And all, too, in a room which couldn’t be locked! The key had been lost. There was always the chance, the remote chance, that one of the other nurses might suddenly walk in, or Mrs. Burgess—someone to whom she might not have had time to give a warning beforehand. Once, in fact, this had actually happened. Miss McKittrick, who had been out all day, and who had come home late, had charged in while they were on the couch together. It had been very funny—he had sat up abruptly and tried to hide his shoeless feet under the edge of the couch. They had tried in an instant to look very respectable and innocent, but not with much success; they could see that by the gleam in Miss McKittrick’s eye, and the polite but amused smile with which she had then hastily vanished. And oddly enough, Eunice had seemed to be enormously pleased by the episode. Perhaps she felt—yes, perhaps she had then felt an equality, at last, with the others. Not with Miss Orr, who had never had a lover, being too shy, but with the others. Yes, that must have been it. That must have been it. She had known that now Miss McKittrick would tell the others, and that they would all look upon her in a new light. She had now joined the nunnery in earnest.
The first winter had been the nicest. As he looked back on it now, it seemed one long madness of laughter. For some reason, he had been able to amuse Eunice as he had never been able to amuse anyone else. Why was that? The simplest things narrated to her—his habit of forgetting things, his proneness to social blunders, his shyness at the telephone, his ineptitudes in making love, to her and to her predecessors (about whom he was able to be quite frank with her)—all these things she seemed to find endlessly entertaining. Partly, no doubt, because he had from the outset been able to talk so easily to her, so unrestrainedly. She had taken him into a new world, one less conventional than his own, freer, brighter, more honest. He had been able for the first time to shed all sorts of absurd Puritan inhibitions into which he had been born, and to experience an honest delight in complete honesty. The sensual and even the smutty had for the first time taken a place in the world, and an honorable place; and with his discovery of this had come an extraordinary sense of increased unity and power. He had walked on air. He had seemed to be a foot taller. In the presence of his friends, he had felt an integrity and clearness which at once had given him an enormous advantage; they too had felt it without quite knowing why.… But why had he been able to talk so freely and well with Eunice? So much more freely than, for example, with Daisy?
Partly, perhaps, because he had felt an intellectual and social superiority; though God knew he attached little importance to either. Just the same, it might have been that. He could relax, with her, as with no one else. She was always receptive, too, glad to see him, eager to be amused; she never reproached him if he absented himself for longer than usual, nor asked him why he hadn’t come sooner, or where he had been; never wrote him, nor called him on the telephone; just waited for him to reappear; and when at last he called Back Bay 21307 was at once just as gayly responsive as ever. “Hello?” “Hello!” “Is that Mrs. Charles the Second?” “Oh no, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number. This is nobody you know.” “Oh yes, it is!” “Well, your voice is familiar—” and then the little laugh, quenched in the little handkerchief, and in fifteen minutes she would be meeting him at the door, and they would climb the shabby carpeted stairs to the third-floor room. And there the pale oak desk, the oil painting of a sunset on a river, the clothes closet in which the gin bottle was kept among hat-boxes on the shelf, the low couch with a Paisley shawl spread over it and an ornamental calendar on the wall just above it, and Miss Orr’s couch just opposite, pushed against the screen by the fireplace, and the toy monkey hung from the gas bracket, and the ugly upholstered chairs—these things were still a surprisingly real part of his life. He had been happy, in that room—happier than he would ever be again. If only he had known enough to know it! But how could he have guessed that merely to sit there with Eunice, listening to Miss McKittrick and Miss Orr talking and laughing slyly in the next room, would at last be remembered as something extraordinarily haunting and lovely? If only now he could recover those voices, or, for that matter, those talks with Eunice! Three years of it, and all he could recall was the look of the room, the chairs, the calendar, the view from the window toward the church at night with lamplight on the snow, the walk from the Club through slush and ice at eight o’clock, the departure punctually at ten-fifteen, when all guests were firmly expelled. Sometimes, in good weather, Eunice had strolled down with him to the river, and they had sat on the Esplanade, watching the lighted trains go over the salt-box bridge like dotted glowworms. At other times, when they had dined out, and when perhaps Miss Orr was ill, and they had been unable to go to the room, they had dawdled over dinner till late, and perhaps got a little tight, and then wandered along Commonwealth Avenue to the Public Gardens. And once, when they were both very tight—but what a scene! What a scene! They had crept up the narrow alley behind Newbury Street and into the little yard behind the house, and there under the ailanthus tree had surrendered to such a delirium as he had never known before or since. The full moon was above them, there were lights in Miss McKittrick’s room, at any moment somebody might look out and see them or hear them. And after that, in Commonwealth Avenue, where the reviewing stands had just been built for the Liberty Parade—he groaned with delight when he thought of it. It had been sheer madness. Not a soul was in sight—it was after midnight. The lamplight came greenly through the leaves on the elm trees, the gaunt reviewing stands screened them on either side.… And then the whispered good-night at the door, and he walked to the Waldorf for his cornflakes and cream and coffee, and so home to the Fenway and to bed.…
Withdrawing himself again from the past to his room in the Adams House, he watched the large snowflakes fall heavily and slowly along the soot-blackened walls outside his window. It must be after eight. But the past was too delicious, too powerful for him, and again he plunged into his stream of recollection. What a magic thing was memory, and in a way, how painful! Here one could lie on a winter’s morning, in the Adams House, and relive a Spring long ago; look out of a hotel window, and at the same moment think of a sweetheart who was perhaps—dead. But could she possibly be dead? No. After all, it was now only two years since he had discovered, by the merest accident, where she lived, and that she was married—only two years since he had written her that carefully guarded note, signed Ethel Swift, asking her to meet him; that note to which she had replied only, on a postcard, “No!” Well, she was quite right, quite right. Suppose she had a jealous husband? Suppose her husband had, to begin with, been suspicious of her past? And no doubt he was; Eunice had spoken of him years ago, she had even then, from time to time, gone yachting with him at Gloucester. Tompkins—Thorwald Tompkins. Curious name. Why the Thorwald? Norwegian blood somewhere, probably. And of course Tompkins must have known about himself, just as he had known about Tompkins. He remembered that time, when, calling her by telephone from the Public Library pay-station, he had, by some queer accident, been connected with the Newbury Street telephone while Eunice was talking with Tompkins. It had given him rather a turn, to hear her laughing at another man’s jokes, being natural and amusing with him, treating him as if he were an intimate! And to hear poor Tompkins urging, urging her to meet him that evening to dance, and Eunice evading skillfully, since she more than half expected a visit from him—it had been this that had reassured him, and prevented him from being furiously jealous. How amused Eunice had been when, ten minutes later, he had quoted that whole telephone conversation to her, verbatim! She had thought him a wizard, a necromancer, a fiend. He had teased her about it all evening. And she had been so obviously glad to see him, and not Tompkins.…