can remember all the things that people have. Pneumonia.”
She was silent again, reflecting.
“And when they shut you up in a box and put you in the ground, the way they did Old Ben, what do they call that?” she asked with a soft inquiring smile.
He did not laugh.
“They call that death, Mrs. Pert.”
“Death! Yes, that’s it,” said Mrs. Pert brightly, nodding her head in agreement. “That’s one kind,’Gene. There are some other lands, too. Did you know that?” She smiled at him.
“Yes,” said Eugene. “I know that, Mrs. Pert.”
She stretched out her hands suddenly to him, and clasped his cold fingers. She did not smile any more.
“Good-bye, my dear,” she said. “We both knew Ben, didn’t we? God bless you.”
Then she turned and walked away down the road, at her portly uncertain gait, and was lost in the gathering dark.
The great stars rode proudly up into heaven. And just over him, just over the town, it seemed, there was one so rich and low he could have touched it. Ben’s grave had been that day freshly sodded: there was a sharp cold smell of earth there. Eugene thought of Spring, and the poignant and wordless odor of the elvish dandelions that would be there. In the frosty dark, far-faint, there was the departing wail of a whistle.
And suddenly, as he watched the lights wink cheerfully up in the town, their warm message of the hived life of men brought to him a numb hunger for all the words and the faces. He heard the far voices and laughter. And on the distant road a powerful car, bending around the curve, cast over him for a second, over that lonely hill of the dead, its great shaft of light and life. In his numbed mind, which for days now had fumbled curiously with little things, with little things alone, as a child fumbles with blocks or with little things, a light was growing.
His mind gathered itself out of the wreckage of little things: out of all that the world had shown or taught him he could remember now only the great star above the town, and the light that had swung over the hill, and the fresh sod upon Ben’s grave,
