The hurrying crowd paused, and cheered huskily when he drove away. He
had the cabman drive across town and down the old avenue. At the
church of the Holy Trinity there was a morning service beginning, and he
climbed the steps. Within, a few hundred people were scattered about.
The only sound was the moaning of the organ. High up at one side he
could see Moselle's hunched shoulders and dingy yellow head, faded with
age, against the blue and gilded pipes. Moselle began to play a prelude,
something stately and stern, like the thousand-century-old front of a
gray crag, that might be well known but never could be familiar. The
dingy old head moved Gard more than the prelude. He went back to the cab
and drove down towards the Brotherhood. There was no flowing river so
strange as the flowing river of the street. Every one was isolated, no
doubt; but, after all, there was a bond. It ought to be celebrated and
sworn to. A truckman on top of a dray looked down and probably caught
him smiling to himself, grinned, and shouted, "How goes it?" Here and
there on the sidewalk, too, men called out to him. Every door and window
here between Trinity and the Brotherhood was familiar, and the brick
walls and shuttered windows of the Brotherhood were eloquent. He
thought. "I'll go in another time, and see Francis and his sick
flower-bed, and the school and Andrew. It would scare me into a relapse
to see the Superior now. Nobody but the _bonus Deus_ ever understood
him, and the _bonus Deus_ is in Hagar."
* * * * *
So he went back to the station. The train ran for an hour or more past
glimpses of the sea, and then turned up the Wyantenaug Valley. At
Hamilton he changed cars. The brave old river sweeps around a curve,
and Hamilton lies in the curve. He could see the tower of the
grand-stand in the Fair grounds, and Saint Mary's among the other
steeples, but he sat still on the station platform, saw his trunk go by
on a hand-truck, and watched beyond the freight-yards the rippling,
glinting river, hurrying, busy, with its myriad little shining points of
happiness. Was it the languor of his weariness or a magic in the river
that flowed down from that promised land of Beulah, the mythical Hagar,
the mother of the homeless--a Mecca, a Bethlehem, an Arden of wise
flowers and musical brooks? The river seemed to gesture, and mutter
syllables and sentences. Some one spoke loudly over his head. He looked
up and saw Morgan Map.
"Going up the valley? So am I," Morgan said, and Gard nodded languidly.
It occurred to him, slowly, that he ought to be surprised. "The train's
ready. Come along."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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