He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.
There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:
Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I’ve been engaged to him almost a year. We’re going off quietly to Norfolk tomorrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn’t tell you! I tried to, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn’t been so young, but what’s the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don’t forget me. Goodbye and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you.
When he had finished the letter, he reread it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun’s vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horseshoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day’s distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.
And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew’s great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of death alone, alone.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. “Your girl went and got married, didn’t she? She fooled you. You got left.”
“Wh‑a‑a‑a‑t!” said Eliza banteringly, “has my boy been—as the fellow says” (she sniggered behind her hand) “has my boy been a-courtin’?” She puckered her lips in playful reproach.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily, “What fellow says!”
His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister’s eye. They laughed.
“Well, ’Gene,” said the girl seriously, “forget about it. You’re only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman.”
“Why, son,” said Eliza with a touch of malice, “that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on.”
“Oh, stop it, please.”
“Cheer up!” said Helen heartily. “Your time’s coming. You’ll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you’re a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, “I’d make a big joke of it all. I wouldn’t let on to her that it affected me. I’d write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I’d show them! That’s what I’d—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he groaned, starting up. “Leave me alone, won’t you?”
He left the house.
But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:
… and I hope he’s worth having you—he can’t deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that’s something. How lucky he is! You’re right about me—I’m too young. I’d cut off my hand now for eight or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.
Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won’t, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I’m lost now and I’ll never find the way again. In God’s name write me a line
