but the station records the opposite: the special has left, the schedule cannot be recovered, and Temple confronts him rather than welcoming him. The location is not elaborated as a stable community; its significance comes from the road, the platform, the train, and the exact interval by which Gowan arrives too late.

As a narrative threshold, Taylor stands between intention and consequence. The road permits frantic motion, while the station imposes a final fact. Gowan can accelerate across town and down the highway, but he cannot make the departed train return. In that sense, Taylor gives physical form to the episode’s governing conflict between self-presentation and reality: Gowan wants to be the gentleman who meets a scheduled train, yet Taylor preserves the evidence of the drunk man who arrives after it has gone.