the years at Sidney; finally, Gant, after his marriage with Eliza, standing with gaunt face and lank drooping moustaches before his shop upon the square, in the company of Will Pentland, who was at the time his business partner.
And all these pictures, from first to last, from the little boy to the man with the lank drooping moustaches, had been marked by the same expression: the sharp thin face was always stern and sad with care, the shallow cold-grey eyes always stared out of the bony cage-formation of the skull with a cold mournfulness—the whole impression was always one of gaunt sad loneliness. And it was not the loneliness of the dreamer, the poet, or the misjudged prophet, it was just the cold and terrible loneliness of man, of every man, and of the lost American who has been brought forth naked under immense and lonely skies, to “shift for himself,” to grope his way blindly through the confusion and brutal chaos of a life as naked and unsure as he, to wander blindly down across the continent, to hunt for ever for a goal, a wall, a dwelling-place of warmth and certitude, a light, a door.
And for this reason, she now understood something about her father, this great gaunt figure of a stone-cutter that she had never understood or thought about before: she suddenly understood his order, sense of decency and dispatch; his love of cleanness, roaring fires, and rich abundance, his foul drunkenness, violence, and howling fury, his naked shame and trembling penitence, his good clothes of heavy monumental black that he always kept well pressed, his clean boiled shirts, wing collars, and his love of hotels, ships, and trains, his love of gardens, new lands, cities, voyages. She knew suddenly that he was unlike any other man that ever lived, and that every man that ever lived was like her father. And remembering the cold and mournful look in his shallow staring eyes of cold hard grey, she suddenly knew the reason for that look, as she had never known it before, and understood now why so few men had ever called him by his first name—why he was known to all the world as “Mr. Gant.”
Having joined this group of working men, Helen immediately felt an indefinable but powerful sense of comfort and physical well-being which the presence of such men as these always gave to her. And she did not know why; but immediately, once she had grasped Mr. Ramsay by the hand, and was aware of Mike Fogarty’s mountainous form and clear-blue eye above her, and Ollie Gant’s deep and lazy laugh, and the deliberate
