Just what he wanted to do with this, or make of it, he could not precisely have said. It was something as yet unformulable: it changed its shape from day to day and night to night like a cloud; at times it seemed extraordinarily near and immediate, as close and intimate as the sparrow on the window-sill; as definite as a yellow willow twig, which the rain had darkened; but at other times it was as elusive as one of those chance fragrances which awaken in one’s memory, for a flash, some poignant forgotten scene of which the poignance is all that one can recall. Nevertheless, the seeking of this thing was his business. He went deep into his soul for it, as if it were a cavern or mine and himself a miner. Whenever he picked up in his reading, or in his daily life, any sort of clue to the mystery, no matter how slight, he was at once eager to try it out; and down at once he would go into himself with this little lantern in his hand; and up again, after awhile, he would come, defeated, but none the less refreshed and none the less convinced that some day, at last, he would discover the real thing. He was developing, in fact, a keen and insatiable curiosity about every minutest facet of life. Nothing escaped him. His pleasure in merely standing at his window and looking along the street of the country town, and watching (himself unobserved) the comings and goings of his acquaintances, their little absurd manipulations of each other, and the effect of wind or weather on them, the rain on their hats, the wind blowing their skirts, the scarf that had to be removed from the cheek—all these things gave him an astonishing sense of wonder. In such things as these the secret was not far off: in these, and in the fact that he understood them. When he saw the professor of biochemistry making exactly the gesture, with his elbow, which he had foreseen, he experienced a definite intimation of immortality, and permitted himself (standing in his window) a self-conscious crow of pleasure. And this, too, he immediately understood, and did not despise. For there was nothing despicable.
And on the plane of personal relationships this business of exploration was perfectly inexhaustible. Here, indeed, was the real world: a vista of miracles as vast and interminable as the steppes and tundras of Asia, the prolific human jungles of India and China; a universe of star-fields; a soundable space which was all depth and height and fecundity. Each human creature with whom he came into contact, no matter how grazingly, was a marvel to be apprehended. He flattered himself that his tactilism was becoming an instrument of surpassing delicacy and divination: frequently, with one look, he penetrated to secrets of a personality which that personality itself might spend a lifetime in misunderstanding. And when opportunity afforded for a longer and more careful scrutiny, as with his pupils and his colleagues, he cherished with the nicest care his gradual peeling of layer after layer from the unsuspecting soul. It gave him a special ecstasy, in such cases, if, while thus reaching to the very ore-seams of another’s soul, he could maintain his own soul’s silence unbroken. An overwhelming sense of power came over him when he saw that soul’s defenses going down, one by one, under the minute blows of his searching and surgical curiosity. Gradually, day after day, he moved closer to the frightened center of that being; he drove it in, as mowers in a field, moving always nearer to the field’s middle, drive in the rabbit or the fox; until at length came the instant when the poor creature bolted; and for him, the onlooker, this was the moment of the miracle.
II.
As might be imagined, his boarding-house was an admirable source of entertainment for him, and within a year of his arrival he had discovered everything transacted within it which was of the smallest interest. In this, of course, he had to exercise a fine discretion; it would never do to permit to any of these people the seeking of an intimacy. But as a matter of fact there had been no great difficulty about this. There was something in him—it was probably the keenness of his mind, his unsleeping critical faculty—which could always be counted on to keep these simpler folk at a comfortable distance. Mrs. Holt, his landlady, was unobtrusive and businesslike; Mandell, an instructor in history, and rather a pedagogue, who at first had been somewhat inclined (being lonely) to drop in of an evening for a smoke, had been tactfully impressed with the fact that the evening was sacred to the Muse; Wright, a terrible bore, with large teeth and large ears, who worked in the local bank, had given him up on discovering in him faint traces of socialism and pacifism; and the old couple who had the room opposite his own, the Brownlees, were decently self-absorbed. What there was to know about these good people he knew. Together they constituted for him, as time went on, a kind of unified organism: he always thought of them as belonging to each other and to him and to the house. Their toothbrushes hung in the bathroom, he knew their slippers, their bathrobes, their neckties, their breakfast habits, the names of their correspondents, their views on life. Now and then there was a minor altercation, as when one or another of them used the bath too indecently long; or a breeze of jealousy or competition would momentarily set them a-shaking; and these outcroppings and cross-currents he noted with delight. But for the most part they were miracles of expectedness: they seldom any longer surprised him; and the sense of joy he extracted from living with them, which was still very real, was largely derived from the queer feeling he had of being, in a sense, the house’s consciousness. He carried the whole thing in his mind. When he lay in his bed, of a spring evening, looking out of his window at the locust tree, he felt, between the house full of human beings and himself, an almost physical identity. He could hear Mrs. Brownlee coughing, as usual, and old Brownlee thumping his shoes off, and Wright singing in the bathroom, and Mrs. Holt talking, at the back door, to the cat. Mandell was inaudible: he would be sitting, of course, at his hideous golden-oak roll-top desk, with a green visor on his noble brow, his shirtsleeves rolled up, a very masculine array of pipes scattered around him (he was one of those pedagogues who affect the minor masculine characteristics, just to prove to themselves that they are men) and a drop-lamp focused glaringly on an opened book. His room was stuffy, and always smelt a little of sweat.… And the back door was shut, Mrs. Holt’s footsteps mounted the carpeted stairs, she said a good-night to Wright, whom she encountered, the Brownlees got laboriously into bed, or Brownlee put his head out of the window and said it was a fine night, and the house came to rest; coming to rest, to all intents and purposes, in the brain of S. Pierce Babcock.
III.
In May, the Brownlees went away to California, with every intention of staying there till one or both of them died. Their departure was as casual as their arrival had been: no fuss was made about it. They had their breakfast as usual, without the slightest deviation of habit, said their goodbyes unexcitedly, and at lunch were gone. Mrs. Holt took the occasion to give the room a thorough housecleaning, and Babcock in turn took the occasion to inspect it: he had thought it might be preferable to his own. He walked in after dinner on the same evening, lighted the gas, and examined it. It had two windows, being a corner room; that was its chief advantage; but in other respects he didn’t especially like it. The wallpaper was an affair of roses on trellises, the chest of drawers was painted a bright blue, and over the large old-fashioned wooden bed hung a steel engraving of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”