CHAPTER XII

"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.