Only when the train was in, and at a full stop, and the platform gates stood open, did she break away and make a little dashing scamper that carried her aboard. On an insulated straight line, along which nothing could possibly happen to her, for the third rail was sheathed now by the undercarriages of the cars themselves.
An elevated train wriggled by like a glowworm at the far end of the street. A taxi sloughed by and the driver glanced at her curiously, but he didn’t want any more fares because he was taking his cab to bed for the night. Two late wayfarers passed, and one of them called over jocularly, “What’s matter, Toots, did you get a rain check?” Quiet descended again after they had lost themselves in the distance.
Suddenly without any warning the doorway, the doorway that belonged to the two windows, disgorged a woman, hair awry and rushing as though she were a projectile discharged by the long black bore of the hall. She had donned a coat over her nightdress, and her bare feet were thrust into improperly secured shoes that made a clattering noise at each purposefully quick step she took. She was brandishing the long pole of a denuded floor brush, and she made unerringly for the lone figure standing across the way, with unmistakable intent to flail at her.
The girl turned and sped, down to the near-by corner and around it and along the next street, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all fear, made it just a precautionary withdrawal from someone in whom she had no interest.
The woman’s railing screams, fleeter than their owner, winged after the girl, overtook her midway down the block. “For three days now you been hounding my monn! Come back here and I’ll give it to you! Let me get my hands on you and I’ll fix you, I will!”
She stood there in view for a moment or two, just past the corner, gesturing threats of dire antagonism with pole and arm. The girl slowed, stopped, dissolved into the gloom.
Presently the woman went back around the corner, sought her own house again.
Presently the girl was back again, too, standing where she had been before, and as she had been before, staring upward at two windows of the house across the way, like a cat watching a mouse hole.
An elevated train wriggled by... A taxi passed... A late wayfarer came along, passed, receded...
Those blank window-panes staring sightlessly down at her had a look of helpless frustration now, somehow.
“Soon,” the voice on the telephone said. “One more day, to make sure he’s completely pulverized. Maybe by tomorrow night—”
It was his day off, and he had been attempting to shake her off for well over an hour now.
He was going to halt again. She saw it coming before it had even occurred, she already knew the signs so well by now. He halted in full sunshine this time, stood back against a building wall, with shoppers streaming to and fro before him. He had already halted two or three times before this, but each time it had ended inconclusively. As it always did. He had gone on again; she had too.
This time she detected a difference. This time the halt almost seemed to be involuntary. As though some mainspring of endurance had finally snapped, then and there, at just that point, as he was passing it, and he had suddenly found himself all unwound. As he backed to the wall the small flat parcel he had held bedded under his arm slowly overbalanced, slapped to the ground, and he allowed it to lie there unrecovered.
She halted a short distance from him, making no pretense, as usual, that her halt had anything to do but with him. She stood looking at him in her usual grave way.
The sun was streaming whitely into his face, and he was blinking his eyes against it. More and more rapidly, however.
Tears appeared unexpectedly, and suddenly he was weeping abjectly, in full view of all the passersby, his face an ugly, brick-red, puckered mask.
Two people stopped, incredulous. The two became four, the four, eight. He and the girl were both contained in the hollow core of the crowd that in no time at all had ringed them around, kept thickening, outer layer by outer layer.
He was past all ordinary sense of self-consciousness, humiliation; he appealed to the onlookers, almost as if asking help, protection against her.
“Ask her what she wants of me!” he bawled soddenly. “Ask her what she’s after! She’s been doing this to me for days now— Day and night, night and day! I can’t stand it any more, I tell ya, I can’t stand it any more—!”
“What is he, drunk?” a woman asked another, in a derisive undertone.
She stood there unshrinking, making no attempt to escape from the attention he was forcing her to share with him. She was so dignified, so grave, so fetching to the eye, and he was so grotesquely comical, it could have had only one result; the sympathies of the crowd could have gone only one way. Crowds are more often sadistic than not, anyway.
Grins appeared here and there. The grins became snickers. The snickers, guffaws and outright jeers. In another moment the whole crowd was laughing pitilessly at him. Only one face in all that group remained impassive, sober, clinically neutral.
Hers.
He had only worsened his situation instead of bettering it, by making this spectacle. He had thirty tormentors now, instead of one. “I can’t stand it any more! I tell ya I’ll do something to her—!” Suddenly he advanced on her, as if to strike her, beat her back.
Instantly men leaped forward, caught his arms, flung him this way and that with surly grunts. For a moment there was a confused floundering of bodies around her. His head suddenly forced its way through, lower than normal, straining to get at her.
It might easily have developed into a multiple onslaught — on him.
She appealed to them, self-possessedly but loudly enough to be heard, and the calm clarity of her voice stopped them all short. “Don’t. Let him alone. Let him go about his business.”
But there was no warmth nor compassion about it, just a terrible steely impartiality. As if to say: Leave him to me. He’s mine.
Arms fell away from him, poised fists relaxed, coats were shrugged back into place, and the angry inner nucleus within the greater one disintegrated. Leaving him alone again within the hollow circle. Alone with her.
He made several false moves, in his torment and frustration, seeking an outlet through the massed figures around him. Then he found one, and forced his way through it, and went plunging out. He went running away from the scene full tilt, padding ponderously down the street; running away from the slender girl who stood there looking after him, her coat belted around her waist to the thickness of little more than a man’s hand span. The ultimate in degradation.
She didn’t linger long behind him. She wasn’t interested in the plaudits of the crowd, or savoring any juvenile public triumph. She thrust those in her way aside with deft little passes of her arm, until she had gained clearance for herself. Then she set out after the heavily laboring figure ahead, at a blend of light running and graceful energetic walking that carried her rapidly forward in his wake.
Strange pursuit. Incredible pursuit. Slim young girl hurrying after a stocky barman, in and out, out and in, through the swarming midday streets of New York.
He became aware almost at once that she had taken up the chase once more. He looked back, the first time in dismal apprehension. She waited for him to look again. When he did, she flung up her arm straight overhead, in imperious summons to him to stop.