Hugo turned and stared at the brown mound of the bull. After a moment he walked over and stood above it. Its tongue hung out and its mouth grinned. It lay there dead, and yet to Hugo it still had life: the indestructibility of a ghost and the immortality of a symbol. He sat beside it until sundown.

At twilight he entered the barn and tended the cows. The doors of the house were closed. He went without supper. Cane returned jubilantly later in the evening. He called Hugo from the back porch.

“Telegram for you.”

Hugo read the wire. His father was sick and failing rapidly. “I want my wages,” he said. Then he went back to the barn. His trifling belongings were already wrapped in a bundle. Cane reluctantly counted out the money. Hugo felt nauseated and feverish. He put the money in his pocket, the bundle under his arm; he opened the gate, and his feet found the soft earth of the road in the darkness.

XX

Hugo had three hours to wait for a Chicago train. His wages purchased his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.

When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated. His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires would not yield to any temporal powers.