That vision haunted him. He could not forget it. That boy who stood there on the corner in that lonely little town at night became the image of his own desire, of the desire of every youth that ever lived, of all the lonely, secret, and unsleeping desire of America, that lives for ever in the little towns at night, that wakes at times, a lively, small, and savage flame, while all the sleepers sleep, that burns there, unimprisoned and alone, beneath immense and timeless skies, upon the dark and secret visage of the continent, that prowls for ever past the shuttered façades of the night, and furious, famished, unassuaged and driven as it is, lives alone in darkness and will not die.
That urge held and drew him with a magnetic power. Eight times that spring he made that wild journey of impulse and desire up the river. Eight times in darkness over pounding wheel and rod he saw the wild and secret continent of night, the nocturnal sweep and flow of the great river, and felt the swelling of the old, impossible and savage joy within him. That little town, seen first with such a charm and dream-like casualness out of the windows of a passing train, became part of the structure of his life, carved upon the tablets of his brain indelibly.
Eight times that year he saw it in every light and weather: in blown drifts of sleeting snow, in spouting rain, in bleak and wintry darkness, and when the first grey light of day was breaking haggardly against its ridge of eastern hills. And its whole design—each grimy brick and edge and corner of its shabby pattern—became familiar to him as something he had known all his life.
He came to know its times, its movements, and its people—its station workers, railwaymen, and porters; the night-time litter of the station derelicts and vagabonds themselves, as he was blown past this little town in darkness.
And he came to know all the prowlers of the night that walk and wait and wear the slow grey ash of time away in little towns—and this, too, was like something he had known for ever. He came to know them all by sight and word and name: the taxi-drivers, luncheon-room countermen, the soiled and weary-looking night-time Greeks, and all the others who inhabit the great shambles of the night.
Finally, and as a consequence of these blind voyages, he came to know all the prostitutes that lived there in that little row of wooden tenements beside the tracks. Eight times, at the end of night, he came again into the last commerce of their fagged embrace; eight times he left those
