turned away, plucking at her large chin absently, and said: “Well, have it your own way! It’s your own funeral! If you’re determined to go today, no one can stop you. But I don’t see why you can’t just as well wait over till tomorrow.”
“Why, yes!” the mother now said briskly and confidently. “That’s exactly what I’d do if I were you!… Now, it’s not going to do a bit of harm to anyone if you’re a day or so late in gettin’there…. Now I’ve never been there myself,” she went on in her tone of tranquil sarcasm, “but I’ve always heard that Harvard University was a good big sort of place—and I’ll bet you’ll find,” the mother now said gravely, with a strong slow nod of conviction—“I’ll bet you’ll find that it’s right there where it always was when you get there. I’ll bet you find they haven’t moved a foot,” she said, “and let me tell you something, boy,” she now continued, looking at him almost sternly, but with a ghost of a smile about her powerful and delicate mouth—“now I haven’t had your education and I reckon I don’t know as much about universities as you do—but I’ve never heard of one yet that would run a feller away for bein’a day late as long as he’s got money enough to pay his tuition…. Now you’ll find’em waitin’for you when you get there—and you’ll get in,” she said slowly and powerfully. “You don’t have to worry about that—they’ll be glad to see you, and they’ll take you in a hurry when they see you’ve got the price.”
“Now, Mama,” he said in a quiet frenzied tone, “I beg of you, for God’s sake, please, not to—”
“All right, all right,” the mother answered hastily in a placating tone, “I was only sayin’—”
“If you will kindly, please, for God’s sake—”
“K-k-k-k-k-k!” his sister snickered, poking him in the ribs.
But now the train was coming. Down the powerful shining tracks a half-mile away, the huge black snout of the locomotive swung slowly round the magnificent bend and flare of the rails that went into the railway yards of Altamont two miles away, and with short explosive thunders of its squat funnel came barging slowly forward. Across the golden pollenated haze of the warm autumnal afternoon they watched it with numb lips and an empty hollowness of fear, delight, and sorrow in their hearts.
And from the sensual terror, the ecstatic tension of that train’s approach, all things before, around, about the boy came to instant life, to such sensuous and intolerable poignancy of life as a doomed man might feel
