It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which he had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying that Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly as a kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren’t like England at all, so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but there wasn’t the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should have been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to him, like the illustrations in a school history. They were dry ... sec, he thought, considering the French word better in this case on account of its sound.
And it wasn’t the likeness to England that he found interesting, but rather the difference ... the bleak rawness of the countryside and the sight of whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs and Poles providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.
He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth, filled with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the spectacle of life, he was acutely conscious of it.
To Sabine, he said, “You know the funny thing is that it seems to me like coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America ... not in Durham, but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I’ve passed through.”
He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer than the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street “Challs Street” and sacred Harvard ... “Havaad.”
It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than any other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with a consciousness of uttering treason, was America, far more than the sort of life he would encounter in Durham.
As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.
“It’s old country,” he said, “and if one has been brought up there, as I’ve been, there’s no reason for going back there to live. In a way it’s a dead world ... dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it’s the future that interests me ... not the past. I want to be where the most is going on ... in the center of things.”
When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure ... young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.
To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity, rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside. He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old wound, but he got as far as O’Hara’s house, where he met the Irishman and they became friends. O’Hara turned over to him a canoe and a rowing-scull and told him that whenever his leg was better he might have a horse from his stables.