‘What’s the matter, Elaine?’ he burst out. She lied:
‘Nothing George… Somebody walked over my grave I guess.’
‘Couldnt I get you a wrap or something?’
She shook her head.
‘Well what about it?’ he said as they got up from the table.
‘What?’ she asked smiling. ‘After Paris?’
‘I guess I can stand it if you can George,’ she said quietly.
He was waiting for her, standing at the open door of a taxi. She saw him poised spry against the darkness in a tan felt hat and a light tan overcoat, smiling like some celebrity in the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper. Mechanically she squeezed the hand that helped her into the cab.
‘Elaine,’ he said shakily, ‘life’s going to mean something to me now… God if you knew how empty life had been for so many years. I’ve been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside.’
‘Let’s not talk about mechanical toys,’ she said in a strangled voice.
‘No let’s talk about our happiness,’ he shouted.
Inexorably his lips closed on to hers. Beyond the shaking glass window of the taxi, like someone drowning, she saw out of a corner of an eye whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickleglinting wheels.
The old man in the checked cap sits on the brownstone stoop with his face in his hands. With the glare of Broadway in their backs there is a continual flickering of people past him towards the theaters down the street. The old man is sobbing through his fingers in a sour reek of gin. Once in a while he raises his head and shouts hoarsely, ‘I cant, dont you see I cant?’ The voice is inhuman like the splitting of a plank. Footsteps quicken. Middleaged people look the other way. Two girls giggle shrilly as they look at him. Streeturchins nudging each other peer in and out through the dark crowd. ‘Bum Hootch.’ ‘He’ll get his when the cop on the block comes by.’ ‘Prohibition liquor.’ The old man lifts his wet face out of his hands, staring out of sightless bloodyrimmed eyes. People back off, step on the feet of the people behind them. Like splintering wood the voice comes out of him. ‘Don’t you see I cant…? I cant… I cant.’
When Alice Sheffield dropped into the stream of women going through the doors of Lord & Taylor’s and felt the close smell of stuffs in her nostrils something went click in her head. First she went to the glovecounter. The girl was very young and had long curved black lashes and a pretty smile; they talked of permanent waves while Alice tried on gray kids, white kids with a little fringe like a gauntlet. Before she tried it on, the girl deftly powdered the inside of each glove out of a longnecked wooden shaker. Alice ordered six pairs.
‘Yes. Mrs Roy Sheffield… Yes I have a charge account, here’s my card… I’ll be having quite a lot of things sent.’ And to herself she said all the while: Ridiculous how I’ve been going round in rags all winter… When the bill comes Roy’ll have to find some way of paying it that’s all. Time he stopped mooning round anyway. I’ve paid enough bills for him in my time, God knows.’ Then she started looking at fleshcolored silk stockings. She left the store her head still in a whirl of long vistas of counters in a violet electric haze, of braided embroidery and tassles and nasturtiumtinted silks; she had ordered two summer dresses and an evening wrap.
At Maillard’s she met a tall blond Englishman with a coneshaped head and pointed wisps of towcolored mustaches under his long nose.
‘Oh Buck I’m having the grandest time. I’ve been going berserk in Lord & Taylor’s. Do you know that it must be a year and a half since I’ve bought any clothes?’
‘Poor old thing,’ he said as he motioned her to a table. ‘Tell me about it.’
She let herself flop into a chair suddenly whimpering, ‘Oh Buck I’m so tired of it all… I dont know how much longer I can stand it.’
‘Well you cant blame me… You know what I want you to do…’
‘Well suppose I did?’
‘It’d be topping, we’d hit it off like anything… But you must have a bit of beef tea or something. You need picking up.’ She giggled. ‘You old dear that’s just what I do need.’
‘Well how about making tracks for Calgary? I know a fellow there who’ll give me a job I think.’
‘Oh let’s go right away. I dont care about clothes or anything… Roy can send those things back to Lord & Taylor’s… Got any money Buck?’
A flush started on his cheekbones and spread over his temples to his flat irregular ears. ‘I confess, Al darling, that I havent a penny. I can pay for lunch.’
‘Oh hell I’ll cash a check; the account’s in both our names.’
‘They’ll cash it for me at the Biltmore, they know me there. When we get to Canada everything will be quite all right I can assure you. In His Majesty’s Dominion, the name of Buckminster has rather more weight than in the U.S.’
‘Oh I know darling, it’s nothing but money in New York.’
When they were walking up Fifth Avenue she hooked her arm in his suddenly. ‘O Buck I have the most horrible thing to tell you. It made me deathly ill… You know what I told you about the awful smell we had in the apartment we thought was rats? This morning I met the woman who lives on the ground floor… O it makes me sick to think of it. Her face was green as that bus… It seems they’ve been having the plumbing examined by an inspector… They arrested the woman upstairs. O it’s too disgusting. I cant tell you about it… I’ll never go back there. I’d die if I did… There wasnt a drop of water in the house all day yesterday.’
‘What was the matter?’
‘It’s too horrible.’
‘Tell it to popper.’
‘Buck they wont know you when you get back home to Orpen Manor.’
‘But what was it?’
‘There was a woman upstairs who did illegal operations, abortions… That was what stopped up the plumbing.’
‘Good God.’
‘Somehow that’s the last straw… And Roy sitting limp over his damn paper in the middle of that stench with that horrible adenoid expression on his face.’
‘Poor little girl.’
‘But Buck I couldn’t cash a check for more than two hundred… It’ll be an overdraft as it is. Will that get us to Calgary?’
‘Not very comfortably… There’s a man I know in Montreal who’ll give me a job writing society notes… Beastly thing to do, but I can use an assumed name. Then we can trot along from there when we get a little more spondulix as you call it… How about cashing that check now?’
She stood waiting for him beside the information desk while he went to get the tickets. She felt alone and tiny in the middle of the great white vault of the station. All her life with Roy was going by her like a movie reeled off backwards, faster and faster. Buck came back looking happy and masterful, his hands full of greenbacks and railway tickets. ‘No train till seven ten Al,’ he said. ‘Suppose you go to the Palace and leave me a seat at the boxoffice… I’ll run up and fetch my kit. Wont take a sec… Here’s a fiver.’ And he had gone, and she was walking alone across Fortythird Street on a hot May afternoon. For some reason she began to cry. People stared at her; she couldnt help it. She walked on doggedly with the tears streaming down her face.