"It's not being certain?"

"Not the way it was at first--but, Ollie, we're neither of us the same--"

"Then you _aren't_ sure?"

"I can't--I haven't--oh, Ollie, I don't know, I don't know!"

"That means you know."

Again the kiss but this time their lips only hurt against each other--Oliver feels for a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made itself into a question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry of a puppy baying the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming round silver above him, ineffably l.u.s.trous, ineffably removed, none of it ever coming to touch him but light too pale to help at all. He is holding a girl in his arms--he can feel her body against him--but it is not Nancy he is holding--it never will be Nancy any more. He releases her and starts walking up and down in a series of short, uneasy strides, turning mechanically to keep out of the way of chairs. Words come out of him, words he never imagined he could ever say, he thinks dizzily that it would feel like this if he were invisibly bleeding to death--that would come the same way in fiery spurts and pauses that tore at the body.

"Don't you see, dear, don't you _see_? It's been eight months now and we aren't any nearer getting married than we were at first and it isn't honest to say we will be soon any more--I can't see any prospect--I've failed in everything I thought would go--and we can't get married on my job for _years_--I'm not good enough at it--and I _won't_ have you hurt--I _won't_ have you tied to me when it only means neither of us doing what we want and both of us getting, older and our work not done.

Oh, I love you, Nancy--if there was any hope at all I'd go down on my knees to ask you to keep on but there isn't--they've beaten us--they've beaten us--all the fat old people who told us we were too poor and too young. All we do is go on like this both of us getting worked up whenever we see each other and both of us hurting each other and nothing happening--Oh, Nancy, I thought we could help each other always and now we can't even [Ill.u.s.tration: AND THEN THE QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of us stopping loving each other we'd tell?"

Nancy is very silent and rather white.

"Yes, Ollie."

"Well, Nancy?"

"Well--"

They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.

"Good-by darling, darling, darling!" says Ollie through lips like a marionette's.

Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else in Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly has gone out of the door.

XVI

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he pa.s.ses 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--n.o.body'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 h.e.l.l!" and the man fades away again, without even looking startled, to mutter "Well, you needn' be so d.a.m.n peeved about it--I'll say you needn' be so d.a.m.n 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 b.o.o.b," 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.