HIS DAY OF FREEDOM

He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanically into a street which led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church.  A crowd of men, gathered in the doorway of the post-office, called to him to join them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his own ears.

“If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there’s a man for you,” he heard one of them remark, and knew that they were discussing his political chances.  Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end of the street, passed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country.

Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his passion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it.  A sense of exhilaration, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession of him.  “I won’t go back!” he said defiantly, “I won’t go back!” And with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous consciousness of his release.  It was as if he had burst his bonds by a single effort of strength, and was stretching his cramped limbs in the open.  The idea of escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked neither to right or left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break from his pursuers.  At the moment he would have bartered his soul in exchange for the unholy, the nameless rapture of the vagabond and the gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization.  Duty, love, ambition—­all these were nothing beside the perfect, the incommunicable passion of the open road!

It is a mood that comes once to every man—­to some men more frequently—­a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out for the strong meat of the jungle—­for the scent of the raw, dark earth and for the gleam of the yellow moonlight on the wet, rustling leaves.  This longing may come but once in adolescence, or many times until the frost of age has withered the senses.  It may come amid the showery warmth and the roving fragrance of an April day, or beside the shining, brown, leaf-strewn brooks of November.  But let it come to a man when it will, and that man renounces, in spite of himself, his little leaden gods of prosperity, and in his heart, beneath the woven garment of custom, he exchanges his birthright of respectability for a mess of Romany pottage.  Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy.  Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and evanescent as shadows.