Page 302 - tender-is-the-night

XIX

For an hour, tied up with his profound reaction to his fa-
ther’s death, the magnificent façade of the homeland, the
harbor of New York, seemed all sad and glorious to Dick,
but once ashore the feeling vanished, nor did he find it
again in the streets or the hotels or the trains that bore him
first to Buffalo, and then south to Virginia with his father’s
body. Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested
clayland of Westmoreland County, did he feel once more
identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star
he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he
heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely
fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flow-
ing softly under soft Indian names.
Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a
hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly
leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flow-
ers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had
no more ties here now and did not believe he would come
back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them
all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the
spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the for-
est-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.
‘Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers.’
On the long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country

302 Tender is the Night