the bookkeepers—the little proper and respectable people of all sorts—were riding home across the quiet little square at noon.
On the other side of the square he could see two workmen who were still at work upon a piece of stone; one was holding an iron spike and one a sledge, and they worked slowly, with frequent pauses.
A young buck, with a noisy, sporty little car, sped over the square and vanished; and the youth wondered if he was one of the daring blades of Dijon, and what young women of the town’s best families he had taken out in the car, and if he boasted to other young town blades in cafés of his prowess at seduction, as did the bucks before Wood’s Pharmacy at home.
Then for a moment there was a brooding silence in the square again, and presently there began the most lonely, lost and unforgettable of all sounds on earth—the solid, liquid leather-shuffle of footsteps going home one way, as men had done when they came home to lunch at noon some twenty years ago, in the green-gold and summer magic of full June, before he had seen his father’s land, and when the kingdoms of this earth and the enchanted city still blazed there in the legendary magic of his boyhood’s vision.
They came with solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of their decent leather, going home, the merchants, workers, and good citizens of that old town of Dijon. They streamed across the cobbles of that little square; they passed, and vanished, and were gone for ever—leaving silence, the brooding hush and apathy of noon, a suddenly living and intolerable memory, instant and familiar as all this life around him, of a life that he had lost, and that could never die.
It was the life of twenty years ago in the quiet, leafy streets and little towns of lost America—of an America that had been lost beneath the savage roar of its machinery, the brutal stupefaction of its days, the huge disease of its furious, ever-quickening and incurable unrest, its flood-tide horror of grey, driven faces, stolid eyes, starved, brutal nerves, and dull, dead flesh.
The memory of the lost America—the America of twenty years ago, of quiet streets, the time-enchanted spell and magic of full June, the solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of men in shirt-sleeves coming home, the leafy fragrance of the cooling turnip-greens, and screens that slammed, and sudden silence—had long since died, had been drowned beneath the brutal flood-tide, the edict stupefaction of that roaring surge and mechanical life which had succeeded it.
