"I don't want to die, Gray, but I don't know how to keep alive. It's odd, isn't it? I don't wish to die. It's an interesting world. I want to see how the local elections turn out in New York."
"What!"
"Certainly. That is what worries me more than anything. We Allies are sure to win. I'm not worrying about that. But I'd like to live to see Tammany a dead cock in the pit!"
Gray forced a laugh; Vail laughed unfeignedly, and then, solemn again, said:
"I'd like to live to see this country aspire to something really noble."
"After all," said Gray, "there is really nothing to stifle aspiration."
It was not only because Vail had been gazing upon death in every phase, every degree—on brutal destruction wholesale and in detail; but also he had been standing on the outer escarpment of Civilization and had watched[pg 132] the mounting sea of barbarism battering, thundering, undermining, gradually engulfing the world itself and all its ancient liberties.
He and the young surgeon, Gray, who was to sail to France next day were alone together on the loggia of the club; dusk mitigated the infernal heat of a summer day in town.
On the avenue below motor cars moved north and south, hansoms crept slowly along the curb, and on the hot sidewalks people passed listlessly under the electric lights—the nine—and—seventy sweating tribes.
For, on such summer nights, under the red moon, an exodus from the East Side peoples the noble avenue with dingy spectres who shuffle along the gilded grilles and still façades of stone, up and down, to and fro, in quest of God knows what—of air perhaps, perhaps of happiness, or of something even vaguer. But whatever it may be that starts them into painful motion, one thing seems certain: aspiration is a part of their unrest.