“Do you see it?” cried Eugene. “Do you see it, Ben?”
“Yes,” said Ben. “What about it? They have a right to, haven’t they?”
“Not here! Not here!” said Eugene passionately. “It’s not right, here! My God, this is the Square! There’s the fountain! There’s the City Hall! There’s the Greek’s lunchroom.”
The bank-chimes struck the half hour.
“And there’s the bank,” he cried.
“That makes no difference,” said Ben.
“Yes,” said Eugene, “it does!”
I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night—
“But not here! Not here, Ben!” said Eugene.
“Where?” said Ben wearily.
“In Babylon! In Thebes! In all the other places. But not here!” Eugene answered with growing passion. “There is a place where all things happen! But not here, Ben!”
My gods, with bird-cries in the sun, hang in the sky.
“Not here, Ben! It is not right!” Eugene said again.
The manifold gods of Babylon. Then, for a moment, Eugene stared at the dark figure on the rail, muttering in protest and disbelief: “Ghost! Ghost!”
“Fool,” said Ben again, “I tell you I am not a ghost.”
“Then, what are you?” said Eugene with strong excitement. “You are dead, Ben.”
In a moment, more quietly, he added: “Or do men die?”
“How should I know,” said Ben.
“They say papa is dying. Did you know that, Ben?” Eugene asked.
“Yes,” said Ben.
“They have bought his shop. They are going to tear it down and put up a skyscraper here.”
“Yes,” said Ben, “I know it.”
We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.
“Everything is going. Everything changes and passes away. Tomorrow I shall be gone and this—” he stopped.
“This—what?” said Ben.
“This will be gone or—O God! Did all this happen?” cried Eugene.
“How should I know, fool?” cried Ben angrily.
“What happens, Ben? What really happens?” said Eugene. “Can you remember some of the same things that I do? I have forgotten the old faces. Where are they, Ben? What were their names? I forget the names of people I knew for years. I get their faces mixed. I get their heads stuck on other people’s bodies. I think one man has said what another said. And I forget—forget. There is something I have lost and have forgotten. I can’t remember, Ben.”
“What do you want to remember?” said Ben.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces.
“I have forgotten names. I have forgotten faces. And I remember little things,” said Eugene. “I remember the fly I swallowed on the peach, and the little boys on tricycles at Saint Louis, and the mole on Grover’s neck, and the Lackawanna freight-car, number 16356, on a siding near Gulfport. Once, in Norfolk, an Australian soldier on his way to France asked me the way to a ship; I remember that man’s face.”
He stared for an answer into the shadow of Ben’s face, and then he turned his moon-bright eyes upon the Square.
And for a moment all the silver space was printed with the thousand forms of himself and Ben. There, by the corner in from Academy Street, Eugene watched his own approach; there, by the City Hall, he strode with lifted knees; there, by the curb upon the step, he stood, peopling the night with the great lost legion of himself—the thousand forms that came, that passed, that wove and shifted in unending change, and that remained unchanging Him.
And through the Square, unwoven from lost time, the fierce bright horde of Ben spun in and out its deathless loom. Ben, in a thousand moments, walked the Square: Ben of the lost years, the forgotten days, the unremembered hours; prowled by the moonlit façades; vanished, returned, left and rejoined himself, was one and many—deathless Ben in search of the lost dead lusts, the finished enterprise, the unfound door—unchanging Ben multiplying himself in form, by all the brick façades entering and coming out.
And as Eugene watched the army of himself and Ben, which were not ghosts, and which were lost, he saw himself—his son, his boy, his lost and virgin flesh—come over past the fountain, leaning against the loaded canvas bag, and walking down with rapid crippled stride past Gant’s toward Niggertown in young prenatal dawn. And as he passed the porch where he sat watching, he saw the lost child-face below the lumpy ragged cap, drugged in the magic of unheard music, listening for the far-forested horn-note, the speechless almost captured password. The fast boy-hands folded the fresh sheets, but the fabulous lost face went by, steeped in its incantations.
Eugene leaped to the railing.
“You! You! My son! My child! Come back! Come back!”
His voice strangled in his throat: the boy had gone, leaving the memory of his bewitched and listening face turned to the hidden world. O lost!
And now the Square was thronging with their lost bright shapes, and all the minutes of lost time collected and stood still. Then, shot from them with projectile speed, the Square shrank down the rails of destiny, and was vanished with all things done, with all forgotten shapes of himself and Ben.
And in his vision he saw the fabulous lost cities, buried in the drifted silt of the earth—Thebes, the seven-gated, and all the temples of the Daulian and Phocian lands, and all Oenotria to the Tyrrhene gulf. Sunk in the burial-urn of earth he saw the vanished cultures: the strange sourceless glory of the Incas, the fragments of lost epics upon a broken shard of Gnossic pottery, the buried tombs of the Memphian kings, and imperial dust, wound all about with gold and rotting linen, dead with their thousand bestial gods, their mute unwakened ushabti in their finished eternities.
He saw the billion living of the earth, the thousand billion dead: seas were withered, deserts flooded, mountains drowned; and gods and demons came out of the South, and ruled above the little rocket-flare of centuries, and sank—came
