to be, and now he was here to march onward toward his shining goal, as he had always done.
But, for the first time in his life, something had gone wrong, something had gone terribly, appallingly amiss, and Johnny did not yet know what it was. Perhaps he never would, but now he was in the greatest trouble and confusion of his life, and he knew it. His voice was still slow, drawling, and good-natured, he was full of kindly warmth and friendliness as he had always been, he had responded quickly, dutifully, to all the customs and observances of the new life—had had grey baggy trousers and tweed coats made at the tailor’s shop, had made arrangements for trips and walking-tours upon the Continent with his fellows in vacation time, had met his tutors, found out about the proctors and the penalties, learned the system of the college bills and battels, joined the Union and learned to go out dutifully for sports in the afternoon—he had even learned the mysterious ceremonial of tea and had it in his rooms each afternoon—all this he had learned and done with a punctilious thoroughness; but something had gone wrong.
Everything about Johnny was just as it had always been—his smile, his slow, good-natured voice, his amiable warmth and modesty and friendliness—all was the same with him except his eyes. But the quiet, thoughtful, tranquilly assured expression of his eyes had changed: he had in them the stunned, bewildered look, full of pain and a groping confusion, of a man who has been brutally slugged at the base of the brain and is not yet certain what has happened to him.
His was an impossible situation, a tragic ordeal of loneliness, strangeness, and bewilderment among all the complex and alien forms of a new life for which nothing in the old had prepared him. Born in a small town in the South, going to school there and at his own State University, he had all his life breathed and lived in a familiar air, heard the familiar words of well-known voices all round him, known and seen nothing but assurance, certitude and success in everything he planned.
And now all this, even the earth beneath his feet, had melted from him like a wisp of smoke, and he was wandering blindly about in a life as strange to him as Asia, as far as the moon, and knew nowhere to turn, nothing to grasp, no door to enter. In his whole life he had never seen or visited a great city, and then had seen New York just for a day or two, and then for seven days had known for the first time the mystery of the sea and a great ship, and now was here in the green English country, in an ancient town, hurled cruelly, suddenly, naked and unprepared for
