shabby shuttered little houses in grey haggard light; and eight times that year, as morning came, he again made the journey down the river.
And later he could forget none of it. It became part of a whole design—all of its horror and its beauty, its grime and rustiness of stark red brick, its dark and secret loneliness of earth, the thrill and magic of his casual friendly voices, and the fagged yet friendly commerce of the prostitutes, the haggard light of morning at the ridges of the hills, and that great enchanted river greening into May—all this was one and single, woven of the same pattern, and coherent to the same design—and that design was somehow beautiful.
That spring, along the noble sweep of the great river, he returned at morning to the city many times. He saw April come, with all its sudden patches of shrewd green, and May, with all its bloom, its lights of flowers, its purity of first light and the bird-song waking in young feathered trees, its joy of morning-gold on the great river’s tide.
Eight times that spring, after all the fury, wildness and debauch of night, he rode back at morning towards the city in a world of waking men: they were for the most part railwaymen—engineers, firemen, brakesmen, switchmen, and guards, on their way to work. And their homely, seamed and pungent comradeship filled him with the health of morning and with joy.
And his memory of these journeys of the night, and these wonderful returns at morning, was haunted always by the vision of a single house. It was a great white house set delicate and gleaming in frail morning light upon a noble hill that swept back from the river, and it was shaded by the silent stature of great trees, and vast swards of velvet lawn swept round it, and morning was always there and the tender purity of light.
That house haunted his memory like a dream: he could not forget it. But he did not know, he could not have foreseen, by what strange and dreamlike chance he would later come to it.
LIII
Laughing, and breaking at once into the loud harsh accents of the city, the class scrambled to its feet, and began to gather up its books. Eugene walked rapidly to his table, which stood upon a little platform a few inches above the floor, and stationing himself behind it he began feverishly and untidily to stuff away into his brief-case text-books and themes and the pile of examination papers in which were written
