Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a
distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops
nor 'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and
small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman
car. In a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly
eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the
drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake.
His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K.
Buffinton--Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with
its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.
Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron
thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's
funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.
Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and
repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over
again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is
a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge
laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out
of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman
telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of
a nasty nurse.
“All for the best, you know--all for the best, we're all of us sure of
that. Love doesn't last--doesn't last--doesn't last--as good fish in
the sea as ever were caught out of it--nobody's heart could break at
twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud--you think you're lovers
and friends--but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last--none of
it lasts at all.”
If he only weren't so _tired_ he could do something. But instead he
feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant
before complete intoxication--his body is as distinct from him as if
it were walking behind him with his shadow--all the colors he sees seem
exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the
next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same,
his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically,
one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock.
There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any
definite word--there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind
men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to
it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual
hurry of feet to tell of their presence.
A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of
his mouth.
“Say, mister--”
“Oh, _go_ to hell!” and the man fades away again, without even looking
startled, to mutter “Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about
it--I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved--whatcha think you are,
anyhow--Marathon Mike?” as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from
him.
Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer
with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer--and then
when they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again
never any more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over--what was
it?
We won't go there any more,
We won't go there any more
We won't go there any mo-o-ore----
He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him
fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a
very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over
and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the
cream of the jest--the very cream--to end the evening in combat with a
large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you
suddenly like new ice.
He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He
had a hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might
know.
The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him,
remarked “hophead” internally and played with his nightstick a little
more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the
policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel
was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His
mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite
to large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the
square of the policeman.
“I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?” Oliver
began. “What hotel?” said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed
with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick
as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be
tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized
that the policeman had asked him a question--courtesy demanded a prompt
response.
“What?” said Oliver.
“I said 'What hotel?'” The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.
Oliver started to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember
the name of your own hotel--even when your own particular material and
immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three
hours. The Rossiter was all that he could think of.
“The Rossiter,” he said firmly.
“No hotel Rossiter in _this_ town.” The policeman's nightstick was
getting more and more irritated. “Rossiter's a lotta flats. You live
there?”
“No. I live in a hotel.”
“Well, what hotel?”
“Oh, I tell you I don't remember,” said Oliver vaguely. “A big one with
a lot of electric lights.”
The policeman's face became suddenly very red.
“Well, you move on, buddy!” he said in a tone of hoarse displeasure.
“You move right on! You don't come around me with any of your funny
cracks--I know whatsa matter with you, all right, all right. I know
whatsa matter with you.”
“So do I.” Oliver was smiling a little now, the whole scene was so
arabesque. “I want to go to my hotel.”
“You move on. You move on _quick_!” said the policeman vastly. “It's a
long walk down to the hoosegow and _I_ don't want to take you there.”
“I don't want to go there,” said Oliver. “But my hotel--”
“_Quit arguin'”_! said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.
Oliver turned and walked two steps away. Then he turned again. After all
why not? The important part of his life was over anyhow--and before the
rest of it finished he might be able to tell one large policeman just
what he thought of him.
“Why, you big blue boob,” he began abruptly with a sense of pleasant
refreshment better than drink, “You great heaving purple ice wagon--”
and then he was stopped abruptly for the policeman was taking the
necessary breath away.