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IV THE BROTHER

“This is King’s Highway,” the man said.

And then Eugene looked and saw that it was just a street. There were some big new buildings, a large hotel, some restaurants and “bar-grill” places of the modern kind, the livid monotone of neon lights, the ceaseless traffic of motor cars—all this was new, but it was just a street. And he knew that it had always been just a street, and nothing more—but somehow—well, he stood there looking at it, wondering what else he had expected to find.

The man kept looking at him with inquiry in his eyes, and Eugene asked him if the Fair had not been out this way.

“Sure, the Fair was out beyond here,” the man said.”Out where the park is now. But this street you’re looking for—don’t you remember the name of it or nothing?” the man said.

Eugene said he thought the name of the street was Edgemont, but that he wasn’t sure. Anyhow it was something like that. And he said the house was on the corner of that street and of another street.

Then the man said: “What was that other street?”

Eugene said he did not know, but that King’s Highway was a block or so away, and that an interurban line ran past about half a block from where he once had lived.

“What line was this?” the man said, and stared at him.

“The interurban line,” Eugene said.

Then the man stared at him again, and finally, “I don’t know no interurban line,” he said.

Eugene said it was a line that ran behind some houses, and that there were board fences there and grass beside the tracks. But somehow he could not say that it was summer in those days and that you could smell the ties, a wooden, tarry smell, and feel a kind of absence in the afternoon after the car had gone. He only said the interurban line was back behind somewhere between the backyards of some houses and some old board fences, and that King’s Highway was a block or two away.

He did not say that King’s Highway had not been a street in those days but a kind of road that wound from magic out of some dim and haunted land, and that along the way it had got mixed in with Tom the Piper’s son, with hot cross buns, with all the light that came and went, and with coming down through Indiana in the morning, and the smell of engine smoke, the Union Station, and most of all with voices lost and far and long ago that said “King’s Highway.”

He did not say these things about King’s Highway because he looked about him and he saw what King’s Highway was. All he could say was that the street was near King’s Highway, and was on the corner, and that the interurban trolley line was close to there. He said it was a stone house, and that there were stone steps before it, and a strip of grass. He said he thought the house had had a turret at one corner, he could not be sure.

The man looked at him again, and said, “This is King’s Highway, but I never heard of any street like, that.”

Eugene left him then, and went on till he found the place. And so at last he turned into the street, finding the place where the two corners met, the huddled block, the turret, and the steps, and paused a moment, looking back, as if the street were Time.

For a moment he stood there, waiting—for a word, and for a door to open, for the child to come. He waited, but no words were spoken; no one came.

Yet all of it was just as it had always been, except that the steps were lower, the porch less high, the strip of grass less wide, than he had thought. All the rest of it was as he had known it would be. A graystone front, three-storied, with a slant slate roof, the side red brick and windowed, still with the old arched entrance in the center for the doctor’s use.