the old man’s hand, was fixed in Eugene’s brain for ever. And like everything he did or saw that year, like every journey that he made, it became a part of his whole memory of the city.
And the city would always be the same when he came back. He would rush through the immense and glorious stations, murmurous with their million destinies and the everlasting sound of time, that was caught up for ever in their roof—he would rush out into the street, and instantly it would be the same as it had always been, and yet for ever strange and new.
He felt as if by being gone from it an instant he had missed something priceless and irrecoverable. He felt instantly that nothing had changed a bit, and yet it was changing furiously, unbelievably, every second before his eyes. It seemed stranger than a dream, and more familiar than his mother’s face. He could not believe in it—and he could not believe in anything else on earth. He hated it, he loved it, he was instantly engulfed and overwhelmed by it.
He brought to it the whole packed glory of the earth—the splendour, power, and beauty of the nation. He brought back to it a tremendous memory of space, and power, and of exultant distances; a vision of trains that smashed and pounded at the rails, a memory of people hurled past the window of his vision in another train, of people eating sumptuously from gleaming silver in the dining cars, of cities waking in the first light of the morning, and of a thousand little sleeping towns built across the land, lonely and small and silent in the night, huddled below the desolation of immense and cruel skies.
He brought to it a memory of the loaded box-cars slatting past at fifty miles an hour, of swift breaks like openings in a wall when coal cars came between, and the sudden feeling of release and freedom when the last caboose whipped past. He remembered the dull rusty red, like dried blood, of the freight cars, the lettering on them, and their huge gaping emptiness and joy as they curved in among raw piny land upon a rusty track, waiting for great destinies in the old red light of evening upon the lonely, savage, and indifferent earth; and he remembered the cindery look of road-beds and the raw and barren spaces in the land that ended nowhere; the red clay of railway cuts, and the small hard lights of semaphores—green, red, and yellow—as in the heart of the enormous dark they shone, for great trains smashing at the rails, their small and passionate assurances.
He brought to it the heart, the eye, the vision of the everlasting stranger,
