speech, his mumbling awkwardness.
“Oh—walk!” she cried, with an air of swift enlightenment, as if her puzzled mind had just succeeded in translating his jargon. “Oh,” she said quietly, and looked at him for a moment steadily with her fixed and glacial smile, “you do.”
It seemed to him that those brief words were already pregnant with a cold indifferent dismissal: in them he seemed to feel the impregnable indifference of her cold detachment—the yawning gulf that separated her life from his. Already it seemed to him that she had turned away from him, dismissing him as not worthy even of such amused attention as she had given him. But after a moment, as she continued to look at him with her brilliant, glacial, detached, yet not unkindly smile, she continued:
“And what do you do on these walks? Where do you go?”
—Where? Where? Where indeed? His mind groped desperately over the whole nocturnal pattern of the city—over the lean, gaunt webbing of Manhattan with the barren angularity of its streets, the splintered, glacial soar of its terrific buildings, and the silent, frozen harshness of its streets of old brown houses, grimy brick and rusty, age-encrusted stone.
Oh, he thought that he could tell her all that could be told, that youth could know, that any man had ever known about night and time and darkness, and about the city’s dark and secret heart, and what lay buried in the dark and secret heart of all America. He thought that he could tell her all that any man could ever know about the huge, attentive secrecy of night, and of man’s silent heart of buried, waiting, and intolerable desire, about the thing that waits there in the night-time in America, that lies buried at the city’s secret heart of night, the mute and single tongue of man’s intolerable desire, the silence of his single heart in all its overwhelming eloquence, the great tide flowing in the hearts of men, as dark and as mysterious as the great, unceasing river, the thing that waits and does not speak and is for ever silent and that knows for ever, and that has no words to say, no tongue to speak, and that unites six million celled and lonely sleepers at the heart of night and silence, in the great dark tide of the unceasing river, and of all our buried songs of hope and joy and wild desire that live for ever in the heart of night and of America.
Yes, he thought that he could tell her all of this, but when he spoke, with thickened
