Anthony began to run again. The cries were clear
and distinct now as they rose with clouds of frosted
breath into the chilly air:
"Germany’s surrendered! Germany’s
surrendered!"
That evening in the opaque gloom of six o’clock
Anthony slipped between two freight-cars, and once
over the railroad, followed the track along to Garden
City, where he caught an electric train for New York.
He stood some chance of apprehension—he
knew that the military police were often sent through
the cars to ask for passes, but he imagined that to-night
the vigilance would be relaxed. But, in any event,
he would have tried to slip through, for he had been
unable to locate Gloria by telephone, and another
day of suspense would have been intolerable.
After inexplicable stops and waits that reminded him
of the night he had left New York, over a year before,
they drew into the Pennsylvania Station, and he followed
the familiar way to the taxi-stand, finding it grotesque
and oddly stimulating to give his own address.
Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never
seen it with a carnival crowd which swept its glittering
way through scraps of paper, piled ankle-deep on the
sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches
and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each
face in which was clear cut and distinct under the
white glare overhead. Anthony picked out half
a dozen figures—a drunken sailor, tipped
backward and supported by two other gobs, was waving
his hat and emitting a wild series of roars; a wounded
soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in an eddy
on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired
girl sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked
taxicab. Here surely the victory had come in
time, the climax had been scheduled with the uttermost
celestial foresight. The great rich nation had
made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy
but not enough for bitterness—hence the
carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these
bright lights glittered the faces of peoples whose
glory had long since passed away, whose very civilizations
were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the news of
victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre,
a hundred generations before; men whose ancestors
had seen a flower-decked, slave-adorned cortege drift
with its wake of captives down the avenues of Imperial
Rome....
Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor,
the jewelled magnificence of Times Square ... a gorgeous
alley of incandescence ahead.... Then—was
it years later?—he was paying the taxi-driver
in front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street.
He was in the hall—ah, there was the negro
boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent, unchanged.
“Is Mrs. Patch in?”
“I have just came on, sah,” the man announced
with his incongruous British accent.
