Hugh Person followed his chance girl down the long steep stairs, and to her favorite street corner where they parted for many years. He had hoped that the girl would keep him till morn – and thus spare him a night at the hotel, with his dead father present in every dark corner of solitude; but when she saw him inclined to stay she misconstrued his plans, brutally said it would take much too long to get such a poor performer back into shape, and ushered him out. It was not a ghost, however, that prevented him from falling asleep, but the stuffiness. He opened wide both casements; they gave on a parking place four floors below; the thin meniscus overhead was too wan to illumine the roofs of the houses descending toward the invisible lake; the light of a garage picked out the steps of desolate stairs leading into a chaos of shadows; it was all very dismal and very distant, and our acrophobic Person felt the pull of gravity inviting him to join the night and his father. He had walked in his sleep many times as a naked boy but familiar surroundings had guarded him, till finally the strange disease had abated. Tonight, on the highest floor of a strange hotel, he lacked all protection. He closed the windows and sat in an armchair till dawn.
7
In the nights of his youth when Hugh had suffered attacks of somnambulism, he would walk out of his room hugging a pillow, and wander downstairs. He remembered awakening in odd spots, on the steps leading to the cellar or in a hall closet among galoshes and storm coats, and while not overly frightened by those barefoot trips, the boy did not care "to behave like a ghost" and begged to be locked up in his bedroom. This did not work either, as he would scramble out of the window onto the sloping roof of a gallery leading to the schoolhouse dormitories. The first time he did it the chill of the slates against his soles roused him, and he traveled back to his dark nest avoiding chairs and things rather by ear than otherwise. An old and silly doctor advised his parents to cover the floor near his bed with wet towels and place basins with water at strategic points, and the only result was that having circumvented all obstacles in his magic sleep, he found himself shivering at the foot of a chimney with the school cat for companion. Soon after that sally the spectral fits became rarer; they practically stopped in his late adolescence. As a penultimate echo came the strange case of the struggle with a bedside table. This was when Hugh attended college and lodged with a fellow student. Jack Moore (no relation), in two rooms of the newly built Snyder Hall. Jack was awakened in the middle of the night, after a weary day of cramming, by a burst of crashing sounds coming from the bed-sitting room. He went to investigate. Hugh, in his sleep, had imagined that his bedside table, a little three-legged affair (borrowed from under the hallway telephone), was executing a furious war dance all by itself, as he had seen a similar article do at a seance when asked if the visiting spirit (Napoleon) missed the springtime sunsets of St. Helena. Jack Moore found Hugh energetically leaning from his couch and with both arms embracing and crushing the inoffensive object, in a ludicrous effort to stop its inexistent motion. Books, an ashtray, an alarm clock, a box of cough drops, had all been shaken off, and the tormented wood was emitting snaps and crackles in the idiot's grasp. Jack Moore pried the two apart. Hugh silently turned over and went to sleep.
8
During the ten years that were to elapse between Hugh Person's first and second visits to Switzerland he earned his living in the various dull ways that fall to the lot of brilliant young people who lack any special gift or ambition and get accustomed to applying only a small part of their wits to humdrum or charlatan tasks. What they do with the other, much greater, portion, how and where their real fancies and feelings are housed, is not exactly a mystery – there are no mysteries now – but would entail explications and revelations too sad, too frightful, to face. Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind's misery.
He could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head, and lost that capacity in the course of a few gray diminishing nights during hospitalization with a virus infection at twenty-five. He had published a poem in a college magazine, a long rambling piece that began rather auspiciously:
Blest are suspension dots . . .
The sun was setting a heavenly example to the lake…Љ
He was the author of a letter to the London Times which was reproduced a few years later in the anthology To the Editor: Sir, and a passage of which read:
Anacreon died at eighty-five choked by "wine's skeleton" (as another Ionian put it), and a gypsy predicted to the chessplayer Alyokhin that he would be killed in Spain by a dead bull.
For seven years after graduating from the university he had been the secretary and anonymous associate of a notorious fraud, the late symbolist Atman, and was wholly responsible for such footnotes as:
The cromlech (associated with mieko, milch, milk) is obviously a symbol of the Great Mother, just as the menhir ("mein Herr") is as obviously masculine.
He had been in the stationery business for another spell and a fountain pen he had promoted bore his name: The Person Pen. But that remained his greatest achievement.
As a sulky person of twenty-nine he joined a great publishing firm, where he worked in various capacities – research assistant, scout, associate editor, copy editor, proofreader, flatterer of our authors. A sullen slave, he was placed at the disposal of Mrs. Flankard, an exuberant and pretentious lady with a florid face and octopus eyes whose enormous romance The Stag had been accepted for publication on condition that it be drastically revised, ruthlessly cut, and partly rewritten. The rewritten bits, consisting of a few pages here and there, were supposed to bridge the black bleeding gaps of generously deleted matter between the retained chapters. That job had been performed by one of Hugh's colleagues, a pretty ponytail who had since left the firm. As a novelist she possessed even less talent than Mrs. Flankard, and Hugh was now cursed with the task of healing not only the wounds she had inflicted but the warts she had left intact. He had tea several times with Mrs. Flankard in her charming suburban house decorated almost exclusively with her late husband's oils, early spring in the parlor, surnmertime in the dining room, all the glory of New England in the library, and winter in the bedchamber. Hugh did not linger in that particular room, for he had the uncanny feeling that Mrs. Flankard was planning to be raped beneath Mr. Flankard's mauve snowflakes. Like many overripe and still handsome lady artists, she seemed to be quite unaware that a big bust, a wrinkled neck, and the smell of stale femininity on an eau de Cologne base might repel a nervous male. He uttered a grunt of relief when "our" book finally got published.