Sometimes a song crazily drifted to Carl’s ears from one of the negro cottages--a song that was weighted with loosely undulating sadness--and he listened with a stern greediness. Music is a huge, treacherous sound made by thoughts and emotions to console them for their feeling of minute mortality, and after it has given them its dream of permanent size it disappears, slaying the illusion with silence. Now it brought a delusion of substantiality to the ghost within the mould of Carl’s flesh and he listened in a trance of gratitude. Lost in the obliterations of his grief, he felt infinitely nearer to these abject, musical negroes outside than to the artificially silent, stiffly satisfied white people with whom he was riding. Grief, which is an insane tyrant among emotions, has an effortless way of crossing all boundaries and walls, but it does not reveal any hidden oneness between human beings. Grief places men and women in a vacuum of renunciation, or shows them that they have little connection with the people around them and that they have been enduring an alien camp. Ruled by this latter discovery, Carl looked with an undisguised hatred at the formal, complacent white people in the railway coach and felt that he was deeply related to the negroes outside. Almost three months had passed since the invisible knife had swung into the middle of his being, and since he had staggered across the agitated sincerity of night to the peaceful compassion of the young school teacher. Now and then he remembered their silent walk down the sturdy brightness of the country road--a silence which had been a soft wreath ironically thrown upon the weakness of words--and the troubled way in which she had helped him brush his clothes and wash his face, and the stumbling simplicity of the words with which she had tried to comfort him. Although he had been a stranger to her, she had thrown aside that distrust which is born of sensual pride and a cheaply purchased worldly wisdom, influenced by the helpless directness of his demeanor and by the supple humility which a grief of her own had once left within her. The force of her fearlessness had fallen upon him like the sweeping touch of another world, and in his daze he had actually believed that she had been sent by the woman whom he had lost as an alert messenger striving to teach him how to hold his ghostlike shoulders up beneath a future burden. If she had held a human aspect to him he would have hated and reviled her, for then she would have been merely an atom in the vast, turbid reality that had slowly lured him to an imbecilic torture. He accepted the curves of her body as an unearthly visitation and possessed them as one who passes through a fragile ritual. But after his departure from her, as he once more walked down the shaggy, solid country road, she had tiptoed away from him with a spectral quickness, and the clamor of a world had once more attacked him, like the scattered falsehoods of an idiot.