for that grand life in ways stranger, darker, and more painful in their labyrinthine complications than any he had ever dreamed of as a child; and that, like Moses, he must strike water from the common stone of life, and like Samson, take honey from the savage lion’s maw of the great world, find all the joy of living that he lusted for in the blind swarm, the brutal stupefaction of the streets; goodness and truth in the mean hearts of common men; and beauty in the only place where it can ever be found—inextricably meshed, inwrought, and interwoven in that great web of horror, pain and sweat and bitter anguish, that great woven fabric of blind cruelty, hatred, filth and lust and tyranny and injustice, of joy, of faith, of love, of courage and devotion—that makes up life and that resumes the world.
It was a desolating loss, a hideous acknowledgment, a cruel discovery—to know that all the haunted glory of this enchanted world, which he thought he had discovered the night before, had been just what it now seemed to him to be—moon-magic—and to know that it was gone from him for ever. It was a bitter pill to know that what had seemed so grand, so strong, so right, and so inevitable at the moment of discovery was now lost to him—that some blind chemistry of man’s common earth, and of his father’s clay, and of genial nature, had taken from him what he seemed to possess, and that he could never make this enchanted life his own again, or ever again believe in its reality. It was a desperate and soul-sickening discovery to know that not alone through moonlight, magic, and the radiant images of their heart’s desire could men find America, but that somewhere there, and far darklier and strangelier than the river, lay the thing they sought, in all the blind and brutal complications of its destiny—buried there in the grimy and illimitable jungles of its savage cities—a-prowl and raging in the desert and half mad with hunger in the barren land, befouled and smutted with the rust and grime of its vast works and factories, warped and scarred and twisted, stunned, bewildered by the huge multitude of all its errors and blind gropings, yet still fierce with life, still savage with its hunger, still broken, slain and devoured by its terrific earth, its savage wilderness—and still, somehow, God knows how, the thing of which he was a part, that beat in every atom of his blood and brain and life, and was indestructible and everlasting, and that was America!
Miss Telfair’s house, which they now entered, was just the sort of house that one would expect a woman like Miss Telfair to live in. Everywhere
