He smiled, a beautiful smile, and we walked off together down the road.
I wish I had gone on with him at that time into the city, but somehow I could not do it. I stopped near the top of the hill where one can see in the distance that smoky huddle of buildings which is known as Kilburn, and though he urged me, I turned aside and sat down in the edge of a meadow. There were many things I wanted to think about, to get clear in my mind.
As I sat looking out toward that great city, I saw three men walking in the white road. As I watched them, I could see them coming quickly, eagerly. Presently they threw up their hands and evidently began to shout, though I could not hear what they said. At that moment I saw my friend Bill Hahn running in the road, his coat skirts flapping heavily about his legs. When they met they almost fell into another's arms.
I suppose it was so that the early Christians, those who hid in the Roman catacombs, were wont to greet one another.
So I sat thinking.
“A man,” I said to myself, “who can regard himself as a function, not an end of creation, has arrived.”
After a time I got up and walked down the hill—some strange force carrying me onward—and came thus to the city of Kilburn.
CHAPTER X. I AM CAUGHT UP INTO LIFE
I can scarcely convey in written words the whirling emotions I felt when I entered the city of Kilburn. Every sight, every sound, recalled vividly and painfully the unhappy years I had once spent in another and greater city. Every mingled odour of the streets—and there is nothing that will so surely re-create (for me) the inner emotion of a time or place as a remembered odour—brought back to me the incidents of that immemorial existence.