But he got his hat and shook Ponds’ hand and left.
He went out into the late sunlight. It was a vivid day, the sun creating a sort of glow like a haze of canary brick dust wherever it fell, the shade-lines sharp and azure like unblotted fountain-pen ink. Every pedestrian walked in a puddle of his own ink, every awning and projection spilled a pool of it. The sky had been drained almost white by the loss.
An electric trolley came grinding by, the one he needed to take to get home. Sluicing majestically through the lesser shoals of horse-drawn beer trucks, grocery carts, flimsy tin Fords with their high, awning-covered backs, and an occasional privately owned Reo or Mercer, Stutz or Locomobile, jaunty with brass fixtures and ochre or ketchup-red body paint. Its overhead transmission-rod contemptuously spit turquoise sparks on these underlings as it glided along the air-strung conductor.
He wasn’t in time, it was already too far past the proper stop for him to signal and to board it. He’d have to wait for the next.
Then suddenly, as simply as that and with no further effort, he knew what to do, how to keep himself out of the clutches of New York. He cut out into the middle of the street and started running after it. It wouldn’t stop of course, it had its appointed stops, and the next was two whole corners away. But this was June, and it was already one of the open-sided hot-weather cars; the banks of seats running crosswise, and you just thrust yourself over the side into any given one.
Nothing was moving fast enough to be completely unattainable by foot, neither it nor its surrounding school. A short sprint and he’d overtaken the rear end of it, while the nearest drayman accommodatingly reined in his horses. A short additional run and he’d gained midsection, so that he could allow for the loss of ground that would come when he aimed himself at it.
He flung himself toward the projecting vertical handgrip that accompanied each seat-bank.
He was sick with fear, but he was even sicker with fear of New York, and the greater fear overcame the lesser one. Moreover, a voluntarily incurred danger is somehow always easier to bear than an involuntary one. He kept reminding himself he must stay clear of the wheels. God, he must be sure to stay clear of the wheels, and not lose a foot or a whole leg! Roll out, if possible, so that he wasn’t caught and dragged by the undercarriage.
He got the hand-grip, and he got his inside foot, the right one to use, on the long trestle that ran the length of the car from front to back. He’d caught it successfully (as you always do when you don’t want to; if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have.) All that was left was the simple act of levitation.
But then instead of pulling his other foot up clear, he purposely left it down, used it for a brake along the ground. He deliberately let go the hand-grip, crossbarred both forearms to make a sort of frame or cushion for his head, so that his skull should not strike nakedly, then he let himself fall straight forward on his face, parallel to the car, onto the cobblestones.
The impact hurt him. It was like falling into a puddle of pain and sending up a momentary splash — not of water, but of bright white shock.
He heard a man, one of the passengers above him, give a hoarse shout of alarm. He remembered to roll away from the wheels. Then he came to a stop several body-spans over, but still face down. He was perfectly conscious. His body, in particular his bone-structure, was tingling from the rough usage he had given it, but he had done it well, he knew he had done it well, and his hidden face gave a smile of satisfaction to itself in the moment or two before it was unearthed from the padding of his arms and multiple sympathetic hands picked him up (to a still-flat position, not an upright one) and transported him up over the curb, and set him down there again.
They bade him lie still there until he had been looked at, and in the meantime people stood around him gazing down at him curiously. He didn’t mind that. Presently a horse-drawn ambulance wagon arrived, and an intern bent down by him and made an examination. His leg was beginning to ache a great deal, particularly down below at the lower part. He not only didn’t mind that, he was glad of it. The very place he had wanted it to be. You could still travel on a train with an injured arm; with an injured or useless leg it was an almost impossible undertaking.
She was all ready to go to the train, when they helped him home to his own door. He had purposely accepted the offer of a ride there in the ambulance (for she could hear its dolorous bell, and see the white jacket of its attendant, and it made the whole thing far more convincing), in preference to that of one of the bystanders who had happened to be a car-owner and had offered to bring him home in that. It would have been much less effective.
He was holding his one shoe in his hand, and hobbling one-legged with its owning foot hitched clear of the ground.
She was badly frightened for the first moment or so, and it was a cruel thing to do to her, he knew, make her pay that way for his immunity, but it had had to be done.
“I fell off the trolley,” he said, with a sort of complacent demureness. “I was in too much of a hurry to get back here, I guess.”
“It’s only a bad sprain,” the intern tried to reassure her. “He’ll be back on it again in a day or two.”
Marshall was sorry he’d given him the chance to say that; he would have preferred to make it a fracture, but now it had to remain a sprain.
“Thank you very much. I can manage now.” He closed the door on him.
“You’ll have to go without me,” was the first thing he told her. “I won’t be able to make the trip now, in this condition.”
“But how can I leave you, like this? Who’ll look after you?”
“You’ve got to go. It’s your mother’s funeral, it’s not a thing that can be put off for a few days, or even just a day. You’ve got to be there by Wednesday. I’ll manage; at least I’m not laid up in bed. You can leave word with the superintendent’s wife; she’s a nice woman, I’m sure she won’t mind getting my meals for me and keeping the place in order.”
She decided to, then; only because of the tragic event that was calling her. Nothing less could have made her leave him. A taxi was summoned, and the man came in and carried out her valise for her.
She kissed Marshall good-bye; he was now sitting in an easy chair, with his cotton-swollen ankle at adjusted height out before him.
“I’ll start back right after the services. I’ve told Mrs. Sorenson, she said she’d look after everything.”
“Buy some extra flowers when you get there, in my name, as well as the ones we already ordered. Hurry, don’t miss your train.”
She kissed him again, ran, the door closed. A moment later it reopened in agitated haste and she came running back again. “Thank God, I just remembered in time! You must have the tickets. You were to bring them home, remember?”
Incautiously, he reached into his pocket, brought out the little envelope, handed it to her. It was a motor reflex, more than anything.
She opened it, looked. It only held one. The one he’d bought.
She stared, puzzled; first at it, then at him, then at it again.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “If you bought them before the accident — and you must have, because you phoned me to say you had — how, how could you have known you were only going to need to buy one?”
In the silence he was unable to fill, the taxi driver suddenly called in from the open doorway, where he had reappeared: “Lady, if you don’t want to miss that train, we’d better get under way.”
9
A man named Wise suddenly appeared at the office one day. At least, that was the name he was introduced around by. Ponds introduced him around, making no other comment, no other explanation, than just that: “This is Mr. Wise.” Not another word.