of them was hungry, and they had no need or desire for further nourishment.
But the impulse which had made his brother halt belonged to all the dissonance and frenzied unrest of his whole life, and by thousands of actions such as this, the course and pattern of his life were shaped. And finally, his brother had halted because those two small flares of light—pitiful and shabby as they were—had wakened in him a memory of the vast darkness of the huge and lonely earth before them, and because he gave himself into this dark regretfully and with some misgiving of his soul.
For his spirit was afraid of solitude and darkness and, like all men in this land, his soul was drawn by the small hard blaze of incandescence—even by those barren bulbous clusters of hard light upon the wintry midnight pavements of a little town—which somehow pitifully and terribly suggest the fear and loneliness in men’s souls, the small hard assurances of manufactured light which they have gathered as some beacon of comfort and security against a dark too vast and terrible, an earth too savage in its rudeness, space, and emptiness, for the spirit and the strength of men.
And now his brother and he were given to this earth, this dark, this loneliness again. And as they rushed on into the darkness, held, save for the throbbing motor of the little car, in the immutable silence of the earth and darkness, the flickering headlights of the car would suddenly pierce into the huge surrounding mystery of night, lunging for an instant the flashing finger of their light upon some fugitive and secret presence in the vault of night, where all the million lives of men were held. Sometimes the flashing light would blaze upon the boarding of a little house at the bend of the road, and then the house would flash behind and be engulfed in darkness.
Sometimes it would reveal the brown and dusty stubble of the cotton-fields, a stretch of ragged pine, a lonely little wooden church, a shack, a cabin, the swift and sinuous forking of another road that spoked into their own, flashed past, and curved away—was gone for ever—leaving an instant and intolerable pain and memory—a searing recognition and discovery—a road once seen but never followed and now for ever lost with all its promises of a life that they had never known or explored, of faces they had never seen.
And again, out of this huge and mournful earth, out of the limitless mystery of this continent of night,
