“All right,” I repeated a little dissatisfiedly. “Thanks a lot. I’ll be there.” But as I hung up, I couldn’t understand why, when she had been so frightened all along of Tenacity and everybody around her, almost of her very shadow, she would trust a message like that to the doorman instead of speaking to me for a minute herself. But, as he had just said, it might have been the safest way after all.
However, to go there instead of directly to the station, I would have to get a local at Seventy-Second Street, get off a station sooner, walk or taxi several blocks eastward, and then continue on down to Forty-Second Street with her. Which would take considerably more time than the other way. So I knew I’d better leave then and not hang around any more if we wanted to make the train — because Bernice might keep me waiting several minutes at her place, too.
I picked up the grip, opened the door, glanced back over my shoulder just once, and left — without another word to Maxine. What was there I could have said, anyway? The word “goodbye” wouldn’t have comforted her any.
I was down on the street now, walking toward the subway, and the place I had lived in was behind me forever. My farewell to Maxine was to think about her for a few minutes. “Had to leave without a thing being arranged between us; if she’d only been modern, instead of 1920! I suppose I should have told her about that compound-interest account in Brooklyn.” I went down the steps, dropped my nickel in, sought a bench on the platform, shoved my valise under it, and sat down to wait for the next train. It was already audible in the length of tube between the next station and this, when the turnstile cracked open a second time and Maxine joined me on the platform. She came and sat beside me on the bench. She had no hat, but she had thrown a coat over the housedress she had had on just now in the apartment.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said quietly. “This won’t help any; you may as well go on back. I’m not afraid of a row in public, you know; that won’t stop me, if that’s what your game is.”
“I didn’t come after you to make a scene, Wade,” she answered. “I want to ride with you part of the way; five minutes more is better than nothing.”
“You’re crazy, absolutely out of your mind—” I tried to tell her, but the train came hissing and spitting in and drowned my voice.
She followed me onto the car and sat beside me. People looked at us a little curiously, but I glared at them, and they turned their eyes away. The first few stations drifted by, and she didn’t speak. I didn’t either, because I had nothing to say; our relationship had ended back there as far as I was concerned.
When she did begin to speak at last, it was tragically comic and comically tragic. For she couldn’t speak too loud, or the others in the car would hear her (and I could see she didn’t want that any more than I did), and yet she must speak loudly enough for me to hear her above the roar of the subway. And I must hear every word, for she hadn’t much time — the stations went dropping behind us like beads on a steel-and-electric rosary — and she must win me over, get me to listen, get me to turn back before I got to the end of the line, where Bernice’s domain began, where she couldn’t follow me any further. I knew that that was what had brought her after me like this — the hope that one supreme, last-minute plea would succeed where all the others had failed. I almost admired her in spite of myself, but, as though the love that was making her go through all this were meant for somebody else altogether and not for me, I was not at all interested. If she knew me as well as she thought she did, why couldn’t she see how useless it was? Bernice occupied every cell of my being, there was not a molecule left over for Maxine.
So why even listen to all that she said? I lost most of it in the noise the train was making, anyway. Just once or twice a remark stood out above all the rest, and made me simply wonder at her, simply wonder at her, and fail to understand what I had done to her to make her love me so. Not a trait in me did she neglect to appeal to, did she overlook; the good and the bad, the high and the low. One by one she sounded them out—
“Is Bernice going to give you money, Wade, until you get started again? No? Well, I can give you some, Wade. All you need. I’ll give you a whole lot if you’ll put off going a while longer—”
Poor little liar, where would she have been able to get it from? But I didn’t dare say that aloud, for fear she would think I was intrigued. And I wasn’t.
“Would you want Bernice to stop with us a while, so I could get to know her better? I’ll gladly ask her out, Wade, if you want me to. Do you think she’d come? I could take a little of the house money and go down to Atlantic City for a little while, and wait until I hear from you — shall I do that, Wade? Shall I do that for you?”
“Don’t insult me, Maxine,” I murmured close to her face. “That isn’t the way — there isn’t any way! Please go back, kid, won’t you? For old times’ sake?”
“How far are you going, Wade?”
“Very far.”
“How long are you going, Wade?”
“Forever.”
There was just one more station to pass now — because I was damned if she was going to get on the local with me at Seventy-Second Street! What was this anyway, a vaudeville show?
“Wade, if I promise to divorce you and let you go, will you stay with me just until we get the divorce?”
“No, not a day longer,” I told her simply. “I don’t care whether I marry Bernice or not. I’m happy enough just to be with her.”
“Do you hate me that much, Wade?” she said.
“I don’t hate you at all, Maxine,” I answered truthfully. “I like you tonight, like you more than I have the whole past year.” I looked at her pityingly and touched her hand for a minute. She sort of shivered. “I like you an awful lot. Don’t you think you can find somebody else after a little while, and get me off your mind?”
“But I don’t want to,” she said innocently.
“Well, will you promise me something?”
“Yes, Wade,” she said unqualifiedly.
“I’m going to leave you at the next station; will you promise you won’t do anything damn foolish — oh, you know what I mean!”
“I’ll promise if you want me to, Wade,” she replied surprisingly, “but I wasn’t going to, anyway. Because I know this isn’t forever; one of these days — you will, won’t you, come back?”
The doors slid open, and I reached for my valise and pulled it out from under my legs. She reached down and helped me with a corner of it that had got wedged in under the seat.
“Good-bye, Max. Try to forgive me, will you?”
“I’m going on down to Forty-Second Street,” she explained limply, “because if I get off here, I’ll have to pay an extra nickel to cross to the uptown side.”
That reminded me, although I was out of the train already. I ran to the window opposite her and pounded on it to attract her attention. Every one else in the car looked around at me, but she had picked up a newspaper some one threw away and was holding it open before her face, as though she were reading it. I guess she was crying behind it, though. The train carried her away. I had wanted to tell her about that compound-interest account over in Brooklyn.
I had just time to light a cigarette and get one drag out of it before my local came in. I had meant to watch from the express window and see just where we passed it, to find out how long I would have to wait, but Maxine had kept my mind occupied. I carried the lighted cigarette in with me anyway — I was so nervous by now I needed it badly — and smoked it secretively out of the little opening between the two cars. Still, it would have been a rotten thing to get arrested then, that close to train time.