Hugo turned and stared at the brown mound of the bull. After a moment he walked over and stood above it. Its tongue hung out and its mouth grinned. It lay there dead, and yet to Hugo it still had life: the indestructibility of a ghost and the immortality of a symbol. He sat beside it until sundown.
At twilight he entered the barn and tended the cows. The doors of the house were closed. He went without supper. Cane returned jubilantly later in the evening. He called Hugo from the back porch.
"Telegram for you."
Hugo read the wire. His father was sick and failing rapidly. "I want my wages," he said. Then he went back to the barn. His trifling belongings were already wrapped in a bundle. Cane reluctantly counted out the money. Hugo felt nauseated and feverish. He put the money in his pocket, the bundle under his arm; he opened the gate, and his feet found the soft earth of the road in the darkness.
XX
Hugo had three hours to wait for a Chicago train. His wages purchased his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.
When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated. His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires would not yield to any temporal powers.
He was barren of desire to investigate deeper into the philosophy of himself. All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human—he looked upon them again with repugnance—and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. When that thought entered his mind, it gave rise to peculiar speculations.
He approached thirty, he thought, and still the world had not re-echoed with his name; the trumps, banners, and cavalcade of his glory had been only shadows in the sky, dust at sunset that made evanescent and intangible colours. Again, he thought, the very perfection of his prowess was responsible for its inapplicability; if he but had an Achilles' heel so that his might could taste the occasional tonic of inadequacy, then he could meet the challenge of possible failure with successful effort. More frequently he condemned his mind and spirit for not being great enough to conceive a mission for his thews. Then he would fall into a reverie, trying to invent a creation that would be as magnificent as the destructions he could so easily envision.