The front door of Hampden Hall creaked slightly, Jack was coming in with the dustcloth in his hand. The scene in Jones’s house suddenly became as small and remote as the picture in the finder of a camera, tilted brightly off and vanished, like a drop of light sliding off a leaf. He passed Jack on the stairs, and without sensible lapse of time was reading his father’s letter in the elevator. The glib phrases were sickening, were like a sickness. Wash my hands of you. Grateful if you’d be so considerate as to keep my name out of the courts. The writer of this anonymous letter says—
The lights in the apartment were turned on, he must have forgotten to switch them off, he dropped the envelope and the letter under the table on the floor and without thinking went straight to the whisky bottle in the kitchenette, poured half a wine glass full, and drank it straight. The writer of this anonymous letter. Who could this be but Sandbach, who but Sandbach — behind whom was Gerta no doubt, and perhaps Toppan as well. But perhaps not Gerta? No, not Gerta, Gerta would have given him a more specific warning, she would have said something tonight if she had known, after all Gerta was honorable. Honorable? He began to laugh, laughed louder and louder, putting both hands down flat on the butterfly-table; his head hung lower and lower over the table as he laughed, the spasms of laughter wheezed into silence, and he found himself studying carefully the grain of the table, on the waxed surface of which two tears had fallen. It was extremely funny.
But it was impossible to stay here.
He could perhaps go up on to the roof, look down from there at the traffic in Massachusetts Avenue.
Or down to the river and the stadium.
Instead, a few minutes later, he found himself walking into Harvard Square, bought a paper, went into Gustie’s and had a quick drink, crossed the street to the delicatessen place and had another. He held the paper before him with both hands and gazed at it without reading it, listening half-consciously to the talk.
— well, I should worry, I told him if he didn’t come by half past ten it would be gone, and it’s gone.
— served him right.
— Sure. It’s his own funeral. Next time—
— crazy as a bedbug.
— and two whisky sours, that’s three to come!
— and besides I don’t think he could really afford it. No, I don’t.
— You don’t think so.
— No, I don’t think so.
— can’t make out what his position is there, he’s always coming in, every evening, and they give him a handout—
— I heard he was unfrocked for something.
— poor themselves, too; Ada, she’s the oldest, working as a cigarette girl at the Palace—
— No. It’s a local beer. Only local.
He turned away from the counter, rising, went out, proceeded along Boylston Street till he came to the river, stood on the bridge and looked down at the dark luster of the water. Two men were standing close together on the float of the boathouse, talking intermittently in low voices: one of them stooped, put his hand into the water, then stood up again and wiped it with a handkerchief. They went slowly up the gangway into the club, which was dark, he heard the door close behind them, and at that moment he felt a single drop of rain on the back of his wrist. The sky was covered with broken clouds, ragged and hurrying, it was like a disordered mind, like a flight of disordered thoughts: with his hands on the parapet of the bridge, he tilted his head back and watched them, so long and so intently that at last he felt it was not the clouds which were moving but himself. And when he turned away, it was with such an acute feeling of giddiness that for a second he thought he was going to fall.
XII What It Is to Be a Stranger
If the whole apartment house had seemed hostile, on his return to it in the evening, and uglier and more prisonlike than ever after his telephone talk with Jones from the pay station in the hall (in the shadow of the elevator), it now seemed, in the soundless turmoil of time, nothing but an enormous and elaborate trap. Lying down for the twentieth time, fully dressed, on the dark bed in the dark room, he stared through the little square of window: not for any sight of the clouded and hurrying sky, but for a sharper vision of Hampden Hall. In mid-air, it was if he could reverse himself, return from halfway across the street (or from the roof of Widener Library) to see his own building from outside; as if in fact he were a bird, looking in through his own window, looking cynically downward at the dark figure on the bed which was himself. Seen thus, under the hurrying heavens, the building was simply nothing but a monster: it stood upright and unapologetic, in the midst of the mad universe, a queer hard brickwork organism with hot metal arteries and tingling nerves of copper, breathing the night air through huge vent holes on a flat roof of tar and gravel. Inside it were the human lice on which it nourished itself — it had gathered them together for the night. Among these of course was himself, lying there with his hands beneath his head; now staring out past the roof of the A.D. Club to meet the gaze of his projected spirit, which hung there like an angel in modern dress, now returning for a scrutiny of the little Buddha on its shelf. It was a prison, a trap; but it was more than that, worse than that — the whole building had seemed somehow sinister as he approached it; and after the telephone talk with Jones it had begun to seem definitely evil. The impulse to take flight had been sharp enough, he had wanted to hurry out again at once, to go anywhere, to drive a car madly into the country, even perhaps simply to go to town and get drunk. But disgust had inhibited this impulse, disgust and something else — a fear, a suspicion, an uneasy edge of self-doubt. Not fear, no — disgust, disgust, disgust, this queer new horror which, rising periodically in the back of his mind, almost on the back of his tongue, made him want to close his eyes lest he should see the world in the very act of changing its shape. And all this was not because of the telephone talk with little Jones, of course not, not at all — at most the telephone talk was a part of it, it had certainly not changed anything. No, what was sickening was the way in which all the details of his plans, his scheme, were now at every point working so well together but in a sense not quite his own: as if his own speech came back to him, from a mouthpiece, translated into an unfamiliar language. There was an ugly sort of distortion in it, everything was meanly and sneeringly caricatured, as by concave and convex mirrors; it was like the strange drawling and snarling sounds which quite ordinary and pleasant words or voices can become in a dream. With a desire to escape this he had thought of going to town, or even of simply taking a long walk, but at once to realize that the thing was inescapable. Much better had been the impulse to put it all down, to make the last entries in his journal of the adventure, add the last date to the column of dates on the map, and even to attempt to codify these impressions as if for the novel. Almost immediately, he had found himself trying to outline a queer sort of essay, a philosophic essay, but not quite philosophic either, perhaps psychological was what he meant, but of course without in the least being able to get at the thing: he had written intermittently for hours, now and again going out to walk from end to end of the long dimly lighted corridor, pausing at the one end to look down toward the river, and at the other to watch a late car or two speeding urgently along Massachusetts Avenue. All night, the world had seemed full of clocks — the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment sent its soft tyang through the walls, Memorial Hall and Saint Paul’s dutifully and sadly echoed each other, the dreary wooden steeple of the Unitarian Church added its deeper note; but even with these to mark the passage of his feet along the corridor, the expensive shoes placed swiftly one in front of the other, the heels slightly scuffed and dragging, his eyes intent on the slight swerve with which the right foot as if carelessly placed itself, even with these the sense of time had not been so much marked as diffuse. He had got up only to sit down again, had flung himself on the bed only again to rise and begin walking, or had paced the crooked corridor only once more to sit down and try to write. It might be four o’clock, it might be five. Above Beck Hall, the sky had begun to brighten. There was a little patter of rain, a little grazing of rain, on the window. It was as if it had touched his skin, it stung him to a sudden but perhaps false alertness, he jumped up and went back to the table, looked sharply at the map, sat down.