The fast-retreating couple had suddenly severed. They continued on their way parallel to one another, but several yards apart now. The girl was gesturing violently, almost explosively. The man’s elbow kicked up once, in her direction, in contemptuous disregard.
Back at the entrance there were only two men left. Another carful had just come down. Half went one way, half the other. A laggard suddenly appeared, finished with bending protectively down over one stocking top in a secluded corner of the inside corridor. She claimed one of the remaining two.
“Got any money?” was his grunted greeting.
“Didn’t that horse come in?” was the exasperated answer. “I told you he was no good! Couldn’t you pick one once that would come in?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. What do you suppose?”
“Come on. Now we’ll have to go home to my place to supper, and have the whole family on top of us the whole evening!”
There was only one man left about the entrance. The one on the outer side of the column. He acted dispirited, he acted dejected. His head was down forlornly, and his hat brim was down over that. He acted like a man who’s been stood up, and knows it at long last. He shuffled unobtrusively off, close along the building line, one hand slung limply to pocket. He appeared, metaphorically, to have his tail between his legs. He didn’t look up to see where he was going, and he didn’t seem to care. His ego was deflated, and it stood out all over him that he wouldn’t wait for her any more, ever again.
Ahead of him one of the two groups was rapidly melting away, but still fairly cohesive. There was a girl embedded in it, walking by herself and ignored by the others all around her, who acted as dejected and forlorn as the unnoticed man to the rear. She wore a threadbare plaid coat, and a babushka tied under her chin. She was thin and scrawny, and there was no lilt to her pace.
At the crossing the group thinned still further. They drained off this way and that. They diminished to a few individuals, for the most part no longer together nor acquainted with one another.
The man kept losing ground. The girls all walked faster than he. Even the babushka drew slowly but steadily away from him. He kept going, however, in that same general direction.
She turned in at a bakery.
The man reached its window after a time lag of about two, two and a half minutes. He stopped at the margin of it, looked at some cinnamon buns down there in the corner. Then he moved out a little farther, looked at a cake toward the center of the display.
Through the window could be seen the backs of women, in a double line. A babushka peeped demurely through from the front rank, its wearer otherwise obliterated.
He lost interest in the cake. He turned and sidled back, as inconspicuous as an illusory reflection swimming across the plate glass; back along the way he’d just come. The impulse wasn’t very strong; it died and left him motionless two store lengths down, and then he stood there inert, the least noticeable thing on that whole stretch of street. The loiterer, the idler in his shell, a human nonentity, almost an invisibility, so accustomed is the eye to them at every turn.
She came out again, a brown paper bag now in her hand. She advanced only a few more steps in the same general direction she had been pursuing before. Then with no warning she looked back, and the look seemed to flatten the man, like a concussive blast of air grazing past him. He didn’t move acutely, and yet he thinned, went back deeper into his surroundings in some way, so that they closed over him. But she was looking back obliquely, toward an oncoming bus, even more distant than he.
She began to run ahead, to meet it at its stop.
The man didn’t, but he was walking again now. Toward that same eventual point.
The bus stopped. His timing was beautiful. Beautiful, that is, if for purposes of not losing the bus altogether and yet not being seen to board it by anyone else doing so. For seven people got on, the babushka the second of the seven, and he wasn’t even in the group at all, hadn’t arrived yet. Then just as the seventh ascended, he joined in at his heels, making an eighth. Only a direct backward look could have shown him to his predecessors, and they were too occupied in depositing their fares and struggling into the crowded interior.
Her struggles carried her to midsection of the bus, then she desisted, stood clinging to a white hoop overhead. He remained a little beyond where he had entered, in spite of the driver’s incessant and generally disregarded commands to “Move back, please! Allaway back! Plenny room in the back!” repeated anew at each stop, and which everyone took as being addressed to everyone else but himself.
They stood opposite ways, he looking out one side, she looking out the other. At his shoulder, however, was the driver’s rear-sight mirror, giving a view of the whole center aisle; at hers, nothing.
Someone got up and gave her a seat, and she sank from sight. The standees between swallowed her. His head didn’t even move. He could still, in the mirror, see the hole where she had been.
Then presently, as the outflow of passengers accelerated, its retaining walls sundered, so to speak, she came back to view, like something buried, when the earth around it has crumbled away and partially exposes it again.
She was not looking out the window now. She was looking forward, but she saw nothing there was to see ahead of her. Her eyes were open, but they were sightless. She had no surroundings. She was lost in some place into which her mind had strayed.
A stop called Purdue Street came along, and it seemed to bear a certain meaning to him. Once it was past he began, very unnoticeably, to shift into position to descend. He turned frontward, and advanced the short distance to the step beside the driver, and dangled one foot over it in preparation, ready to be the first to leave when the eventual next stop was made. As if to make his departure as inconspicuous as his entry. There was an exit door in the middle, more likely to be used by anyone sitting in midsection.
The driver said, “Holden Street,” the bus stopped, both doors opened simultaneously. The man swung down to asphalt with a quick economy of movement meant to carry him from sight as swiftly as possible. He swung his body around, using his grip on the handrail for pivot, as if intending to cross over before the bus and get to the other side of it before it got under way again; keep it between himself and whoever else might have got off at the same time he did. But no one had.
The center and the front doors were closing again on vacancy. He saw that just in time.
He reversed a second time; swung bodily around counter to the way he’d just been about to go, and lodged one buckled leg onto the step again. The door touched it, and sidled back abashed, sensitive to the slightest obstacle. He raised himself aboard again. The door closed unopposed. The bus proceeded.
The driver said, “Make up your mind, mister.” But there was a weariness to the rebuke, bred of long tribulation, that took most of the barb out of it.
He didn’t seem to hear the driver, though he must have.
She hadn’t moved. She was still sitting there like that, entranced. Her eyes were vacant. Her face was worn, but there was more than fatigue on it. It was the wear of a troubled mind; of consuming inner conflict.
The man’s own face was a little uneasy now, itself, as one street and then another told off along the bus’s right of way. His eyes were steady on the mirror; when they wavered, it was the vibration of the bus across the glass and not they.
She jumped up suddenly, as though someone had stuck a pin in her; plucked at the cord above the window. She hurried to the center door, and stood there, and palmed it fretfully.
The man’s face cleared; there was assurance in it again, no longer disquiet. She had forgotten her own stop, that was all.
The two doors opened. The two of them got out. She at the middle, he at the front. He held his face close to the shiny green-painted side of the bus as it flowed by, so close it all but threatened to flatten his nose. That diminished, at least from the back and sides, the area of visibility of his face, even if it risked the wholeness
of its skin.
The long green panel passed, and then he turned and looked covertly.
She was walking rapidly away. Hurrying as one does who must make up wasted time. A little, openly running step interlarded at every third or fourth quick walking pace. Already the chill haze of the evening was softening her distinctness of outline, overrunning it, like a sort of corrosive agent.
He began to walk that way. She didn’t grow any more blurred, but she didn’t regain her former clarity. Conversely, neither did he.
She turned aside into Holden Street. He crossed it to the opposite side, the far, and then their continuity of direction resumed.
She turned aside once more, was swallowed by a doorway, and contact broke.
He passed the doorway without stopping, the street’s width over, without looking at it or seeming to notice it in any way. He continued three building lengths, four. Then suddenly he was coming back again. He turned into an entrance beside him. It was still several short of being directly opposite the one she had chosen. It swallowed him, and he was gone as completely as she was.
He fell motionless, framed in coffinlike black. Like someone standing in an upright coffin with the lid left off. All he could see was a slice of the building opposite. And in the middle of that slice, the doorway into which she’d gone.
He gave a sigh. Not of disappointment. Not of frustration. Of endless patience.
Up the face of the building a short way, at the third floor, two windows brightened that had until now been only dimly lighted, as though the occupants had been in some other, deeper room, and this light was only the excess coming from there. As though additional light had been thrown on, immediately behind them, light of their own and not borrowed light of a distance. The shades, already partly down, were adjusted lower still, by some nebulous gray shadow that didn’t linger long enough by either one for its outline to be traced as either man or woman, child or grownup.
He waited; breathing, and that was all. Things moved, but not he. Sooty ripples of cloud moved slowly across the already black sky; and yet somehow they could be seen. It could be detected from below that there was motion going on up there. A car would go past once in a while; a dusty, cheap passenger sedan or a bulky, red-beaconed truck, trundling heavily, shaking the whole carcass of the street. A figure would come by afoot now and then. A window would light up that had been dark before; another would go dark that had been light before, as though some mystic equation must be maintained. Those things moved, but not he.
One hour and fifteen minutes passed. The windows on the third went down again. Not out altogether, but down; as though near light had been extinguished.
Four or five more minutes went by after that.
He’d sighed again. Not in relief. Not even in alerted hope. Simply in patience that had known all along.
Then suddenly she’d come out of the doorway, and turned, and was walking up the street, back along the way she’d come one hour and twenty minutes ago.
He stayed where he was, motionless. That same equation, as of the lighted and unlighted windows before, seemed to come into play. For while she was in sight on the street, he wasn’t. As she turned the corner and no longer was, he was in sight, moving along the street down that way.
She walked three blocks along the lateral way, the avenue along which the buses ran and there were lighted stores. She went into a drugstore, and for a moment her figure flamed into full color as the revealing swath from its entrance caught her. He came up in turn and passed it, letting it only stripe him for a moment—purple from the urn of colored water at one side of its show window, yellow-white in between, then vivid green from the urn at the other side—then passed on into the comparative darkness beyond.
He stopped there and examined the photographic “still” his mind had printed during its brief passage across the foursquare glass lens that was the drugstore front. Gleaming nickeled surfaces, tall spindle stools, figures on them siphoning straws thrust into cloudy glasses—that was all foreground detail, to be discarded. At the rear end of the enclosure, her back to him, before a counter. Facing her behind it the druggist, holding up a thimble-sized bottle and pointing to it in recommendation. Lingering nearby another customer, a woman, in an attitude suggestive of impatience at the delay in being waited on in turn; fingernails in claw formation to the countertop.
He stood a moment. He stepped back and looked again. There were alterations in the new “still.” Small ones, of no great consequence. The two customers were still there at the rearward counter. The druggist no longer was. He must have stepped back behind-scenes to secure something at request. The carriage of the motionless figures subtly revealed a change of role. The impatient one was attentively upright now, no longer tapping. She had gained her way, been waited on. The other figure was now inclined to the counter, uncertain, dilatory, decision postponed.
He withdrew again. A moment or two passed. He could hear the faint tinkle of the cash register, even out where he was. He withdrew still farther, to an unlighted store entrance a short distance away. Both customers came out almost simultaneously. The register had sounded only once. One must have left without buying anything.
She passed him, crossed in front of the place where he was. The other one had gone the other way. She was holding nothing in her hands. But she had a handbag sheathed under her arm.
He stepped out again in turn. But now he hesitated, turning his head between her receding figure and the lighted drugstore entrance down the other way. He started for that first, as if to go in and inquire what she had purchased, or what she had asked to be shown.
Her figure was already gaining distance. He seemed to measure the relative space between him and it, and between him and the counter far back in the store, and to discard one as impractical. She was nearing a four-directional crossing, well peopled. He let the drugstore entrance alone and hurried after her.
She walked and walked, as though she were never going to get through walking. After a while, with enough of it to sample, he could decipher it to a certain extent. For a walk that continues in one definite direction for a long enough time must have a destination in front of it. And if the region, the locality, the walk progresses through is fairly well known, the destination can be roughly guessed. But her walk didn’t continue in one definite direction; it kept altering, canceling itself out, repeating itself unnecessarily. So before long he was able to read into it that it was aimless, a walk without a destination, a walk taken for the mere sake of being able to think something over while walking. Her mind was lost within itself, while her feet continued to carry her on at random.
She came to the entrance to a park, finally, and turned and went in, as though discovering in this an even greater opportunity for remoteness, for removal from outward disturbance. Or perhaps she was becoming conscious of growing tired at last, and had remembered that there were benches provided in parks.
At any rate, as he followed her along the winding, sparingly lighted walk, he saw her sink down upon the first bench she came to, and abruptly he stopped too, and moved offside into the inky shadow of a tree. There was a lamppost not very far from the bench, so that a faint pallor was cast over her. And in this new situation he could watch her more safely than at any preceding time. For he was completely blotted out, and there was no one else in sight to distract his eyes, he had her all to himself.
She didn’t move. She sat there with her body turned sideward on the bench, and her back toward the lights and noise of the city.
A policeman came along presently. He turned his head curiously toward her as he passed, but he continued on. Then he looked back, as though uncertain whether she should be allowed to stay there alone like that. But still he continued on a little more. Then he looked back a second time, to see if she was still there. This time he halted. But this time he was close enough to the tree.
A low whistle sounded from under it, and he went over, was lost for a moment in the obscurity. When he emerged, though h
e couldn’t resist glancing back again, this time with doubly sharpened curiosity, he continued definitely on his way.
A young couple came along, their heads resting against each other. They were speaking so low that they could scarcely be heard as they passed the tree. They came to the bench, slowed slightly in indecision, then went on again, looking for a bench they could have all to themselves.
She moved a little; as though belatedly aware someone had gone by, but without having seen them at the time they did go by. He saw her open her handbag, and reach into it, and take something out. He saw her looking at it. He couldn’t see what it was. Something small.
Then with some haste she put it away again, as though hearing some sound of imminent interruption that had not yet reached him. It did a moment later. It was coming from the other side of her. A man came along, alone. Not in any impetuous hurry.
Oh-oh, thought the watcher under the tree, warningly.
He passed the bench and looked at her. He didn’t glance as the policeman had, he looked hard and long.
He stopped and stood. Then he went over and sat down, the bench length away.
The watcher under the tree began to move toward them, marginally, without revealing himself on the path.
The man was on mid-bench now, he’d halved the distance between them. Her back was still turned; she didn’t seem aware he’d joined her.
He must have spoken, in a low voice. She whirled around, blankly. Then she bolted upright, with a half-suppressed scream.
She ran down the path toward the park outlet, passing the hidden watcher.
The man now sitting alone on it upped the palms of his hands philosophically. “You’re too thin anyway!” he called after her in belated rancor. “Save your shoe leather. I ain’t coming after you!” He crossed his legs and spread his arms comfortably along the bench top, as though now that he was on it he might as well stay there.
She stopped running as soon as she’d safely gained the entrance, and when he came out in turn she was still securely in sight ahead of him, at a walk once more. The incessant cat-and-mouse play resumed.
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