“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”
“Evie--I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and
died there.”
“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We
must arrange a meeting when I get time.”
And so forth and so on.
It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the
glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up
and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind
stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to
Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather
walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.
It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of
limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the
lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in
dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously
black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and
depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of
the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best
dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes
and neither matters. Nothing matters.
Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted
conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I
was so out of it all. And what was I in--what took its place? I was
going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless
darkness, my evening companion a book.
I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the
relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward,
hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless
poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among
them, also exhaling damp smells--also with hollows under my eyes and
lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I
was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?
My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with
uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty
echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just
then it seemed to me as if I never could do this--its loneliness would
be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from
the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little
possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their
friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things
grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home.
In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a
forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the
rain is on the roof.”
I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between
the bars of the grate, I said to myself:
“I must get some kind of a pet--a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough
money to adopt a child.”
The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper,
I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours,
during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and
the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a
car swept across the distance.
I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to
the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest.
To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off,
and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire,
a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting,
even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on
the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in
front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had
lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at
eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and
young women’s dreams of conquest?
Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so
inevitably, and empty, all empty!
The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best
skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even _that_ didn’t
matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two--forty-nine years of it. I
looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it
Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four
feet on the fender”?
There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the
recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.
The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.