too full of pain and sweat and agony and terror, too ugly, cruel, futile, and horrible, to be endured.
No more! No more! And not to be endured! To discover for three days—three magic swift-winged days—that enchanted life that had held all his visions as a child in fee—to be for just three brief and magic days a lord of life, the valued friend, the respected and well-loved companion of great men and glorious women, to discover and to possess for three haunting and intolerable lovely days the magic domain of his boyhood’s “America”—the most fortunate, good and happy life that men had ever known—the most true and beautiful, the most right—and now to have it torn from him at the very instant of possession—and to come to this:—a nameless cipher hurtled citywards in the huge projectile of a train, with all his fellow-ciphers, towards this blind and brutal stupefaction. A voice sounded far off, thundering in his ears through the battle-roar and rock of that stunned universe, as he cried:
“Joel! Joel! It was good to be here with you—Joel—”
And suddenly he saw his friend’s tall form recoil, shrink back, the look of something instant, startled, closed and final in his face and eye, and heard the swift incisive whisper saying quickly—
“Yes!… It was good that you could come!… And now, good-bye!… I shall see you—”
And so heard no more, and knew that that good-bye was final and irrevocable and could not be altered, no matter now how much or how often they should “see” each other in the future.
And at the same moment, as that door swung shut between them, and he saw that it never could be opened any more, he felt, with the knowledge of that irrevocable loss, a moment’s swift and rending pity for his friend. For he saw somehow that he was lost—that there was nothing for him now but shadows on the wall—Circean make-believe—that world of moonlight, magic and painted smoke that “the river people” knew. For three days he himself had breathed the poppied fumes of all its glorious unreality, and in those three short days the world from which he came—his father’s earth of blood and sweat and stinking day and bitter agony—this world of violence and toil and strife and cruelty and terror, this swarming world of nameless lives and mongrel faces, with all its ugliness—had become phantasmal as an evil dream, until now he could scarcely endure the hot and savage swelter, the savage fury, of the unceasing city. To grope and sweat and thrust and curse his way again among the unceasing
