HE joy that had sung through Anthony shrunk into an intolerable pain
like an icicle thrust into his heart; he swallowed convulsively a
spoonful of soup, tasteless, scalding hot, and put the spoon down with
a clatter. He half rose from the chair, with his arms extended, as if by
that means he could ward off the terrible misfortune that had befallen
him. Thomas Meredith, unaware of Anthony's drawn face, his staring
gaze, continued to eat with gusto the unspeakable liquid, and the waiter
uncorked the champagne with a soft explosion. The wine flowed bubbling
into their glasses, and Tom held his aloft. “To your good luck,” he
proclaimed, but set it down untouched at Anthony's pallor.
“What's the matter--sick? It's the beer and cocktail, it always does
it.”
“It's not that,” Anthony said very distinctly.
His voice sounded to him like that of a third person. He was laboring to
adjust the tumult within him to the fact of Eliza's death; he repeated
half aloud the term “dead” and its whispered syllable seemed to fill the
entire world, the sky, to echo ceaselessly in space. From the
stringed instruments above came the refrain of a popular song; and,
subconsciously, mechanically, he repeated the words aloud; when he heard
his own voice he stopped as though a palm had been clapped upon his
mouth.
“What is it?” Tom persisted; “don't discompose this historical banquet.”
The waiter replaced the soup with fish, over which he spread a thick,
yellow sauce. “Go on,” Anthony articulated, “go on--” he emptied his
champagne glass at a gulp, and then a second. “Certainly a fresh quart,”
his companion directed the waiter.
Eliza was dead! pneumonia. That, he told himself, was why she had
not answered his letter, why, on the steps at Hydrangea House, Mrs.
Dreen--hell! how could he think of such things? Eliza... dead, cold who
warm had kissed him; Eliza, for whom all had been dreamed, planned,
undertaken, dead; Eliza gone from him, gone out of the sun into the
damned and horrible dirt. Tom, explaining him satisfactorily, devoted
himself to the succession of dishes that flowed through the waiter's
skillful hands, dishes that Anthony dimly recognized having
ordered--surely years before. “You're drunk,” Thomas declared.
He drank inordinately: gradually a haze enveloped him, separating him
from the world, from his companion, a shadowy shape performing strange
antics at a distance. Sounds, voices, penetrated to his isolation, rent
thinly the veil that held at its center the sharp pain dulled, expanded,
into a leaden, sickening ache. He placed the yellow bank note on a
silver platter that swayed before him, and in return received a crisp
pile, which, with numb fingers, he crowded into a pocket. He would have
fallen as he rose from his chair if Tom had not caught him, leading him
stumbling but safely to the street.
“Don't start an ugly drunk,” Thomas Meredith begged. Without a word,
Anthony turned and, with stiff legs, strode into the night. Eliza was
dead; he had had something to give her, a surprise, but it was too
late. A great piece of good fortune had overtaken him, he wanted to tell
Eliza, but... he collided with a pedestrian, and continued at a tangent
like a mechanical toy turned from its course. His companion swung him
from under the wheels of a truck. “Wait,” he panted, “I'm no Marathon
runner, it's hotter'n Egypt.”
The perspiration dripped from Anthony's countenance, wet the clenched
palms of his hands. He walked on and on, through streets brilliantly
lighted and streets dark; streets crowded with men in evening clothes,
loafing with cigarettes by illuminated playbills, streets empty, silent
save for the echo of his hurried, shambling footsteps. Eliza was lost,
out there somewhere in the night; he must find her, bring her back: but
he couldn't find her, nor bring her back--she was dead. He stopped to
reconsider dully that idea. A row of surprisingly white marble steps, of
closed doors, blank windows, confronted him. “This is where I retire,”
Thomas Meredith declared. Anthony wondered what the fellow was buzzing
about? why should he wait for him, Anthony Ball, at “McCanns”?
He considered with a troubled brow a world empty of Eliza; it wasn't
possible, no such foolish world could exist for a moment. Who had
dared to rob him? In a methodical voice he cursed all the holy, all
the august, all the reverent names he could call to mind. Then again
he hurried on, leaving standing a ridiculous figure who shouted an
incomprehensible sentence.
He passed through an unsubstantial city of shadows, of sudden,
clangoring sounds, of the blur of lights swaying in strings above his
head, of unsteady luminous bubbles floating before him through ravines
of gloom; bells rang loud and threatening, throats of brass bellowed.
His head began to throb with a sudden pain, and the pain printed clearly
on the bright suffering of his mind a stooping, dusty figure; leaden
eyes, a grey face, peered into his own; slack lips mumbled the story
of a boy dead long ago--Eliza, Eliza was dead--and of a red necktie, a
Sunday suit; a fearful figure, a fearful story, from the low mutter of
which he precipitantly fled. Other faces crowded his brain--Ellie with
her cool, understanding look, his mother, his father frowning at him in
assumed severity; he saw Mrs. Dreen, palely sweet in a starlit gloom.
Then panic swept over him as he realized that he was unable, in a sudden
freak of memory, to summon into that intimate gallery the countenance of
Eliza. It was as though in disappearing from the corporeal world she had
also vanished from the realm of his thoughts, of his longing. He paused,
driving his nails into his palms, knotting his brow, in an agony of
effort to visualize her. In vain. “I can't remember her,” he told an
indistinct human form before him. “I can't remember her.”
A voice answered him, thin and surprisingly bitter. “When you are sober
you will stop trying.”
And then he saw her once more, so vivid, so near, that he gave a sobbing
exclamation of relief. “Don't,” he whispered, “not... lose again--” He
forgot for the moment that she was dead, and put out a hand to touch
her. Thin air. Then he recalled. He commenced his direct, aimless
course, but a staggering weariness overcame him, the toylike progress
grew slower, there were interruptions, convulsive starts.