Alexander sat up and looked about him. The train was tearing on through
the darkness. All his companions in the day-coach were either dozing or
sleeping heavily, and the murky lamps were turned low. How came he here
among all these dirty people? Why was he going to London? What did it
mean--what was the answer? How could this happen to a man who had lived
through that magical spring and summer, and who had felt that the stars
themselves were but flaming particles in the far-away infinitudes of his
love?
What had he done to lose it? How could he endure the baseness of life
without it? And with every revolution of the wheels beneath him, the
unquiet quicksilver in his breast told him that at midsummer he would be
in London. He remembered his last night there: the red foggy darkness,
the hungry crowds before the theatres, the hand-organs, the feverish
rhythm of the blurred, crowded streets, and the feeling of letting
himself go with the crowd. He shuddered and looked about him at the poor
unconscious companions of his journey, unkempt and travel-stained, now
doubled in unlovely attitudes, who had come to stand to him for the
ugliness he had brought into the world.
And those boys back there, beginning it all just as he had begun it; he
wished he could promise them better luck. Ah, if one could promise any
one better luck, if one could assure a single human being of happiness!
He had thought he could do so, once; and it was thinking of that that he
at last fell asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to work
upon, his mind went back and tortured itself with something years and
years away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow of his childhood.
When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through
pale golden ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating
through the pine woods. The white birches, with their little unfolding
leaves, gleamed in the lowlands, and the marsh meadows were already
coming to life with their first green, a thin, bright color which
had run over them like fire. As the train rushed along the trestles,
thousands of wild birds rose screaming into the light. The sky was
already a pale blue and of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught
up his bag and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he found the
conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it and set
about changing his clothes. Last night he would not have believed that
anything could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over his head
and shoulders and the freshness of clean linen on his body.