flood-tides of the grimy swarming pavements; to be buffeted, stunned, bewildered, deadened, and exhausted by the blind turmoil, the quenchless thirst and searching, the insatiate hunger and the black despair of all that bleak and fruitless struggle, that futile and unceasing strife—and to come to this! To come to this!
It was too hard, too painful, too much to be endured, he could not go!—and even as his life shrank back in all the shuddering revulsion and loathing of his desolate discovery—he heard the great train thunder on the rails—and he knew that he must go!
For a moment, as the train pulled out, he stood looking out of the window, waved good-bye to Joel standing on the platform, and for a moment watched his tall retreating form. Then the train gained speed, was running swiftly now along the river’s edge, swept round a bend, the station and the town were left behind him, and presently, just for a few brief moments as it swept along below the magic and familiar hill, he caught a vision of the great white house set proudly far away up on the hill and screened with noble trees. Then this was gone: he looked about him, up and down the grimy coach, which was dense with smoke and pungent with the smell of cheap cigars and strong tobacco.
They were all there, and instantly he knew that he had seen each one of them a million times, and had known all of them for ever; the Greek from Cleveland with his cheap tan suit, his loud tan shoes, his striped tan socks, his cheap cardboard suitcase with its tan shirts and collars and its extra pair of pants, and with his hairy, seamed and pitted nighttime face, his swarthy eyes, his lowering finger-breadth of forehead bent with painful, patient, furrowed rumination into the sensational mysteries of tabloid print. They were all there—two deaf-mutes talking on their fingers; a young Harlem negro and his saffron wench, togged to the nines in tan and lavender; two young Brooklyn Jews and their two girl friends grouped on turned seats; a little chorus girl from the burlesque with dyed hair of straw-blade falseness, a false, meagre, empty, painted little prostitute’s face, and a costume of ratty finery false as all the rest of her; a young Italian with grease-black hair sleeked back in faultless patent-leather pompadour, who talked to her, eyes leering and half-lidded, with thick pale lips fixed in a slow thick smile of sensual assurance, the jaws slow-working on a wad of gum; a man with the strong, common, gaunt-jawed and anonymous visage of the working
