The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare. He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.
“Why didn’t you tell me, boy? I’d have let you have the money,” he said.
“I—don’t—know,” said Eugene, between bites of cheese. “Couldn’t.”
With the checker’s loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day. Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty— first birthday. Eugene stayed on.
He was like a man who had died, and had been re-born. All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world. He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts. The world itself turned ghost. All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival. Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new. Everything was old. Everything was dying. A vast aerial music, forever far— faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. He had known birth. He had known pain and love. He had known hunger. Almost he had known death.
At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go— round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.
And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic—it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark,
