He thought quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy.
They will not find me here.
I cannot move.
It is over.
If I had thought of this long ago, I would have been afraid.
But I’m not, now.
Here — upon this oat pile — doing my bit — for Democracy.
I’ll begin to stink. They’ll find me then.
Life glimmered away out of his weary eyes.
He lay, half-conscious, sprawled upon the oats.
He thought of the horse.
In this way the young checker, who had loaned him money, found him.
The checker knelt above him, supporting Eugene’s head with one hand, and putting a bottle of raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other.
When the boy had revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile and walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.
They went across the road to a little grocery-store.
The checker ordered a bottle of milk, a box of crackers, and a big block of cheese.
As Eugene ate, the tears began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty gullies on his skin.
They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could not restrain them.
The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare.
He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.
“Why didn’t you tell me, boy?
I’d have let you have the money,” he said.
“I— don’t — know,” said Eugene, between bites of cheese.
“Couldn’t.”
With the checker’s loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day.
Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday.
Eugene stayed on.
He was like a man who had died, and had been reborn.
All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world.
He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts.
The world itself turned ghost.
All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival.
Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new.
Everything was old.
Everything was dying.
A vast aerial music, forever far-faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears.
He had known birth.
He had known pain and love.
He had known hunger.
Almost he had known death.
At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches.
But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea.
He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom.
The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.
And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic — it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow — his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger.
His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat’s; his eyes bright and fierce.
O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side.
O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores.
You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor.
You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman’s hair floating like green moss above your belly.