He longed to see her go. He began to pray for it. And yet it was obvious by now, had been for a long time past, that she had no intention of going of her own accord, would only go with the closing of the place. For none of the usual reasons that cause people to seek a bar were operating in her case, and therefore there was no reprieve to be expected from any of them. She was not there to wait for anyone, or she would have been met long ago. She was not there to drink, for that same untouched glass still sat just where he had set it hours ago. She was there for one purpose and one alone: to look at him.
Failing to be rid of her in any other way, he began to long for closing time to come, to find his escape through that. As the customers began to thin out, as the number of counter-attractions about him lessened, her power to bring herself to his notice rose accordingly. Presently there were large gaps around the semicircle fronting him, and that only emphasized the remorseless fixity of that Medusa-like countenance all the more.
He dropped a glass, and that was a thing he hadn’t done in months. She was shooting him to pieces. He glowered at her and cursed her in soundless lip movement as he stooped to gather up the fragments.
And then finally, when he thought it was never coming any more, the minute hand notched twelve, and it was four o’clock and closing time had arrived. Two men engaged in earnest conversation, the last of all the other customers, rose unbidden and sauntered toward the entrance, without interrupting their flow of amicable, low-voiced talk. Not she. Not a muscle moved. The stagnant drink still sat before her, and she sat on with it. Looking, watching, eyeing, without even a blink.
“Good night, gentlemen,” he called out loudly after the other two, so that she would understand.
She didn’t move.
He opened the control box and thew a switch. The outer perimeter of lights went out, leaving just an inner glow coming from behind the bar where he was, a hidden sunset creeping up the mirrors and the tiers of bottles ranged against the wall. He became a black silhouette against it, and she a disembodied, faintly luminous face peering in from the surrounding dimness.
He went up to her, took the hours old drink away, and threw it out, with a violent downward fling of the hand that sent drops leaping up.
“We’re closing up now.” he said in a grating voice.
She moved at last. Suddenly she was on her feet beside the stool, holding it for a moment to give the change of position time to work its way through her circulatory system.
His fingers worked deftly down the buttons of his jacket. He said cholerically, “What was it? What was the game? What was on your mind?”
She moved quietly off through the darkened tavern toward the street entrance without answering, as though she hadn’t heard him. He had never dreamed that such a simple causative as the mere sight of a girl quitting a bar, could bring such utter, contrite, prostrate relief welling up in him. His jacket open all down the front, he supported himself there on one hand planted firmly down upon the bar, and leaned limply, exhaustedly out in the direction in which she had gone.
There was a night light standing at the outer entrance, and she came back into view again when she had reached there. She stopped just short of the doorway, and turned, and looked back at him across the intervening distance, long and solemnly and with purposeful implication. As if to show that the whole thing had been no illusion; more than that, to show that this was not its end, that this was just an interruption.
He turned from keying the door locked, and she was standing there quietly on the sidewalk, only a few yards off. She was turned expectantly facing toward the doorway, as if waiting for him to emerge.
He was forced to go toward her, because it was in that direction his path lay on leaving here of a night. They passed within a foot of one another, for the sidewalk was fairly narrow and she was posted out in the middle of it, not skulking back against the wall. Though her face turned slowly in time with his passing, he saw that she would have let him go by without speaking, and goaded by this silent obstinacy, he spoke himself, although only a second before he had intended ignoring her.
“What is it ye want of me?” he rumbled truculently.
“Have I said I want anything of you?”
He made to go on, then swung around on his heel to face her accusingly. “You sat in there just now, never once took your eyes off me! Never once the livelong night, d’ye hear me?” He pounded one hand within the other for outraged emphasis. “And now I find you outside here waiting around—”
“Is it forbidden to stand here in the street?”
He shook a thick finger at her ponderously. “I’m warning you, young woman! I’m telling you for your own good—!”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t open her mouth, and silence is always so victorious in argument. He turned and shambled off, breathing heavily with his own bafflement.
He didn’t look back. Within twenty paces, even without looking back, he had become aware that she was advancing in turn behind him. It was not difficult to do so, for she was apparently making no effort to conceal the fact. The ticking off of her small brittle shoes was clear cut if subdued on the quiet night pavement.
An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed. Then presently another. Then still another. And through it all, as the town slowly veered over from west to east, came that unhurried tick-chick, tick-chick, behind him in the middle distance.
He turned his head, the first time simply to warn her off. She came on with maddening casualness, as though it were three in the afternoon. Her walk was slow, almost stately, as the feminine gait so often is when the figure is held erect and the pace is leisurely.
He went on again briefly, then turned once more. This time his entire body, and flung himself back toward her in a sudden flurry of ungovernable exasperation.
She stopped advancing, but she held her ground, made no slightest retrograde move.
He closed in and bellowed full into her face, “Turn back now, will ye? That’s enough of this now, d’ye hear? Turn back, or I’ll—”
“I am going this way, too.” was all she said.
Again the circumstances were in her favor. Had their roles been reversed— But what man has sufficiently stout armor against ridicule to risk calling a policeman to complain that a solitary young girl is following him along the streets? She was not reviling him, she was not soliciting him, she was simply walking in the same direction he was; he was as helpless against her as he had been in the bar earlier.
He maintained his stance before her for a moment or two, but his defiance was of that face-saving kind that only marks time while it is waiting to extricate itself with the least possible embarrassment from a false situation. He spun around finally with a snort through his nose, meant to convey belligerence, but that somehow sounded a bit like windy helplessness. He drew away from her, resumed his homeward journeying.
Ten paces, fifteen, twenty. Behind him, as at a given signal, it recommenced again, steady as slow rain in a puddle. Tick-chick, tick-chick, tick-chick. She was coming after him once more.
He rounded the appointed corner, started up the roofed over sidewalk stairway he used every night to reach his train. He halted up above, at the rear of the plank floored station gallery that led through to the tracks, scanning the chutelike incline he had just emerged from for signs of her.