Things like that. She could have finished it with her eyes closed. She’d finish it tomorrow, maybe, when she got up. She’d have to finish it soon: it had been lying there like that for three days now. But not tonight. There are times when you are too tired and vanquished even to lie. And something might have crept through between the lines.
She got up and she went over to a sort of cupboard-arrangement, a niche without any closure, gaping against the back wall. It held, on a shelf, a gas-ring, with a rubber tube leading up and cupping onto a jet that protruded from the wall overhead. She struck a match, uncocked the jet, and a little circle of sluggish blue fire jumped into being. She placed a battered tin coffee-pot over this, readied for brewing from earlier in the day, when it had not been so much agony to move about.
Then her hands went to the shoulder of her dress, to open and discard it. She remembered, and looked toward the window, fronting the street. Its shade had been left up. There were rooftops across on the other side, if nothing else, and vermin sometimes crawled upon them. Once, during the summertime before, a jeering whistle had come in to apprise her of this. She’d never forgotten that since.
She let her dress be for a moment, went over to it to pull the shade down. Then with her hand to the cord, she stopped and forgot to go ahead.
He was still down there. He was lingering down there in the street, directly before this house. The very same one who had walked over with her just now. The street-light falling on him identified him to her beyond the possibility of a mistake.
He was standing out there at the margin of the sidewalk, as if at a loss, as if, having now come this far, he didn’t know where next to go from here, where to go on to. As if her defection had stranded him. He was motionless, yet not quite still. He kept fluctuating a little in the one place where he stood, shifting about like a jittering compass.
It was not herself that held him there, that was implicit in his very stance. His back was to her, or at least partially so; he was standing semi-profileward, parallel to the direction of the street. He wasn’t looking up, seeking her at any of the windows. He wasn’t looking in, questioning the doorway through which he had last seen her go. He was doing again as he had done while she was still with him, staring intently and with only momentary interruptions off into the distance, down the street and beyond, scanning the night in the direction from which they had last come, he and she. Anxiously, worriedly, fearfully. Yes, there was no mistaking the emotion the whole cast of his body conveyed, even from a height of three floors above; fearfully, as well.
Though she had every evidence that this was no trespass upon herself, that it had nothing to do with her, yet it did something to irritate her. What did he want down there? Why didn’t he go elsewhere and do his shadow-boxing? What did he hang around her door for? She wanted to be away from all of them, she wanted to forget them, all those who had to do with the mill. And he was one of them. Why didn’t he go on back where he belonged?
Her mouth tightened into a scowling pucker, and her hands sought the finger-grooves of the lower window-frame. She was going to fling it up high, and lean out, and rail down at him: “Go on now, beat it! Go on about your business! What’re you waiting down there for? Move on, take a walk, or I’ll call a cop!” And other things at fishwife-pitch she knew well how to say, that would have effectively dislodged him no matter how reluctant he was, or else forced him to brave the opening of every window all around him to see what the cause of the tirade was.
But before she could do it, something happened.
He turned his head and looked up the other way. Still along the street-level, but westward now, toward Tenth and beyond. It was just an intermission, a respite, in the steadiness with which he’d maintained his gaze in the first direction. And then suddenly she saw him give a half-crouched, abortive start, though she could still see nothing from where she was, within the window-pane.
An instant longer, no more, he waited to confirm the first glimpse of whatever it was, and then he darted aside, bolted from view somewhere directly underneath her vantage-point. Obviously, judging by his direction, he’d sought refuge in the doorway of this same building she was in.
For a moment there was no sign of what had caused his hasty retreat. The street stretched lifeless under her, gunmetal-dark save where the forlorn halo of the lamppost down there whitened it a little.
She stayed there, face pressed to the window, waiting, watching. Then suddenly, without any warning sound, something white, shaped like an inverted boat, came drifting past on the dark tide of the night. It took her a moment to understand what it was, it was coursing along so insidiously. It was a small patrol-car, making its routine rounds late at night. Approaching without lights or clamor, to catch malefactors off-guard.
It had no objective, it was not stalking anyone, least of all him; she could tell that by its lackadaisical gait. It was just cruising, it had turned in through here at random.
It had already gone on past now. For a moment she toyed with the idea of throwing open the window after all, as she had first intended, and hailing it to stop; of telling them: “There’s a man lurking in the doorway underneath here. Ask him what he’s up to.” She didn’t. Why should she, she asked herself? He hadn’t done anything overt against her, or anything wrong to her knowledge. She held no brief for him, but neither did she for them. He wasn’t her brother, but neither was she his keeper.
It had gone too far by now, anyway. Its occupants hadn’t even glanced over this way, at the door of this house. It coasted on down to the next corner, more boat-like than ever on the invisible current of its own motion, shrinking to the size of a pod, and then it turned to the right and was gone.
She waited a moment or two to see if he would come out again. He didn’t. The street before the house remained as barren as though he’d never been there. He stayed out of sight inside somewhere, wherever it was he’d gone, his courage all spent.
She drew the shade down at last, as she’d originally intended to before it all happened. She turned away, but she didn’t begin her delayed undressing. She crossed the room to the door and stood there by it listening. Then she opened it slowly, quieting it with a hand to its edge as she did so. She advanced out into the barren hall beyond, tread muted in her soft-soled foot-gear.
There was no sound to show that anyone was astir but herself, that anyone was in the building, up or down, who did not belong there. She moved back to where the railed gap surrounding the stairs began, leaned cautiously over it and looked down their dimly-lighted well, all three rungs of it, to the very bottom.
She couldn’t see anything from her first stance, they intercrossed too much. She shifted on a little further, and there got a diagonal insight at their bottom reaches.
She saw him down there. He was sitting huddled on the first flight, disconsolately up against the rail, about halfway between the last landing going down and the bottom. His legs were tucked up to within a step below his body. He’d taken his hat off; it must be resting on the step beside him, but she couldn’t see over that far. The only thing that moved about him were his hands, otherwise he was sitting quite still. She could see the one on the outside ploughing endlessly through his hair, over and over, as though some deep-seated predicament were gnawing at him.