The earth had never worn raiment of such color as it did that year.
The war seemed to unearth pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast unfolding and exposure of wealth and power.
And somehow — this imperial wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended into a lyrical music.
In Eugene’s mind, wealth and love and glory melted into a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world again.
All things were possible.
He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into Virginia.
There was protest, but not loud enough to impede him.
Eliza’s mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life.
Helen laughed at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.
“Can’t do without her?
You can’t fool me!
No, sir.
I know why you want to go,” she said jocularly.
“She’s a married woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know.
You’ve no right to go after her.”
Then abruptly, she said:
“Well, let him go if he wants to.
It looks silly to me, but he’s got to decide for himself.”
He got twenty-five dollars from his father — enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.
“Mark my words,” said Gant. “You’ll be back in a week’s time.
It’s a wild-goose chase you’re going on.”
He went.
All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing moonlight.
Early in the morning he came to Richmond.
He had to change trains; there was a wait.
He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light.
He ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men going to their work.
This casual and brief contact with their lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night, thrilled him by its very casualness.
All the little ticking sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical and unreal.
The city had no existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after he left.
He looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth.
They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos.
And the great hunger for voyages rose up in him — to come always, as now at dawn, into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.
The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper.
That was strange.
Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town.
Merchants lowered their awnings; he left them as their day began.
An hour later he was riding for the sea.
Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura.
She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her.
He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and bright salt.
The train drew under the boat-shed at Newport News.
The terrific locomotive, as beautiful as any ship, breathed with unlaborious fatigue at the rail-head.
There, by lapping water, she came to rest, like a completed destiny.
The little boat lay waiting at the dock.
Within a few minutes he had left the hot murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue water of the Roads.
A great light wind swept over the water, making a singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music and a glory in his heart.
He drove along the little decks at a bounding stride, lunging past the staring people, with wild noises in his throat.
The lean destroyers, the bright mad camouflage of the freighters and the transports, the lazy red whirl of a propeller, half-submerged, and the light winey sparkle of the waves fused to a single radiance and filled him with glory.
He cried back into the throat of the enormous wind, and his eyes were wet.