His eyes rose slowly and heavily from the thought, he saw the knees of the man before him, a loose thread, the edge of the soiled and worn coat, he heard the man’s voice saying post office, in the post office, observed the little fold of shirt protruding between trousers and waistcoat, resented the oppressive nearness of the strange human body, and got up from his seat angrily and abruptly. He pushed contemptuously between the two men, sundering them, was aware of their turning heads, looked back at them with a little smile as he squared his shoulders through the crowd, and pressed toward the opening door. A moment later, as he walked quickly along the cement platform, he found himself laughing, and slapping his hand against his side, he felt a little drunk, a little drugged, for if his eyes had risen heavily from the thought he had himself risen as heavily, it was almost as if he had experienced a slight blow on the head, a concussion. Something had happened, something important had happened! It was always like that. It always came like that. There was just exactly that kind of accidental conjunction of idea and fact — the thought occurring precisely at a moment when the mere physical nearness of a stranger’s human body was beginning to oppress and stifle him, making itself felt as an unwarrantable and disgusting intrusion. The feeling of hatred, intolerable hatred, had come like a flash and had revealed to him as never before the rightness and terribleness of the deed: as under lightning, the whole landscape leapt out of darkness in green and maplike and logical minuteness. The mere presence of the strange human body had shown him not only what he wanted but exactly why he wanted it. And not only that, but also how right had been the idea.
The discovery, as he ascended on the escalator and emerged under the red brick tower at Park Street, had an odd effect on him. He looked round him with a sharp sense of relief and detachment, he felt alone and tall and superior amongst the disorderly crowd of nocturnal pedestrians, and almost indeed as if he belonged to a different race or species; and as he stood still by the corner, observing first one face and then another, one hand jingling pennies in his pocket, the other holding his unlighted pipe, it occurred to him that a cat must feel something like this: a cat alone in a cellar, sitting perhaps on the top of a flour barrel, and watching the naïve and unconscious antics of mice. Close at hand, in an Independent taxi, the driver was reading The Traveler. Red Sox Win Slugfest with Senators. The solemn face was chewing gum. A woman stepped out into the street in front of the cab, paused, looked into her bag, checked her balance as if to come back, then quickly resumed her way. A voice behind him said, the clock says quarter to nine, my watch must be slow, and two young men, wearing identical brown felt hats, approached the taxi with obvious intent. The driver leaned forward to hear the address, Lenox Hotel, clinked the flag down, and in a moment the two felt hats, behind the door of the cab, described a pair of parallel curves round the corner into Tremont Street and were gone. It would be easy and amusing to follow them? And there was now, all of a sudden, plenty of time — for with the sense of relief had also come a curious alteration of his sense of hurry — as if the hurry need no longer be transacted externally, but could become, and without pressure, concentric, an affair of his own, a mere matter of revolving within or around himself. No, the time had now come, as he might have foreseen, for a careful weighing, a careful and cautious inspection; a period of leisure and close scrutiny; and if there was still an urgency, such as was now causing his heart to beat a little more rapidly, it was wholly private. Between his own world and the world outside, a peculiar division had now arrived, and if time still existed importantly for himself, it had no longer any important existence elsewhere: in his own kingdom, the kingdom of thought, he could move as rapidly as he liked, stay as long as he liked, the outside world would meanwhile stand still, and he could rejoin it whenever he wished, and exactly at the point at which he had left it. The situation, or series of situations, which he had created, would remain as if suspended until he chose to resolve them: Gerta would be waiting. Sandbach would be waiting, everything would hang motionless in a kind of timeless limbo. So clear, so beautiful, was this impression, this divination, that he paused to give it visual form. It was like the story of the sleeping beauty — a whole world suddenly frozen into stillness — or the tranced figures of the Grecian Urn. The anarchist meeting in Tremont Temple would still be there, when he got there after his voyage upon voyage round the world, Sandbach would still be holding the black and sticky stump of a cigar in yellow fingers, and saying yes I think maybe, yes I think maybe but do you agree with me, Toppan would still be taking a safety razor blade from his pocketbook to sharpen a smooth red pencil, Gerta would be standing at her window to look at the Charles River Basin, a book opened before her on the window sill, an apple in her hand. They would be listening, they would be waiting, and for what? To be destroyed. To be touched, and waked, and destroyed.
He crossed Tremont Street, entered the drug store, found an empty telephone booth by the front window, and began dialing with the stem of his pipe. In the next booth a voice was saying but I can’t, but you see it would already be too late, I’m way in here at Park Street, a woman’s voice, peevish and whining, softened and made more nasal by the wooden partition. He half turned to listen.
— Hello?
— Ammen speaking. I wanted to be clear—
— Oh, Jasper; did you get my note?
Gerta’s voice was anxious, a trifle high-pitched. She was self-conscious.
— I wanted to be clear that there would be no one else there.
— Of course. If there’s any one else I’ll send them away. I thought that would be understood, my dear.
— All right. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or half an hour. I don’t expect to loiter at the meeting, if I stay at all.
— Very well, if—
He cut off the phrase by hanging up the receiver. No doubt she was now saying Jasper, hello, Jasper, hello, hello, while already he clasped the brass handle of the door. He listened again to the voice in the adjacent booth — but I said I was in here at Park Street, yes, at Park Street — and then went out. Like all fragmentary or uncompleted remarks, as in fact like Gerta’s unfinished phrase, it had an oddly ominous ring, a ring of fatality; and one’s sense of power arose precisely from the fact that one could thus cut them off oneself. As one should.
And what now should be said to little Sandbach?
He walked rapidly with the beginnings of the sentences, touched them against his teeth lightly with the cool pipe stem, let them down with him from the curb in Bromfield Street to pick them up again on the other side, allowed them to be dispersed by the lurid placard of announcements in the lobby of the Temple and to fall behind him on the wide stairs. His shadow rose huge and high-shouldered on the bare wall of the second story, dislocated itself sideways, raised an immensely long arm, and vanished against the open door, from which came the sound of several voices in animated talk. His shadow had, in fact, gone in ahead of him, and he followed it into the room with the feeling of having an immense advantage.
There were half a dozen irregular little rows of folding chairs, and beyond these, by the little platform, Sandbach was talking with a few people, only a handful, it was clear that the meeting was a complete failure. Mrs. Taber was there, smiling her perpetual sweet smile under a pale purple bonnet, that immortal bonnet, and her husband the shyster lawyer, and Mrs. Hays the amateur psychoanalyst.