Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish

coast, the sluggish passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat train

through the summer country. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to

the feeling of rapid motion and to swift, terrifying thoughts. He was

sitting so, his face shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer saw him

from the siding at White River Junction.

When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to

sunset. The train was passing through a gray country and the sky

overhead was flushed with a wide flood of clear color. There was a

rose-colored light over the gray rocks and hills and meadows. Off to the

left, under the approach of a weather-stained wooden bridge, a group of

boys were sitting around a little fire. The smell of the wood smoke blew

in at the window. Except for an old farmer, jogging along the highroad

in his box-wagon, there was not another living creature to be seen.

Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the edge of a

little marsh, crouching under their shelter and looking gravely at their

fire. They took his mind back a long way, to a campfire on a sandbar in

a Western river, and he wished he could go back and sit down with them.

He could remember exactly how the world had looked then.

It was quite dark and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when it

occurred to him that the train must be nearing Allway. In going to his

new bridge at Moorlock he had always to pass through Allway. The train

stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then the

hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge

again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he

was glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on the solid roadbed again.

He did not like coming and going across that bridge, or remembering the

man who built it. And was he, indeed, the same man who used to walk that

bridge at night, promising such things to himself and to the stars? And

yet, he could remember it all so well: the quiet hills sleeping in the

moonlight, the slender skeleton of the bridge reaching out into the

river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big white house; upstairs,

in Winifred's window, the light that told him she was still awake and

still thinking of him. And after the light went out he walked alone,

taking the heavens into his confidence, unable to tear himself away from

the white magic of the night, unwilling to sleep because longing was so

sweet to him, and because, for the first time since first the hills were

hung with moonlight, there was a lover in the world. And always there

was the sound of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more

than anything else, meant death; the wearing away of things under the

impact of physical forces which men could direct but never circumvent or

diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to

him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the

moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only those two things

awake and sleepless; death and love, the rushing river and his burning

heart.




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