Josie was Mrs. Bowden’s niece and lived with her.
She was a tall beanpole of a girl with a prognathous mouth and stick-out grinning teeth.
She was twenty.
The other girl, Louise, was a waitress.
She was small, plump, a warm brunette.
Mrs. Bowden was a little sallow woman with ratty brown hair.
She had brown worn-out eyes.
She was a dressmaker.
Her husband, a carpenter, had died in the Spring.
There was a little insurance money.
That was how she came to take the trip.
Now, by night, he was riding once more into the South.
The day-coach was hot, full of the weary smell of old red plush.
People dozed painfully, distressed by the mournful tolling of the bell, and the grinding halts.
A baby wailed thinly.
Its mother, a gaunt wisp-haired mountaineer, turned the back of the seat ahead, and bedded the child on a spread newspaper.
Its wizened face peeked dirtily out of its swaddling discomfort of soiled jackets and pink ribbon.
It wailed and slept.
At the front of the car, a young hill-man, high-boned and red, clad in corduroys and leather leggings, shelled peanuts steadily, throwing the shells into the aisle.
People trod through them with a sharp masty crackle.
The boys, bored, paraded restlessly to the car-end for water.
There was a crushed litter of sanitary drinking-cups upon the floor, and a stale odor from the toilets.
The two girls slept soundly on turned seats.
The small one breathed warmly and sweetly through moist parted lips.
The weariness of the night wore in upon their jaded nerves, lay upon their dry hot eyeballs.
They flattened noses against the dirty windows, and watched the vast structure of the earth sweep past — clumped woodlands, the bending sweep of the fields, the huge flowing lift of the earth-waves, cyclic intersections bewildering — the American earth — rude, immeasurable, formless, mighty.
His mind was bound in the sad lulling magic of the car wheels.
Clackety-clack.
Clackety-clack.
Clackety-clack.
Clackety-clack.
He thought of his life as something that had happened long ago.
He had found, at last, his gateway to the lost world.
But did it lie before or behind him?
Was he leaving or entering it?
Above the rhythm of the wheels he thought of Eliza’s laughter over ancient things.
He saw a brief forgotten gesture, her white broad forehead, a ghost of old grief in her eyes.
Ben, Gant — their strange lost voices.
Their sad laughter.
They swam toward him through green walls of fantasy.
They caught and twisted at his heart.
The green ghost-glimmer of their faces coiled away.
Lost.
Lost.
“Let’s go for a smoke,” said Max Isaacs.
They went back and stood wedged for stability on the closed platform of the car. They lighted cigarettes.
Light broke against the east, in a murky rim.
The far dark was eaten cleanly away.
The horizon sky was barred with hard fierce strips of light.
Still buried in night, they looked across at the unimpinging sheet of day.