Exhausted, prostrated — though antipathy to what lay on the floor kept me erect on my feet somehow — drained of almost every feeling but one that hadn’t been tapped yet, I stood cowering limply against a wall as though the collar of my coat had caught on a nail and I were suspended there. The knives grew blunted at last, as though the continual driving of them into the same gashes had robbed them of their edge; they gave only a dull ache now. I had no more tears, I had nothing to feed them any more.
In the wake of my ebbing grief came something else — the blind, unreasoning will to preserve myself. I was in a room with that inert mound under the blue dress. The laws of the land said death for that. I must get out into the open. I felt as if the walls were likely to close around me and hold me there in a living trap if I stayed a minute longer. The lights shining so brightly in every corner, in every room of this empty silent place seemed much more horrible to me than darkness could possibly have been. I couldn’t look at her any more, she seemed to move each time I did. She seemed to cause a spell, a stagnation in the air. Breathe it as deeply as I would, I couldn’t get enough of it into my lungs — they seemed to be closing up. It was as though a spark of malevolence had remained behind when all else had fled, and was trying to draw me down, suck me down, into her condition.
I turned and beat my way along the wall out into the foyer to the door and flung it open, and the winds of life rushed in again. Fear instantaneously changed its form, and became a fear of the living and not of the dead. I must get away from here, away from here, and I mustn’t let any one see me!
I closed the door behind me and locked it with my key, fingers shaking like ribbons in a breeze. I put the key in my pocket, listened, then crossed the corridor and got the door open that led to the emergency staircase we had used that night. I went down it and down it and down it, not stopping a floor below but all the way to the bottom. On the inside of each heavy door giving out upon a corridor the number of the floor was painted in red. When I had come to the one below “2” I stopped, though the stairs still went further down, and opened it a little and peered out. The soft pinkish lights of the lobby met my eyes, and I heard some people getting out of the elevator to one side of me, without being able to see them because of an angle in the wall.
The ponderous metal slide closed again; evidently the car had just received another call from above. I heard the doorman I had disliked so remark, “Good evening,” and mention some one’s name. Then a woman’s voice said, “Will you get hold of a taxi for us, Leroy?” and I heard the glass doors in front swinging around.
I pushed the staircase door wide and stepped out; there was no one in the lobby. I walked quickly across it to the front door, still spinning idly around, and passed through it into the street. The doorman was standing out in the middle of the road blowing a little whistle repeatedly and staring fixedly up toward the corner. An elderly lady and a younger one were standing together on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting and looking in the same direction. They had evening wraps on. Neither they nor the doorman turned to look at me as I came out; as a matter of fact he had that very moment turned about to stare in the other direction, toward Fifth, so that his back was now to me altogether.
Though I tried to walk straight, it seemed to me I reeled at every step I took, that those I met would be bound to notice there was something wrong with me. But what more commonplace than an unsteady man making his way along a New York street? I crossed to the other side of Sixth and then turned down it, looking back, always looking crazily back, as though unable to control my neck muscles. An empty cab came along, and thinking I was looking for a taxi, the driver flung the door open for me without even coming to a halt. I took a little run toward it and jumped on, and he cracked the door shut after me, and asked friendlily, “Where to, buddy?”
“Grand Central Station,” I shuddered, biting my nails.
I clapped my hand to my breast pocket to make sure I still had the tickets; I could feel the slight stiffness of the pasteboard even through the cloth of my suit — they were there all right. The lights of New York went spinning and hurtling by like shoals of comets, and each time he turned the cab in a new direction, they flattened and elongated themselves against the windows and left tracks and smears of fire across the glass until they had had time to come into focus again. Tall buildings reeled and threatened to topple over on me, or else leaned far back as though we were about to climb up the faces of them, machine and all.
I must get out of this town — the train had left long ago, but there were others — only, I must get out of this town. Where didn’t matter; anywhere would do! Montreal. Quebec, some place across the line. And then I thought, shivering, “But they bring you back from those places. Just as quick, even quicker. They expect you to go there, they look for you there.” And then I remembered my grip, standing at that very moment in the lobby back there. “Oh, I’m gone!” I groaned aloud, and hid my face behind my sleeves.
I lifted my head again a moment later and looked thoughtfully at the driver’s back through foggy, unseeing eyes. What good would going back for it do, even if I did manage to get it into the cab with me and drive off again without being stopped? They knew who I was; the very doorman up there knew me by name, had seen me time and again. The grip wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already—
And what good for that matter, I began to tell myself, would going off like this do? Even if I did get out of New York, get to Quebec, get to Montreal? What was the most I could expect? To drag out an existence ten times worse than the one Bernice had foreseen for herself if she had quit New York — robbed of the right to use my own name any longer, cowering at every shadow that crossed my path, fleeing abruptly and silently from one place to the next as though pursued by ghosts or possessed of devils. Ah, no! To face such a future, to plunge into it, was not cowardice — was the utmost bravery, required more courage than I had. I hadn’t the guts, the lust for life anymore that that took. After all, what was there so sweet about life any longer to make it worth fighting for at such a price? What happiness was there left for me in this world even if I stood acquitted of all suspicion at that very moment? Gray days and endless nights without her. Month after month of them, year after year of them.
Oh, I had no one to stand at my shoulder and say in my ear, “A year from now, six months from now, it will still hurt perhaps when you remember her, but you won’t remember her constantly all day long or all through the night; days will have color and nights will have dawns. And a year is such a small part of a lifetime — take a sporting chance and stick it out!” And if I had had, I wouldn’t have believed them anyway, would have thrown the lie in their teeth. I was so sure that all my life from now on was going to be like tonight. So I made up my mind and I lifted my hand and I knocked on the glass.
“Never mind about the station,” I said. “Take me back to 55th Street again.”
And I wasn’t going back for my grip, I was going back to get what was waiting for me. And if nothing was waiting for me yet, why I was going to look it up myself. I was the coward, not the brave guy — I didn’t have the stuff in me, the starch, the sand, to face all those hours and weeks and months feeling the way I did: heartbroken, weary, alone, and bereft. This way was much quicker and easier.