and the rusted stock lie stogged in desert sand: by the horsehead a woman’s skull. No love?
No lonely footfalls in a million streets, no heart that beat its best and bloodiest cry out against the steel and stone, no aching brain, caught in its iron ring, groping among the labyrinthine canyons? Naught in that immense and lonely land but incessant growth and ripeness and pollution, the emptiness of forests and deserts, the unhearted, harsh and metal jangle of a million tongues, crying the belly-cry for bread, or the great cat’s snarl for meat and honey? All then, all? Birth and the twenty thousand days of snarl and jangle—and no love, no love? Was no love crying in the wilderness?
It was not true. The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel leaves were trembling in the wood.
Suddenly it seemed to the boy that if he could put his hand upon his uncle, if he could grip his fingers in his stringy arm, his own strength and youth would go into him, and he could rekindle memory like a living flame in him, he could animate for an hour that ancient heart with the exultancy, the power, the joy that pulsed in himself; he could make the old man speak.
He wanted to speak to him as people never speak to one another, he wanted to say and hear the things one never says and hears. He wanted to know what the old man’s youth beyond its grim weather of poverty, loneliness, and desperation had been like. His uncle had been over ten years old when the war had ended, and he had seen the men plod home in wreaths of dust and heard their casual voices in a room; he had breathed the air of vanished summers, he had seen cloud shadows floating on the massed green of the wilderness, the twisting of a last lone leaf upon a bough; and he had heard the desolate and stricken voices in the South long, long ago, the quiet and casual voices of lost men, a million vanished footsteps in the streets of life. And he had known the years of brown, dark lavish brown, the lost and hypocritical years, the thunder of the wheels and hooves upon the cobbles, the colour of bright blood—the savagery, the hunger and the fear.
Was the memory of all this lost?
The boy touched him—he put his hand upon his uncle’s shoulder; the old man did not move. Sunken in what lost world, buried in what incommunicable and tongueless past, he said—“So long ago.”
Then the boy got up and left him and went out into the streets where the singing and lyrical air,
