The red lamp of the cab vanished. Hugo turned in the other direction and began to run in great leaps. He slowed when he came to a town. A light was burning in an all-night restaurant. Hugo produced the five-dollar bill.
"Give me a bucket of water—and put on about five steaks. Five."
XIX
It was bright morning when Hugo awoke. Through the window-pane in the room where he had slept, he could see a straggling back yard; damp clothes moved in the breeze, and beyond was a depression green with young shoots. He descended to the restaurant and ate his breakfast. Automobiles were swishing along the road outside and he could hear a clatter of dishes in the kitchen. Afterwards he went out doors and walked through the busy centre of the village and on into the country.
Sun streamed upon him; the sky was blue; birds twittered in the budding bushes. He had almost forgotten the beauty and peacefulness of springtime; now it came over him with a rush—pastel colours and fecund warmth, smells of earth and rain, melodious, haphazard wind. He knew intuitively that McClaren would never send for him; he wondered what Mr. Mills would say to Mr. Shayne about him. Both thoughts passed like white clouds over his mind and he forgot them for an indolent vegetative tranquillity.
The road curved over hills and descended into tinted valleys. Farmers were ploughing and planting. The men at the restaurant had told him that he was in Connecticut. That did not matter, for any other place would have been the same on this May morning. A truck-driver offered him a ride, which Hugo refused, and then, watching the cubic van surge away in the distance, he wished fugitively that he had accepted.
Two half dollars and a quarter jingled in his pocket. His suit was seedy and his beard unshaven. A picture of New York ran through his mind: he stood far off from it gazing at the splendour of its towers in the morning light; he came closer and the noise of it smote his ears; suddenly he plunged into the city, his perspective vanished, and there rose about him the ugly, unrelated, inchoate masses of tawdriness that had been glorious from a distance, while people—dour, malicious, selfish people who scuttled like ants—supplanted the vista of stone and steel. The trite truth of the ratio between approach and enchantment amused him. It was so obvious, yet so few mortals had the fine sense to withdraw themselves. He was very happy walking tirelessly along that road.
After his luncheon he allowed a truck to carry him farther from the city, deeper into the magic of spring. The driver bubbled with it—he wore a purple tulip in his greasy cap and he slowed down on the hilltops with an unassuming reverence and a naïve slang that fitted well with Hugo's mood. When he reached his destination, Hugo walked on with reluctance. Shadows of the higher places moved into the lowlands. He crossed a brook and leaned over its middle on the bridge rail, fascinated by an underwater landscape, complete, full of colour, less than a foot high. From every side came the strident music of frogs. Spring, spring, spring, they sang, rolling their liquid gutturals and stopping abruptly when he came too near.
In the evening, far from the city, he turned from the pavement on a muddy country road, walking on until he reached the skeleton of an old house. There he lay down, taking his supper from his pocket and eating it slowly. The floor of the second story had fallen down and he could see the stars through a hole in the roof. In such houses, he thought, the first chapters of American history had been lived. When it was entirely dark, a whippoorwill began to make its sweet and mournful music. Warmth and chilliness came together from the ground. He slept.