“I was a boy here,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re going to make you well again.
Why! You’ll be a boy again!”
Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely in among the broken lives — with arms proposed in an attitude of enormous mercy — many times bigger than Gant’s largest angel — is an image of gentle Jesus.
Eugene went to see the Leonards several times.
Margaret looked thin and ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly.
Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience, the great health of her spirit.
All of his sin, all of his pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and ragged cloak.
He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless light.
But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the university, he talked of little else.
His heart was packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she would not understand.
She was too wise for anything but faith.
Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a confession awkwardly in a few words.
Before he had finished she began to laugh.
“Mr. Leonard!” she called.
“Imagine this rascal with a girl!
Pshaw, boy!
You don’t know what love is.
Get along with you.
There’ll be time enough to think of that ten years from now.”
She laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.
“Old ‘Gene with a girl!
Pity the poor girl!
Ah, Lord, Boy!
That’s a long way off for you.
Thank your stars!”
He bent his head sharply, and closed his eyes.
O My lovely Saint! he thought.
How close you have been to me, if any one.
How I have cut my brain open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how alone I am, and always have been.
He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and saddened by departures.
A few people hurried past, as if driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind.
He was held in the lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched her.
But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate.
She sat beside him and stroked his hand.
It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.
The house was almost empty.
At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with satisfaction.
“Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son.
Try to take care of them.”
She put Gant’s check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a safety-pin.
“Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy.
You never know who you’ll run up with on a train.”
He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.
“It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother,” she said querulously.
Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile.
“I tell you what!
It looks mighty funny, doesn’t it?
You can’t stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along.
It’s all right!