The Party at Jack's
Page 33
LOVE IS ENOUGH?
• • •
He made no answer. For suddenly he knew that, for him, at any rate, it was not the story. He felt desolate and tired, weary of all the consuming fury, fire, and passion, the tormenting jealousy and doubt, the self-loathing, the degrading egotisms of possession—of desire, of passion, and romantic love—of youth.
And suddenly it seemed to him that it was not enough. It seemed to him that there had to be a larger world, a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment could ever find. Well, then,—a swift thrust of rending pity pierced him as he looked at the rose sweetness of that childlike and enraptured face—it must be so: he to his world, and she to hers, and each to each—which to the better one, no one could say—but this, at last, he knew, was not enough. There were new lands; dark windings, strange and subtle webs there in the deep delved earth, a tide was running in the hearts of men—and he must go.
The memory of all those years of love, of beauty, of devotion, of pain, of conflict, hate and fear and joy—the whole universe of love, all that the tenement of flesh, or one small room could hold—together with this marvelous tenacity, the determination of the flower face, the resolution of this one small person, the refusal to give up in spite of fate, of rebuff, or repulsion, so often wounded sorrowfully, so often spurned, reviled, and treated cruelly, so often flung away only to return again to try the harness of its love upon the wild horse of spirit—together with all its faith, its tenderness, its noble loyalty—all this returned to rend him in this instant, but he knew that he must go.
They said little more that night. In a few minutes he got up, and with a sick and tired heart he went away.
* * * * *
Outside, at a side entrance, on the now quiet, deserted street, one of the dark green wagons of the police had slid up very quietly and was waiting now with a softly throbbing motor. No one was watching it. In a few moments a door which gave on to a flight of concrete stairs and led down into one of the basement entrances of the enormous building was opened.
A minute or two later two men emerged bearing a stretcher which had something on it that was very still, completely covered. They slid this carefully away into the back of the green wagon. In another moment two other men, bearing a stretcher with a similar burden, emerged and this also was quietly and carefully disposed in the same way. Then the door of the wagon was securely closed.
The driver and another man walked around and got into the front seat and after conferring quietly a moment with the sergeant of police, they drove off quietly turning the corner below with a subdued clangor of bells. The three policemen conferred together for a moment longer in lowered voices and two of them wrote down notes in their little books. Then the three men said goodnight all around, the two policemen saluted the sergeant and they all departed, each walking away upon the further prosecution of his appointed task.
Meanwhile, at the big front entrance, another policeman was conferring with the doorman, Henry. The doorman answered the questions of the officer in a toneless, monosyllabic and almost sullen voice, and the policeman wrote down his answers in another little book.
“You say he was unmarried?”
“Yes,” said Henry.
“How old?”
“I think he was 28,” Henry said.
“And where did he live?” said the policeman.
“In the Bronx,” said Henry.
His tone was so low and sullen that it was hardly more than a mutter and the policeman lifted his head from the book in which he had been writing, and rasped out harshly: “Where?”
“The Bronx!” said Henry almost furiously.
The man finished writing in his book, put it away into his pocket, and then before he departed, looked up at the facade of the big building with a look of casual, almost weary speculation.
“Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t like to try it. It’s a long way up there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the man named Henry answered with the same ungracious sullenness and turned impatiently away—“If that’s all you want?” he began.
“That’s all” the policeman said with a kind of brutal and ironic geniality, “that’s all, brother.” And with a hard, ironic look of mirth in his cold eyes he oscillated his nightstick behind him and looked at the retreating figure of the doorman as he disappeared.
* * * * *
At this moment, Mr. Jack, wearing his silken dressing gown, and ready for his bed and sleep, had just gone to the window of his room, lowered the sash still farther, and drawn in a good full breath of cool night air. He found it good. The last disruptive taint of smoke had been washed clean and sweet away by the cool breath of April. And in the white light of the virgin moon the spires and ramparts of Manhattan were glittering with cold magic in splintered helves of stone and glass. Peace fell upon his tranquil spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed his soul. It was so solid, splendid, everlasting and so good. And it was all as if it had always been—all so magically itself as it must be save for its magical increasements, forever.
A tremor, faint and instant shook his feet. He paused, startled, waited, listened. Was the old trouble there again to shake the deep perfection of his soul? What was it he had felt that morning? What rumor had he heard this night? … Faint tremors, small but instant, and a talk of tunnels—what was it? What?—This talk of tremors in the tunnels there below?—Ah, there it was a second time! What was it?—
TRAINS AGAIN!
—Passed, faded, trembled delicately away into securities of eternal stone, and left behind it the blue helve of a night, and April, in the blazing vertices of all that sculptured and immortal peace.
The smile came back into his eyes. The brief and troubling frown had lifted from his soul. And his look as he prepared to sleep was almost dulcet and cherubic—the look of a good child who ends the great adventure of another day and who knows that sleep and morning have come back again—
* * * * *
“Long, long into the night I lay” she thought—“and thought of you—”
Ah, sleep.