it as he was, into a life more subtle, complex and confusing than his placid soul had ever dreamed a life could be.
When Eugene asked him if he had stopped in London on his way to Oxford, the look of pain and bewilderment in his eyes had deepened, and he had answered in a slow confused voice:
“We stopped there overnight but we never got to see much of it. We came on out here the next morning.”
The boy was silent a moment, then he laughed good-naturedly with a troubled and uncertain note.
“It sure looked big enough from what I could see of it. I want to get down there some time to see what it is like. I guess I’ve got a lot to learn,” he said.
He could remember London like a man who is whirled blindly at night through a huge, limitless, smoky kaleidoscope of sound and sight and moving objects, and this memory of that enormous terrifying age-encrusted web of life—that web without end or measure, which seems blackened, soaked, and saturated not only in the grey light that falls upon it with its weight of eight million lives, but also by the grey light of compacted centuries and all the countless men who lived there and have died—that great grey web appropriately known to seafaring men as “The Smoke” had added measurably to the sense of bewilderment, terror, and naked desolation in him.
And it was pitifully the same with all the rest of them—the little group of Rhodes scholars that gathered together in Johnny’s rooms every afternoon, and who seemed to huddle and cling together desperately as if they would try to shape, to resurrect, or to create some little pattern of familiar life, some small oasis of warmth and friendliness and familiar things to which they turned with desperate relief from all the alien and hostile loneliness of a life which they had never entered, which they could never make their own, which stood against them like a wall they could not pass, closed against them like a door they could not open.
Curiously, among this group of five or six Rhodes scholars, which formed the nucleus of the group which met in Johnny’s rooms, only two—Johnny and his room-mate, a youth named Price—were first-year men. The others were either in the second or the final year of their appointments, but they seemed to have made no friendships with anyone save with a few of the other Rhodes men, to have no other place to go, and to welcome the hospitality of these two boys with a desperate unspoken gratefulness.
