sowed that smoke-blue air with rasping curse and snarling threat, with all the idiotic stupefaction of a foul and idiotic profanity, an obscene but limited complaint:—
“Yuh ——— Kikes!… Yuh ——— Jews!… I’ll kick duh ——— s—t outa duh ——— lot of yuh, yuh ——— bastards, you…. Hey-y! You!… Yuh ——— dummies up deh talkin’on yer ——— fingers all duh time…. Hey-y! You! Inches! You ——— bastard, I don’t give a s—t for duh whole ——— lot of yuh.”
It was all as it had always been, as he had known it would be, as he never could have foreseen it: the young dark Irishman sowed the air with threats and foulness, he finished up his bottle, and the foulness and the old red light of murder grew. And the mongrel compost laughed and snickered as they always did, and at length grew silent when he lurched with drunken measure towards them, and the old guard with the sour, seamed face then stopped the Irishman, and he cursed him.
And the slant light steepened in the skies, the old red light of waning day made magic fire upon the river, and the train made on for ever its tremendous monotone that was like silence and for ever—and now there was nothing but that tremendous monotone of time and silence and the river, the haunted river, the enchanted river that drank for ever its great soundless tides from out the inland slowly, and that moved through all man’s lives the magic thread of its huge haunting spell, and that linked his life to magic kingdoms and to lotus-land and to all the vision of the magic earth that he had dreamed of as a child, and that bore him on for ever out of magic to all the grime and sweat and violence of the city, the unceasing city, the million-footed city, and into America.
The great river burned there in his vision in that light of fading day and it was hung there in that spell of silence and for ever, and it was flowing on for ever, and it was stranger than a legend, and as dark astime.
