week, and was a playing, singing, and fanatic Baptist; yet on her common kindly face was the same animal, gentle, smoke-like delicacy of expression round the mouth that some of these men and women had.
It was a life that seemed so near to Eugene that he could lay his hand on it and make it his at any moment. He seemed to have returned to a room he had always known, and to have paused for a moment, without any doubt or perturbation of the soul, outside the door.
But he never found the door, or turned the knob, or stepped into the room. When he got there he couldn’t find it. It was as near as his hand if he could only reach it, only as high as his heart and yet he could not reach it, only a hand’s breadth off if he would span it, a word away if he would speak it. Only a stride, a move, a step away was all the peace, the certitude, the joy—and home for ever—for which his life was panting, and he was drowning in the darkness.
He never found it. The old smoke-gold of morning would be full of hope and joy and imminent discovery but afternoon would come and the soft grey humid skies pressed down on him with their huge numb waste and weight and weariness of intolerable time, and the empty naked desolation filled his body.
He would walk that legendary street past all those visible and enchanted substances of time and see the students passing through the college gates, the unbelievable velvet green of college quads, and see the huge dark room of peace and joy that time had made, and he had no way of getting into it.
Each day he walked about the town and breathed the accursed languid softness of grey foreign air, that had no bite or sparkle in it, and went by all their fabulous age-encrusted walls of Gothic time, and wondered what in the name of God he had to do with all their walls or towers, or how he could feed his hunger on the portraits of the Spanish king, and why he was there, why he had come!
Sometimes it was just a word, the intonation of a phrase—the way they would say “very” or “American,” which chilled and withered all the ardours of the heart, or the way they would say “Thank you!” when you paid for something, crisply, courteously, yet with a quick, cautious, and obdurate finality, as if someone had swiftly and firmly closed a door lest you should try to enter it. Eugene could listen to them talk and hear all the words, the moods and tones of life and humour that he had known all his life, until it seemed that he could foresee the very stories they were going to tell, the very situations they were going to describe—and
