"What'll you have, colonel?"
"I think I'll have a cab."
The hurrying crowd paused, and cheered huskily when he drove away. He had the cab-man drive across town and down the old avenue. At the church of the Holy Trinity there was a morning service beginning, and he climbed the steps. Within, a few hundred people were scattered about. The only sound was the moaning of the organ. High up at one side he could see Moselle's hunched shoulders and dingy yellow head, faded with age, against the blue and gilded pipes. Moselle began to play a prelude, something stately and stern, like the thousand-century-old front of a gray crag, that might be well known but never could be familiar. The dingy old head moved Gard more than the prelude. He went back to the cab and drove down towards the Brotherhood. There was no flowing river so strange as the flowing river of the street. Every one was isolated, no doubt; but, after all, there was a bond. It ought to be celebrated and sworn to. A truckman on top of a dray looked down and probably caught him smiling to himself, grinned, and shouted, "How goes it?" Here and there on the sidewalk, too, men called out to him. Every door and window here between Trinity and the Brotherhood was familiar, and the brick walls and shuttered windows of the Brotherhood were eloquent. He thought. "I'll go in another time, and see Francis and his sick flower-bed, and the school and Andrew. It would scare me into a relapse to see the Superior now. Nobody but the bonus Deus ever understood him, and the bonus Deus is in Hagar."
So he went back to the station. The train ran for an hour or more past glimpses of the sea, and then turned up the Wyantenaug Valley. At Hamilton he changed cars. The brave old river sweeps around a curve, and Hamilton lies in the curve. He could see the tower of the grand-stand in the Fair grounds, and Saint Mary's among the other steeples, but he sat still on the station platform, saw his trunk go by on a hand-truck, and watched beyond the freight-yards the rippling, glinting river, hurrying, busy, with its myriad little shining points of happiness. Was it the languor of his weariness or a magic in the river that flowed down from that promised land of Beulah, the mythical Hagar, the mother of the homeless—a Mecca, a Bethlehem, an Arden of wise flowers and musical brooks? The river seemed to gesture, and mutter syllables and sentences. Some one spoke loudly over his head. He looked up and saw Morgan Map.
"Going up the valley? So am I," Morgan said, and Gard nodded languidly. It occurred to him, slowly, that he ought to be surprised. "The train's ready. Come along."
A practical man, this Map, Gard thought—a very genius of accomplishment. Why should he go into Beulah, too? Why not? But he must be doing something here, this forcible schemer, who did nothing unaccountably. If he meditated violence, it was a poor place for it. Much better to have set fire to the house near the hospital, or corrupted Sabrina and poisoned the breakfast. Still—Gard pulled himself slowly up the car steps. His knees had not yet recovered from their wavering inadequacy—still, it was what Mavering would have called "a sportsmanlike situation." Map might try some simple, antique, and desperate thing. In that case it would be well to get one's gun where it could be pulled suddenly. Gunpowder was the handicap that made an invalid even with two hundred pounds and six-feet-two of red-haired, aggressive health. And all that was nonsense. What a sinewy force it was—this love of a woman!—that suddenly snapped a man's habits apart, dragged all his other motives indifferently after it; one of the universal energies. Joy and desperation, and the beast and the climbing soul, seemed packed in it more closely side by side than in any other experience.
Two or three men were in the car at one end. Morgan went to the other end and pulled over a seat. The two sat down facing each other, and Morgan produced cigars.
"I'm glad you brought these, however you happen to be here," said Gard. "The doctor forbids them, so I don't carry any, but accept them from fate. It's a fine point of casuistry. I disliked that doctor—I disliked his whiskers, mostly. They used to get twisted up in my feverish nightmares. Did you happen to be here?"
"No. I found out what time you were going, got leave of absence and came along."