Chapter 41

"I'M ALL ALONE"

The same grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted, unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more have given names to than to the streets whose dreary lengths he had plodded.

The one thing that isolated itself from the rest, climbed up into his mind and there kept goading him into a weak helpless fury, was a jingling tune and a set of silly words that Rose and her sisters in the sextette had sung the night before: "You're all alone, I'm all alone; come on, let's be lonesome together." And then a line he couldn't remember exactly, containing, for the sake of the rhyme, some total irrelevancy about the weather, and a sickening bit of false rhyming to end up with, about loving forever and ever. The jingle of that tune had kept time to his steps, and the silly words had sung themselves over and over endlessly in his brain until the mockery of it had become absolutely excruciating. Except for that damnable tune, there was nothing in his mind at all. Everything else was synthesized into a dull ache, a hollow, gnawing, physical ache. But he'd endure that, he thought, if he could get rid of the diabolical malice of that tune. Perhaps if he stopped walking and just sat still it would go away.

That's why he went home, let himself in with his latch-key and made his way furtively to the library, where the embers of last night's fire were still warm. He had an hour at least before the servants would be stirring. He was terribly cold and pretty well exhausted, and the comfort of his big chair and the glow of the fire carried him off irresistibly into a doze--a doze that was troubled by fantastic dreams.

With the first early morning stirrings in the house, the sounds of opening doors here and there, the penetrating cry of one of the babies--muffled, to be sure, and a long way off, but still audible--he came broad awake again, but sat for a while staring about the room; at the wonderful ornate perfection of the Italian marble chimney-piece that framed the dying fire; at the tall carved chairs, the simple grandeur of the three-hundred-year-old table and the subdued richness, in the half light, of the tapestries that hung on the walls.

It was Florence McCrea's masterpiece, this room. But this morning its perfections mocked him with the ferocious irony of the contrast they presented to that other room--that unspeakably horrible room where he had left Rose. Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him, bitten out with acid clearness;--the varnished top of the bureau mottled with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar.

And that abominable room was where Rose was now! She was sitting, perhaps, just as he'd left her, with that look of frozen, dumb agony still in her face, while he sat here ...

He sprang up in a sort of frenzy. The parlor maid would be in here any minute now, on her morning rounds, and would wish him a respectful good morning, and ask him what he wanted for breakfast. And then, with automatic perfection, would appear his coffee, his grapefruit, and the rest of it--all exactly right, the result of a perfect precalculation of his wishes. While Rose ...

He put on his outdoor things and left the house, motivated now, for the first time in many hours, with a clear purpose. He'd go back to that room and get Rose out of it. He was incapable of planning how it should be done, but somehow--anyhow, it should be; that was all he knew!

But this purpose was frustrated the moment he reached Clark Street, by the realization that he hadn't an idea within half a mile at least, where the room was. Neither when he went into it with Rose, nor when he left it, had he picked up any sort of landmark. There was a passage, he remembered, leading back between two buildings, which projected to the sidewalk. But there were a dozen of these in every block.

A miserable little lunch-room caught his eye, displaying in its dingy windows, pies, oranges, big shallow pans of pork and beans. This was the sort of place Rose would have to come to, he reflected, for her breakfast. And with that thought--hardly the conscious hope that she would actually come to this place this morning--he turned in, sat down at a cloth spotted with coffee and catsup stains, and ordered his breakfast of a yawning waiter. He even forced himself, when it was brought in, to eat it. If it was good enough for Rose, wasn't it good enough for him?

And all the while he kept his eye on the street door, in the irrepressible, unacknowledged hope that the gods would be kind enough to bring her there.

But it was a mocking hope, he knew, and he didn't linger after he'd finished. He walked down-town to his office. It was still pretty early--not yet eight o'clock. Even his office boy wouldn't be down for three-quarters of an hour. He was safe, he found himself saying, for so long, anyway.

He sat down at his desk and stared bewildered at the stack of letters that lay there awaiting his signature. They were the very letters Miss Beach had been typing when he had told her to telephone to the club and get him a seat for _The Girl Up-stairs_, by way of passing a pleasant evening;--and had laughed at her when she protested. Oh, God!

He felt like a sort of inverted Rip Van Winkle--like a man who had been away twenty years--in hell twenty years!--and coming back found everything exactly as he had left it. As if, in reality, his absence had lasted only overnight.

He pulled himself together and began to read the letters, but interrupted himself before he'd gone far, to laugh aloud. The laugh startled him a little. He hadn't expected to do more than smile. But certainly it was worth a laugh, the solemn importance with which he'd dictated those letters; the notion that it mattered what he said, how he advised his clients in their bloodless, parchment-like affairs; that anything in all the files behind the black door of that vault represented more than the empty victories and defeats of a childish game. The dead smug orderliness of the place, with the infallible Miss Beach as its presiding genius, infuriated him. Clearly he couldn't stay here till he was better in hand than this.

He signed his letters without reading them, and scribbled a note to Craig that he'd been called out of town for a day or two on a matter of urgent personal business. He hadn't thought of actually going out of town until the note was written. But once he saw the statement in black and white, the notion of making it true, invited him. He'd run off to some small city where no curious eyes, animated by the knowledge that he was Rodney Aldrich whose wife had left him to become a chorus-girl, could steal glances at him. Where he needn't speak to any one from morning till night. Where he could really get himself together and think.

He added in a postscript to the note to Craig, instructions to call up his house and tell them he was out of town.

The thought cropped up in one of the more automatic sections of his brain, that for traveling he ought to have a bag, night things, fresh underclothes, and so on, and the routine method of supplying that need suggested itself to him; namely, to telephone to the house, have one of the maids pack his bag for him and send it down-town in the car. But just as he had rejected the notion of breakfasting at home, and had gone out to that miserable Clark Street lunch-room instead, so he rejected this. All the small civilized refinements of his way of life went utterly against his grain. They'd continue to be intolerable to him, he thought, as long as he had to go on envisaging Rose in that ghastly environment of hers.

He left his office and turned into one of the big department stores that backs up on Dearborn Street, where he bought himself a cheap bag and furnished it with a few necessaries. Then, leaving the store, simply kept on going to the first railway station that lay in his way. He chose a destination quite at random. The train announcer, with a megaphone, was calling off a list of towns which a train, on the point of departure, would stop at. Rodney picked one that he had never visited, bought a ticket, walked down the platform past the Pullmans, and found himself a seat in a coach.

He found a measure of relief in all this. It gave him the illusion, at least, of doing something. Or, more accurately, of getting ready to do something, while it liberated him from the immediate necessity of doing it. He'd go to a hotel in that town whose name was printed on his ticket, and hire a room; lock himself up in it, and then begin to think. Once he could get the engine of his mind to going, he'd be all right. There must be some right thing to do. Or if not that, at least something that was better to do than anything else. And when his mind should have discovered what that thing was, he'd have, he felt, resolution enough to go on and do it. Until he should find it, he was like a man shamed--naked, unable to encounter the most casual glance of any of the persons in his world who knew his shame. Once he was safe in that hotel room, the process of thinking could begin. He wouldn't have to hurry about it. He could take all the time he liked.

For the present, he was getting a queer sort of comfort out of what would ordinarily be labeled the discomforts of his surroundings: the fierce dry heat of the car, the smells--that of oranges was perhaps the strongest of these--the raucous persistence of the train butcher hawking his wares; and, most of all, in the very density of the crowd.

This is one of the comforts that many a member of the favored, chauffeur-driven, servant-attended class lives his life in ignorance of, the nervous relief that comes from ceasing, for a while, to be an isolated, sharply bounded, perfectly visible entity, and subsiding, indistinguishably, into a mere mass of humanity; in being nobody for a while. It was a want which, in the old days before his marriage, Rodney had often, unconsciously, felt and gratified. He had enjoyed being herded about, riding in crowded street-cars, working his way through the press in the down-town streets during the noon hour.

He was no more conscious of it now, but it was distinctly pleasant to him to be identified for the conductor merely by a bit of blue pasteboard with punch marks in it, stuck in his hat-band.

The pleasant torpor didn't last long, because presently, the rhythmic thud of the wheels began singing to him the same damned tune that had dogged his footsteps earlier that morning: "I'm all alone, you're all alone; come on, let's be lonesome together."

This was intolerable! To break it up, he bought a magazine from the train-boy and tried to read. But the story he lighted on concerned itself with a ravishingly beautiful young woman and an incredibly meritorious young man, and worked itself out, cleverly enough to be sure--which made it worse--upon the assumption that all that was needed for their supreme and permanent happiness was to get into each other's arms, which eventually they did.

Rose had been in his arms last night!

So the scorching treadmill round began again. But at last sheer physical exhaustion intervened and he fell heavily asleep. He didn't waken until the conductor took up his bit of pasteboard again, shook him by the shoulder, and told him that he'd be at his destination in five minutes.

Presently, in the hotel, he locked his door, opened the window and sat down to think.