THE pulse of moving left them numb. The pensiveness of rapid flight through the world came near them, could not transfix their numbness. Men and women in a railroad car—serried, determined; pointed the train, flung it against the city. David sat next the window. He saw the world fly past as if afraid and offended. The green comfort of meadows was too sweet for the sharp earnestness of the travelers. They had no will for the shadow of trees and the cool ambiance of little rivers. Their mood was a straight hard hot track of steel along which they flung: their mood cut through smile of fields, slumber of towns. Their minds hurled the train....
Tom and David sat together swathed in the pensiveness of travel. David was restrained and somehow broken. Tom made efforts to read. Mostly he held the book in his lap and looked before him. He spoke to David but David was impossible to speak to. Tom understood.
His own coming to New York, eight years before, was there. It was an ecstasy, an angry birth. Manhattan girdled in flame, Manhattan a woman, terrible, virgin, and he aware of his own love and of his impotence before her. Moving in the train with Tom, this time beside the mystery of David, as that first time beside the mystery of his fate, was the seed of Tom’s fate—his past. Moving in Tom along the iron rails....
The train and the rails and that world were gone: were become a cloud of sense lifting him elsewhere. He dreamed of New York, of Ohio ... locust grove, slender, reticent, athrill with the restraint of some secret ... he dreamed of them as if they were not, he only was ... he a dream.
Night cast down curtains. Tom looked at David again, and seemed to enter and know him. David was moving forward to the City as to a death he must pass through. The City was a cloud for them both ... though a different cloud ... whose blackness wreathed far over their afternoon. But David was distant from Thomas Rennard. David felt he might know this man and the City at a single moment: know them at once and together.
Sharp long shadows crouched across the aisle of the car. Heads and shoulders of men and women loomed from a common gloom that expressed their oneness. Men and women were single-mooded, single-loined, they were a swaying, night-bound creature.
Four men—more nearly boys save one who was old—got up and reached to the racks above the windows. They took violins and mandolins from cases. They tuned them. The old one who was leader struck a chord. A chorus of voices—male and wistfully female—quavered about the car.
Only the four who stood were visible. Song rose from underneath them, tremulous and pervasive, rose from the gloom of the car. It was a song of folk, a song of yearning. Passion shot it through and passion ribbed it, it was a song of tender sorrow. The voices of women rose in it like waving of lonely trees in a wide bare field—rose and swayed, wept and subsided. The voices of men rose higher, mastering, comforting the low wail of women.
The melody throbbed higher. Sharp flashings of desire were now the women’s voices: the men were weary and disconsolate, dying down. The song was over.
A new silence lay in the car. The car ran on, subdued in it and sweetened.