He wanted to tell them how the loss had not come bitterly and suddenly but how it came insensibly day by day so that man’s youth and visions slip away from him without his knowing it and time wears slowly at his life as a drop of water wears at rock. He wanted to ask them if they had learned as he had learned the hard knowledge which the world can give a man and which he must get and live by if he is to draw his breath calmly without pain and not to die maddened, snarling, beaten, full of hate, like a wild beast in a snare.

Jack wanted to ask the old men if they too had found that a boy’s dreams and visions passed like smoke and were like sand that slid and vanished through his fingers for all the good that they might do him. He wanted to ask them if they had learned that a suave and kindly cynicism was better than all the tortured protest in the painful and indignant soul of man and a wise and graceful acquiescence to the way of the world more sensible than all the anguish and madness youth can know. He wanted to ask them if they too had found there is no shame too great to be endured but thinking makes it so and that the wise men of the world have eyes to see with when they need them, ears to hear with when they want to use them for that purpose, but neither eyes, ears, tongues or words for what had better not be seen or known or spoken.

He wanted to ask them if they too had found that a hard word breaks no bones, that envy, venom, hatred, lies and slander are poisons to which man’s hardy flesh may grow immune and the falseness of one’s wife or mistress is an injury less harmful to sound sleep than an ill-cooked meal or a lumpy mattress—yes! far less harmful to the healthy slumber of a man of great affairs than the ravings of a drunken boy upon the telephone in the middle of the night. Such injuries as this were real and not to be endured. But cuckoldry! Why, cuckoldry was nothing, a joke, a thing to be made light of or ignored by people of experience, something sophisticated people laugh about, a subject for light comedy in the theatre, an evil only to some yokel who would not take the world as it was made.

Had they not found it so? Was a serious man to lose his own good sleep because his wife had gone to bed with other men? Was it a matter of moment that a woman gave her body for an hour or so to a lover? What did it matter so long as she behaved herself discreetly and got home in time for dinner. Cuckoldry! Why, a man might even take some pride in it, a kind of secret and illicit joy, if his wife had only made him cuckold with a celebrated man—a famous painter, say, or a distinguished lawyer—yes, even if the lover was only a nameless and infatuated fool of a boy, a man might feel a cynical and urbane amusement, an almost paternal and friendly interest. But to lose sleep, to writhe with jealousy or grow sick with shame, to be tortured by a thousand doubts and fears, to waste in flesh and lose all interest in one’s business, to strangle with hatred and choke with murderous fury for revenge, because of the illicit rhythms of a woman’s hams, the infidelities of a few inches of hair and gristle—it was a grotesque idiocy, a childish and provincial superstition, and not to be thought of by a grown man. Jack wanted to ask his friends if they had not found it so.

Jack also wanted to know if his friends had steeped and stained their souls in the hard dyes of the earth’s iniquity. He wanted to know if they were crusted hide and heart with the hard varnish of complaisance. He wanted to know if they had seen the good man drown and the mad boy perish, if they had held their peace and saved their lives by losing them, buying success at the price of one man’s failure or another’s folly, paying for position as they went, and sure of nothing except that prizes go to men who yield consent.

The words of shame and penitence rushed to his lips in a hot and choking flood releasing the foul packed burden of his heart of a weight it had not known it bore. Yet when he tried to speak, he could not, no more than when vain boasting filled his mouth. But suddenly he saw their quiet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him, he heard again a strange and wordless whisper full with its weary final knowledge and he knew that they had known all this too and had for him neither reproach nor loathing because of it.

The old men sat there looking with their quiet eyes into the street where it was always morning. Bright sunlight, ancient, sorrowful, and autumnal sunlight, cut into the cool steep shadows of the street and the sunlight was like wine. Between the terraces of October hills, he knew, the Rhine was flowing. Bathed in the sorrowful harvest of that light, premonitory with its sense of death and parting, the wine hills rose steeply from the edges of a fabled river and the river was itself a tide of golden wine.

Then Jack bought the old men wine.

He shouted loudly to the waiter with the brutal and friendly face, and the man came quickly towards the table with his heavy limp. Jack flung great sums of money on the table, and he bought the old men wine. He bought frantically, lavishly, as if he could somehow consummate the only act and answer that was left for him. He bought until the old carved table was covered with tall slender bottles of the golden wine. The old men poured the potent wine into their throats. Again and again they filled their glasses with wild golden wine and drank it down. Then the old men lifted up their lined and worn faces and, looking out into the street with their quiet and sorrowful eyes, which never changed or faltered in their expression of a single and final knowledge, they sang out strongly in the hoarse, worn voices of old men such songs as young men sing, which they had sung themselves in youth. They sang again the songs of love and hope and wandering, of drunkenness and glee, and of wild and strange adventure.

Jack turned his face away into his hand and wept bitterly.

*   *   *   *   *

Now Jack thought he was standing with his mother on the Rhine-boat landing. Bright October sunlight lay upon the terraced hills and filled the river with its light. It was morning, the landing place was swarming with an immense energy of arrival and departure, but the breath of autumn, sorrowful and foreboding, was in the air. Jack felt an immense and nameless excitement stirring in him, and also a sense of incommunicable sadness. The Rhine boat had just come in, people were streaming up the landing from the boat, and other people were streaming into the boat. The porters were diving feverishly among the crowd, loading, unloading, stockily bowed with people’s baggage, uttering sharp cries of warning as they rushed on and off the boat. In the crowd Jack saw many people that he knew.

He spoke to his mother, but she did not hear him or answer him. Instead, she stood motionless, looking with a fixed stare at someone who was standing on the top deck of the crowded boat, as if she wanted to fix his image in her mind forever.