along the river, a gem-like incandescence, few and hard and bright, and so poignantly lost and lonely in enormous darkness as are all lights in America, sown sparsely on the enormous viewless mantle of the night, and by that pattern so defining it—a scheme of sparse, few lights, hard, bright and small, sown there upon night’s enormous darkness, the great earth’s secret and attentive loneliness, its huge, abiding mystery.
And for ever, beyond the mysterious river’s farthest shore, the great earth waited in the darkness, and was still. It waited there with the huge, attentive secrecy of night and of America, and of the wilderness of this everlasting earth on which we live; and its dark visage that we cannot see was more cruel, strange and lonely than the visage of dark death, and its rude strength more savage and destructive than a tiger’s paw, and its wild, mysterious loveliness more delicate than magic, more desireful than a woman’s flesh, and more thrilling, secret and seductive than a woman’s love.
As he stood there, tranced in that powerful spell of silence and of night, he heard swift footsteps running down the station stairs, he turned and saw Joel Pierce approaching. He ran forward quickly, his tall, thin figure clad in a blue coat and white flannels, alive with the swift boyish eagerness that was one of his engaging qualities.
“Gosh!” he said, in his eager whispered tone, panting a little as he came up, “—I’m sorry that I’m late: we have people staying at the house; I had to drive a woman who’s been staying with us to Poughkeepsie—I tried to get you there, but your train had already gone. I drove like hell getting here.—It’s good to see you!” he burst out in his eager whispering way—at once so gentle, and so friendly and spontaneous—“It’s swell that you could come!” he whispered enthusiastically. “Come on! They’re all waiting for you!”
And picking up his friend’s valise, he walked swiftly across the platform and began to climb the stairs.
Although Joel Pierce would have spoken in this way to any friend—to anyone for whom he had a friendly feeling, however casual—and although the other youth knew that he would have spoken this way to many other people—the words filled him with happiness, with an instinctive warmth and affection for the person who had spoken them. Indeed, the very fact that there was in Joel’s words—in all his human relationships—this curious impersonality, gave what he said an enhanced value. For in this way Joel revealed instinctively what everyone
